LUXr « Practical Tools for Today's Global Entrepreneurs

Last week in a late-night tweet I quietly announced to that Luxr is changing in a big way. Nobody freaked out when I did that…so now I feel confident sharing the full story:

For the past two+ years, we’ve worked face-to-face with hundreds of startups and thousands of founders. We developed a strong curriculum for helping entrepreneurs make meaningful products and improve teamwork, and we can see the results as many of those companies have gone on to successful exits and many tens of millions in follow-on funding.

And every day we’ve found ourselves referring people to other coaches with different specialties—like Laura Klein, who knows more about UX for Lean Startups than anyone I know. Or Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper, who (literally) wrote the book on being a Lean Entrepreneur. My house has become a crashpad for international entrepreneurs opening their Silicon Valley offices, and they all talk about immigration and visa issues, so I was thrilled to finally find a Startup Visa specialist, Craig Montuori, who’s your best friend if you have immigration questions.

Startups need a constant stream of advice and coaching about myriad subjects. The only solution that makes sense to us is to gather all of that advice into a carefully curated e-Learning-style platform, Luxr-style. So that’s what we’re making—a low-cost subscription service that brings a range of coaches together under one umbrella to provide useful, tactical video workshops for startup teams.

What Will the New Site Be Like?

Take a look at Lynda.com: Lynda Weinman was a leading writer about web design in the 1990′s and she was the first to create a “school” for web designers. Several years later, she moved her school onto the web. Today, the site’s short, practical, just-what-you-need videos have proven to be exceptionally useful. We’re doing something kind of like that, but for entrepreneurs.

Aren’t You Afraid of Someone Stealing This Idea?

Not really. Edison wasn’t the first to create the lightbulb. There was a time when we were all racing to be the first to create each new thing. But today it’s all about execution. Our videos might not be as pretty as some; our UI might not be as fancy as others. We believe that useful content will win the day. Is the material helpful? Is it useful? Is it tactically important and strategically instructive?

I was a cofounder of the first User Experience firm in the world, Adaptive Path. Dozens of other firms popped up once we got started, and yet we were able to create a company with enduring value that has created wealth for the founders and employees. More than that, Adaptive Path had a profound impact on how design is practiced.

Ultimately, Luxr will be one of many services that help to elevate the practice of entrepreneurship. Some will inspire people to try starting a business. Others will help with skill-building. We’re focused on being practical, helpful, and down-to-earth support for the parts of a startup that demand critical thinking. We ask the unasked questions, and walk you step by step toward clarity, insight, and decision.

What’s Going To Happen To the Core Curriculum?

The Core Curriculum, Luxr’s current product, will continue to be available exactly the way it is today. The Core Curriculum is used by accelerators and entrepreneurs all over the world. (Welcome to our newest customers, NMotion in Omaha, NE, and Happy Farm, in Ukraine.) The curriculum is bundled with a kit of supplies and workshop materials. It’s a hands-on program that can transform a startup team. When you use the Core Curriculum through an accelerator, you’re getting an unparalleled learning experience—long-term access to the video content, augmented by the personal attention of mentors who can give specific, targeted feedback. Customers love it, and you’ll still be able to get it from Luxr.co.

Who Are The New Coaches?

We’ll be announcing many of the coaches over the next few months. Today I’m pleased to announce that we have exclusive agreements with these expert coaches:

Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper, the authors of the NYT best seller, The Lean Entrepreneur
Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups and UsersKnow.com
Tristan Kromer, global organizer of Lean Startup Circle meetups, and mentor at countless accelerators
Sam McAfee, process coach for Lean Startup, Agile, and Kanban methods
Craig Montuori, leading expert on visa and immigration issues for startups

These are the people we turn to when we need help. Now you’ll have access to them, too.

Can I Get a Preview?

Of course! Sign up for the preview list, and we’ll keep you posted on progress and let you see the early content as it’s developed. We’ll send an invitation as soon as we’re ready to have you kick the tires.

How Much Will It Cost?

I remember when Flickr first launched, they gave their early customers free Pro accounts. I felt so special and appreciated. I want you to feel that way, too, so all of our current Luxr customers will have access with no monthly subscription fee. New customers will be able to sign up for membership plans starting at $25/month.

How Can I Help?

If you think it might be valuable to you or to others in your community, please spread the word and sign up yourself—no commitment, just put in your email address to show your support.

