presentation for the NYCRIN / NSF meeting 2013-07-24, showing 1st demo of leanworkbench.com, open source tools to quantify and drive early stage startups, with support from NSF award 1305023

1. NYCRIN Level 3:
Lean Workbench
open source tools to drive and quantify
seed-stage startups
Chris Wiggins / chris@leanworkbench.com
Jennifer Rubinovitz / jen@leanworkbench.com
Columbia University & LeanWorkbench

2. "Standard accounting is not
helpful in evaluating
entrepreneurs."
- Eric Reis, "The Lean Startup"
(Random House, Inc. 2011)

3. Lean Hypothesis
"Evaluating customer response and innovation
accounting requires a tool-set not generally
available, especially lean or first time
entrepreneurs."
- NYCRIN Proposal

4. Customer Interview Results
Must Have Key Activities
● CHEAP: Affordable for cash strapped early
stage startups
● FAST: Allow for easy installation

5. Customer Interview Results
Must Have Channels
● Github: collaborative open source platform

6. Customer Interview Results
Must Have Customer
Segments
● I-Corps cohorts
● Any early stage
startup
● NB: not just web-
tech!
○ All companies have
web presence

7. Lean Workbench
● Open source
● Customer behavior tracking tools
○ Google Analytics
○ Partnering with optimizing
startups
● Automate + report customer
surveys
○ e.g., Wufoo.com
● Social media tools to drive startup
○ Twitter
○ Facebook
● Operations tools
○ e.g., QuickBooks Online.

8. Open Source
● Free to use by I-Corps and other entrepreneurs
● Empowers stakeholder contributors
"Members of the data community at large are very
eager to help one another ... by open sourcing the
tools we have built for ourselves ... as the rest of the
community fixes bugs and adds features to the original
tool"
- Etsy data engineer
"I'm super excited to design! Interested in the idea of
data driven decision making."
- Trendalytics.co designer
Fnordmetric Github Network Graph

9. Wufoo Surveys
● Automate customer interviews
● Analyze survey responses
○ e.g., by customer segment
○ e.g., by location

10. Runway and Income Tracking
● Leverage APIs e.g.,
Quickbooks
● Track income per
feature
● Projections of
○ feature costs (time and
money)
○ needed investment
○ runway

11. Raising Venture Capital (Is Hard)
seed round analysis by Brendan Baker

12. Founders need "investor fit"
Leverage Angellist and
Crunchbase;
help founders find the
right investors

13. Benchmarking
● Standardized data from Lean Workbench
APIs will allow startups to benchmark
against each other
Benchmarking from Crunchbase Data alone, by Buzzsparks.org

14. Our Market
158,372 companies on AngelList, most of which are
early stage.
1,429 teams on Launchpad Central.
653 I-Corps Teams

15. Signup for Beta
http://signup.leanworkbench.com