My thoughts on Leancamp London 10 May 2010

Today I got back from the Leancamp unconference. I went to the event with an open mind not knowing what to expect. After a bit of reflection, here are my notes.

• It was a bit confusing to know what sessions were available and where to go. This sorted itself out after about an hour but it was a bit disorientating for the first bit. I put some of this confusion down to my unfamiliarity with the format.
• Twitter helped understand the mood and interests of attendees – it wasn’t as useful for organising and coordinating sessions though. This might be partly due to patchy wifi.
• Although DHH’s views on business and startups is brilliant I didn’t learn anything new from his talk. He is a great speaker and doesn’t waffle.
• I enjoyed DHH vs. Eric – this debate (as remarked afterwards by one attendee) was a bit black and white, and at some points, emotive – however it was good to see two guys at the top of their game converse. Probably the most interesting panel-like discussion I’ve seen in a while.
• I don’t know the definition of a leanstartup. Salim said it was a framework for addressing the biggest market risk and learning from that.
• I also don’t know if that even matters. Clearly I’ve got some reading to do though. Probably starting with CustDev.com, Brant Cooper, Metrics for Pirates and Four Steps to the Epiphany.
• I was surprised by the amount of terminology and theory that was involved in some sessions. This was a barrier to my participation and understanding of the session. Clearly I’ve got some reading to do (see previous point).
• Other sessions I attended -
  • Bootstrapping lessons run by @chrismdp
  • Lean Marketing by by Matthew – which ran for a mammoth 1 hr 45 mins … all good though.
    • Need to look up VITO letters and
    • work on our referrential-ality – completely bad up word but  basically the full use of existing customer base in developing new business. Something that I’m now aware we’re not fully exploiting.
  • There were a few other sessions that I attended but ‘voted with my feet’.
  • Each attendee wore coloured stickers notating their interest (tech, creative, entrepreneur). This was a good idea. I could look into a session that looked popular and gauge whether it would be of interest to me based on the distribution of sticker colours.
• Anything VC related was really of interest to me. However there was clearly a VC interest thread running through the day.

What did I come away with in the end?

• I met some interesting people
• Experienced a very different unconference format. I was inspired by this – and probably will feel more comfortable about how to participate and contribute next time.
• I came away with some new knowledge about organisations that support startups (and that aren’t VCs!) – e.g. Creative Futures – which I’ve signed up to.
• Knowledge
  • £50k is the average size of first investment from Seedcamp, and that this is supposed to last between 3 and 6 months.
  • A good tip from someone in the audience. If you’re focusing on delivering a new product then make sure you don’t over look the potential of offering consultancy to sustain immediate growth. It will help you to prove customer base and promote stability of revenue
• New terms
  • Vanity Metrics – i.e. page hits, registrations, etc

I take my hat off to the confidence of the organisers to pull off something like this. It worked really well.

Would I go again? Yes, probably.