We’re honored to have worked with so many inspired (and inspiring) entrepreneurs all over—I’m looking at you….Bend, OR…Tallinn…Dublin…Omaha (and Lincoln)…Singapore…Bangkok…Las Vegas…Jackson, TN…Tokyo…Zagreb…Moscow….

With this expanded service, we will be able to provide you with a much wider range of support, right when you need it. Please help us spread the word.

Unicorns & Rainbows,
Janice Fraser
(cofounder & CEO)

Analytics continues to be a hot topic for lean startups, but many startups seem to focus on collecting data instead of searching for information. I’ve written about this difference before here, but I’d like to zoom in on it.

A simple example: Let’s say that I’m trying to figure out who won a particular US election so I can send a congratulatory note to the winner. (I won’t say which election until the end).

Metrics that Make You Ponder(ous)

Here’s some data to answer that question, visually presented in an intriguing way:

countycartpurple512 Information vs. Data

That’s a map of a US election. It’s pure data. I have no idea what it means. Perhaps it’s what the US looks like while it’s falling into a black hole while simultaneously dealing with a zombie apocalypse. I’m not sure.

This map was created by:

Looking at the votes county by county, scaling by population, and using a red-blue color scale to represent the percentage of voters voting for a particular party

Ok…that’s great, but so what? If we wanted to convey that America is a mixed country, not strictly dividing into “red and blue states”, this would be pretty cool.

Who won?

Viewer Context

Here’s a slightly better election map:

statemapredbluer1024 Information vs. Data

Ok…slightly better. On this map of the same election there are no distortions and the maps are chunked by electorate so I can at least tell who won which state.

But who won?

In order to answer the most relevant question we’d need to have a good understanding of US geography and also know the electoral votes of each of the states. Not knowledge most US citizens are likely to possess.

The context matters for metrics. As a foreigner, I might be inclined to say the red party won…whoever that might be. To present data as information, understand who will be viewing your dashboard is relevant, or you may find that people quickly draw the wrong conclusions.

So we’re still in the land of data without being able to parse much relevant information and we still can’t answer the question of who won without a lot of extra work or a considerable amount of expertise in the US electoral system.

A Single Focused Answer

Let’s try again:

Now we have answer very simply presented at the top. Clearly Obama won the election, and that explains why he keeps giving press conferences on the White House lawn.

Information is data framed in such a way that makes it relevant to answering a question at hand and taking…ACTION.

The action in this case is sending our congratulatory note, 5 years too late. (But it’s the thought that counts.)

But let’s go further. If the only thing we’re concerned about is who won the election, then 90% of this image is unnecessary. It’s not information, it’s infotainment. (Unsurprisingly, the above image comes from network news.)

So we could crop this image a bit and get:

Data Mining

At this point some of you are thinking, “but all that data is really useful and I have a machine learning algorithm that will uncover amazing correlations that will make Nate Silver drool with envy!”

Ok sure…but let’s face it… that information is not really necessary. Many of you probably didn’t even notice that Alaska and Hawaii have been suspiciously absent from these maps. We set out to answer a specific question, so we should focus on finding the information relevant to answer that question and taking action.

In the absence of a specific question or hypothesis, information devolves to pure data.

There’s nothing wrong with pure data. If you have enough of it, data mining can uncover all sorts of useful information. But if your startup is trying to figure out if you’ll make payroll at the end of the month, staring at 40 screens of Google Analytics data is not helping you.

Tips for Making Your Metrics Dashboard

Some conclusions:

Information is data framed in such a way that makes it relevant to answering a question at hand and taking action.
Avoid infotainment pie charts or other visual displays and focus on actionable information.
Understand the audience for the dashboard and design correspondingly.
Focus on answers to specific questions, keep interesting but distracting data out of your dashboard.

Cheers,
Tristan

P.S.: I have avoided talking about vanity metrics vs. actionable metrics here. It’s a great subject and closely related. Sometime people think if something is not a vanity metric then it is de facto an actionable metric. This is not true and that’s what I’m focused on in this article.

In addition to running the accelerator facilitator training for the past 9 months, I’m the guy that maintains LUXr’s website. I’m not a formally trained coder and my abilities extend about as far as an MVP or two thanks to a lot of coaching from people like Doug Goldie and James Bond (the one that doesn’t wear a tux).

I enjoy coding and, thanks to open source and stack overflow, I can throw together quite a bit of functionality, but I’m no 10Xer and sometimes talking about my friend Kartik‘s LISP compiler makes me feel like I’m watching an episode of Star Trek.

