[Idea] Entrepreneur School: Hands-on prototyping for non-technical founders

Hacking, Startups 9 May 2010 | 3 Comments

I recently idly tweeted an idea which flitted through my head while considering the pros and cons of “E-School”, the Founder Institute. People asked for more, so here it is!

To build a business you need to build a product. While technical types often find the process of knocking up a quick demo webapp a walk in the park, one way a non-technical person can quickly gain feedback and respect is to build a prototype themselves.

If you have an idea for a web application – whether it’s a shopping site with a twist, an iPhone app that shows you nearby tweets, a game to teach children about finances, or a global treasure hunt – chances are you can build an early version to get the idea across quite quickly, even without much of a background in computer science.

Today’s tools are accessible and almost universal, but they can be really daunting if you don’t know where to begin. The value of creating your first prototype yourself in terms of feedback, understanding the problems you’ll have, and even the exercise of trimming down the feature set and figuring out the MVP (minimum viable product) is far, far greater than the time saved outsourcing it to the Philippines.

But where are the tools to teach you how?

There’s stuff to turn hackers into entrepreneurs, but connecting entrepreneurs with the tools hackers have at their fingertips seems much less common.

Here are some of the ideas I have around creating a resource (offline workshops? week-long intensive? online course? incubator? unconference? wiki? website/blog? book?) to help people without a technical background build a prototype of their idea quickly, and get feedback on it.

Methods

  • How to design, structure and plan a web application (see below for how to build)
  • Rapid prototyping, iteration, and agile development (i.e. build it quickly, get feedback, change it)
  • Minimum viable product and how to figure out what should be in your prototype
  • Ways to test out your application; how to find initial users and get feedback (Real stories)
  • Feedback channels for prototyping before you’ve written a line of code
  • How to pull off an awesome investor demo (Interviews)

Technology and Tools

  • Explanation of different technologies available and what it all means (without using baby language but without using jargon either)
  • Easy, accessible tutorials, workshops and courses that help people quickly master the basics of a webapp framework like Ruby on Rails to put together a fully functioning application
  • Readily available tools and libraries you can use to make this process a lot easier and quicker (e.g. off-the-shelf social networks you can customise)
  • Mashups: What’s a mashup? How can I use Google Maps/Twitter/Facebook in my application? What’s possible and what isn’t?
  • Real developers’ tips and techniques for “faking it” – how to make a demo look good when it’s only 10% complete (Interviews)
  • Alternative technologies that allow you to use familiar tools to build a demo, e.g. Powerpoint mockups, OmniGraffle, spreadsheets, Photoshop, even setting up Wordpress to ‘fake’ a real site
  • Hands on demonstration of an example prototype using these different methods (Initial idea for this: Building a site where dog owners can post their location and dog information and share walks)

Design

  • Product and feature design techniques
  • How to make the most of paper prototypes
  • What’s wireframing and why should I bother? Won’t the designer do that?
  • Designing an awesome user experience
  • Visual design basics (Analysing/Breakdown of beautifully designed prototypes)
  • How to make things look good and feel polished without a degree in graphics
  • Readily available tools and products you can use to speed this along

Getting Help

  • Ideally, build everything yourself; it really helps your credibility and teaches you a hell of a lot along the way. If this isn’t an option for whatever reason,
  • How to outsource the building of a prototype
  • How to find a developer and/or designer
  • Once the prototype is built and you’re happy, how to find the right rockstar lead developer to take it forward

I’d love to hear some feedback on this idea and information on areas you particularly want to learn more about (whether I included them or not) — and how you’d like to consume the information.

Cheers,
Jen

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Hacker Challenge: The Apprentice meets Startup Weekend meets Y Combinator

Startups 24 April 2010 | 1 Comment

A fledgling idea that I’m throwing out there for feedback, comments and refinement.

Take sixteen entrepreneurial hackers.

Follow the standard formula: give them somewhere awesome to live (but force them to live together), a dream workspace, and something to strive towards.

The ultimate reward: $100,000 of seed funding, $50,000 technology funding donated by a sponsor, office space, living space, free hosting, $50,000 of marketing donated, etc etc.

The catch? They have to survive the weekly challenges before they get to the final creation stage.

The challenges are technical and business focused. Similar to the Apprentice, each week tests a different aspect of these hackers’ coding skills and business thinking. From developing an iPhone app prototype and business case pitch in a week, to working with the newly released Twitter API, to finding an innovative green solution to a specific problem… An expert in the relevant area joins the teams each week to help with the tech disconnect, but part of the test is how fast these guys can learn and adapt. Some challenges could be solo but the main idea is getting to know the teams.

The aim is to test the hackers on their ability to hack under pressure as well as their ability to assimilate other business skills, to communicate and pitch, and to work in teams with other type-A personalities. Each week a project manager gets chosen, and the two semi-finalists pick their own full teams from the candidates to create a much more detailed app and business idea, to report back in a month (or week?) – the winning team then gets to create that product with mentoring, cash and invaluable connections.

From marketing to pitch training as well as a ton of challenges around assimilating new technology and developing under pressure, this show should be entertaining and useful to hackers and non-hackers at home. The training sessions, guest speakers, tech guides and even the code developed by the teams should be available online for people to follow along. Hell, even If I Can Dream-style 24/7 ability to follow along, interact via Twitter etc.

Aside: This could also be used as a fairly ‘interesting’ way to select candidates for a job within a large tech company, no? Or to select Y Combinator companies ;)

I’m not sure if non-programmers (or people like me who can program but have moved away from it and prefer to do other things) should be included in the teams. The aim is to train hackers to create awesome startups, both those participating and those watching along. This means covering a lot of business topics as well as development best practices, concepts like ’ship and iterate’, lean startup, customer development, customer management etc.

I think there’s a lot of value to creating a mixed set of participants, front-end guys and girls, back-end, Rails, PHP, Python, C, etc. It just gets interesting when people get voted off if the skillsets don’t end up complementary…

Anyway, there’s the idea. It could even be started fairly low budget – it doesn’t have to be a NBC show. We’d need a team to get together to run it, design challenges, raise funding for the live-in hack-fest and think about some of the technology problems that we’d have to overcome. But I think it’d be pretty cool, even if a little derivative.

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