After a faltering week of trying to get a prototype finished for one project, yesterday felt like a rollercoaster ride…
I got up to take an early Sunday call at 9am to discuss the next steps for the start-up idea developed at the Dublin Techstars Start-up Weekend. This is starting to grow legs, and looks like it is showing real promise. It was a quick call for everyone to touch base, with more co-ordination later in the week.
Then, an hour or so later two collaborators and myself kicked off the inaugural planning meeting for a new start-up idea, to build a product for the recruitment industry.
I am cautiously optimistic that this may go somewhere – within the team lies excellent domain knowledge and contacts within the industry; and the day was extremely productive. 6 hours of intense, heads-down planning: firstly fleshing out the high-level mechanics of what we are trying to build; followed by a couple of hours building a Lean Canvas business plan; followed by another couple of hours creating a high-level product backlog to approximate what we were going to have to do to reach MVP.
Going through this process from start to finish was highly illuminating and a great experience – we were able to really unravel the problem into well-understood and actionable steps; and also to develop a longer-term vision for where we wanted to go. It was a fabulous learning process, and by the end of the day we felt exhausted, but very happy that we had a plan in place to start moving forward.
I was also delighted to find that my kitchen counter top worked brilliantly as a horizontal whiteboard, and being able to brainstorm onto a large flat surface and then annotate the post-its with arrows and lines between them was really useful. I see a potential business idea in selling kitchen counters specifically with this purpose in mind…