This turns out to be ok for LUXr as our website is not very complex and aside from a ‘buy now’ button there are no mission critical systems upon which lives depend. But that’s not always going to be the case. So Janice asked me to write a job description for full time engineer.

With very little idea about what we’re going to build in the future and no real understanding of when we might hire such a person, I hammered out this description with an emphasis on hiring for lean culture and not for any particular skill set such as C++ or LISP.

I’m posting it here for anyone to cut and paste those parts that seem appropriate for their recruiting efforts.

So congratulations to Sam McAfee who, a few days later, showed up as our new VP or Engineering!

Here’s the description in it’s entirety:

LUXr is looking for a full stack engineer to work as part of the core product team creating an online learning platform for entrepreneurs of any stripe or spot. Not just tech entrepreneurs who want to be Mark Zuckerbeg, we want to serve the broader market of moms, pops, and the folks who haven’t yet realized the impact they’ll make in the world.

You’ll be building a product from the ground up on a shifting foundation and with limited visibility. That’s where the fun is!

This is not a job where you’ll be playing with the latest technologies and trying to figure out how to mine data from 1 billion users. This is a job about trying to provide value to the millions of people who drive our economy.

It’s a job for people who want to create value.

Personality wise, must be able to:

Live in a pack of alpha dogs and not just push the button every 88 minutes;

Never ever utter the phrase, “but that’s what the requirements said.” If the user doesn’t use it and derive value from it, the feature is not done;

Express disagreement but be able to accept a decision made by the CEO or product manager and work productively towards executing that decision;

Must be prepared to accept feedback on the code in the form of talking to customers and doing live user testing;

Must be able to accept imperfection as reality even when perfection is the goal;

Must be prepared to throw away large chunks of code and even whole prototypes without loosing your cool;

Work productively through frustrating moments…it’s a startup dude! Roll with it;

Focus even when being told about 20 things that need to be done right away;

Turn off and recharge at the end of the day without unproductively obsessing at 3 am.

Responsibility wise, must:

Communicate effectively with designers, business people, and customers, to determine what to build to provide a value proposition;

Design experiments to determine if a feature actually provides value to the user. This includes A/B testing, smoke testing, concierge testing, or other methods;

Build things! Sometimes from scratch, sometimes with open source or other available software;

Look for additional efficiencies by automating manual processes;

Stop automating and build minimum viable products and features without going through endless refactoring. Know when to code and when to fake it with mTurk;

Present usage metrics in a form understandable by a non-statistician so product decisions can be easily made;

Maintain the live website through rain, shine, and midnight pager duty;

Help make build or buy decisions in regards to third party software and services;

Be able to present a reasonable guestimate on build times and know when to present a reasonable “I don’t know.”

Skills:

Full stack engineer required. Doesn’t have to be pixel perfect front end or scalable to one billion users on the back, but must be able to handle the whole site.

Must be well versed in implementing analytics or prepared to become well versed. Platform is not important (Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, CrazyEgg, Google Analytics), but being able to measure the effectiveness of a feature is essential;

Must be well versed in A/B testing and understand how to implement;

Must use test driven development principles and always write tests prior to writing functional code. (BDD preferable);

Must be familiar with Extreme Programming principles in pratice. Not just theory. The ability to work in pairs is essential;

Must be able to use IRC, Stack Overflow, Quora, or any other channel to get the answers you need. Must not get blocked when a gem you really like arbitraily stops working with heroku.

Current Platform:

We do not have platform language requirements but the current current code is written in RoR, HAML, SASS, Jquery, Compass, and Twitter Bootstrap;

It uses a variety of Rails gems such as devise, activeadmin, gmaps4rails, etc, none of which are critical and can be replaced at any time.

Our blog is hosted in WordPress so some familiarity with PHP is required.

We are currently hosted on Heroku.

Non-core job requirements:

Maintain basic team infrastructure such as email addresses;

Coach team members on various SaaS tools such as Pipedrive, Goodle apps, SaneBox, Mailchimp, WordPress, Bufferapp, etc.

Implement pure marketing requirements which may seem like distractions from core functionality;

It would be helpful if you had experience with:

Subscription model websites and implementing 3^rd party payment APIs;

Social platforms and building forums and other commenting systems;

Video analytics.

Although long winded and in serious need of editing, we passed this entire description to Sam who accepted the job and spent his entire second day pair programming with me.

I hope I’m able to continually embrace and improve some of these practices in my own work and I’ll expand upon some of these points on my own blog on Lean Startup.