Lean Startup Experiment - Day 4 (and last)

At this moment we decided to finish our lean startup experiment. We were currently coping with technological difficulties with a relatively simple feature. It is now clear, that we will not be able to accomplish everything we wanted to until Friday evening. Thus, we all agreed to stop and use the last day somehow else.

Why did we struggle? A short retrospective revealed the following issues:

• We did by far not do enough marketing - thus we had almost no real customer feedback on our site (there was exactly one person subscribing the service :-(). We did get some feedback indicating, that potential customers did not really get the idea of our page.
• We did not prepare well enough for our experiment. We used a whole lot of technologies, we did not really know. This broke our neck today.
• One week is really short for delivering even a relatively simple project in a serious manner.
• Summertime is a really hard time to stay focused on such a project ;-)

But after all, we all still learned a great deal. Not only technology, but also how to work in short cycles as a small team. Setting small reachable targets every day and having short status syncs worked extremely well for us.

A big thank you to all readers of this blog and all supporters giving us valuable feedback on our little product! We will now go on and enjoy a great free three days before going back to business as usual :-)