Recently I caught my eye on Steve Blank and Eric Ries who have been crafting a compelling model for (software) startups called ‘The Lean Startup’. As I read and watch more and more materials they’ve spawn over the years, I frequently got flashbacks on our early days, when we were starting the BackupAgent company on the Delft University Campus.

Here are some nice videos about the concept:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2289
http://steveblank.com/2009/11/23/customer-development-past-present-future/

Lean before it was called ‘lean’

Our early BackupAgent practices were in fact complying to the important lessons of Steve and Eric. Here’s why:

• During the early days we talked and talked and talked with a lot of potential customers, channel partners, influencers and friends about our idea. We still do so today. This matches one of their very important philosophies; the facts are outside the building.
• We had a ‘minimum viable product’ which we threw into the market place very soon. We rendered a lot of feedback and attracted serious attention by doing so. It even enabled us to convince investors.
• We pivoted. We pivoted a lot. We didn’t start out by selling a software platform to Internet Service Providers. To prove this, take a look at our very old website and one 6 months later, where we started to reach out to ISPs.

The missing frame of reference

This results in the question if we would be even more effective if we had any notion of Eric’s and Steve’s theories. While we were busy building our company, we frequently had very fundamental discussions on how we performed. We did suffer from some pitfalls, like these:

• We hired and put fate in senior sales execs before we nailed the sales process by ourselves. We expected them to go out and sell, while it didn’t happen. It took off only after we ‘validated our customers’ and crafted a ‘sales roadmap’ combined with marketing efforts.
• We didn’t always pivot out of own vision and some of our features did end up in the product, because one customer or partner insisted on it. Thinking now: we should have showed them the door.

Do customers ask silly questions? Once worked on a service desk, or have read one of the many famous help desk stories, one must admit that this is true! But how is it possible that otherwise bright, thoughtful and intelligent people ask "silly" questions? Peter van Eijk wrote a very interesting article about Computer Human Interaction (Dutch / English (Translated by Google). Investigations to user interfaces are normally focused on visually impaired people, but professor Alan Newell, stated that the same applies for people with limited attention, like in emergency situations. A good interface can then literally mean the difference between life and death. What happens if someone with an IQ of 140 has to perform 10 different tasks? Add (stressed) emotion to the mix and how much cleverness can you expect per task?

One can imagine that the engineer, that is picking up all the pieces after a disaster has a lot on his mind (All data: gone! Database: gone!) and therefore is unable to calmly think through all the required steps to perform. This is not the time of complex dialog screens full of needless fiddling options! The man needs his data back, now!

Keeping this thought in mind enables BackupAgent employees, whether being designers, developers or support engineers, to make on-the-spot decisions: An extra feature is requested: will this make the restore process more complex? New technology is available, will it make the restore process faster and/or more reliable? An error occurs: does it happen during backup, when we have time to figure out why it happens, or during restore, thereby making it very critical? Following these guidelines has made our software naturally and intuitive to use: packed with advanced features, but easy and straightforward in times of distress.

This may be a bit late, but we still like to wish all our partners all the best for 2010! As for BackupAgent, we are looking at an exciting agenda when it comes planned events, first quarter of 2010.

Parallels Summit 2010
Like last year, we’ll be present at the Parallels summit. It is the golden oppertunity to meet with your industry peers and form new alliances to build better Cloud Services based businesses. The summit is held February 22 – 24th in Miami (Florida, USA).

WebhostingDay
WebhostingDay unites the decision makers of the leading web hosting companies from Europe, America and Asia, thus providing an ideal venue for an exchange of experiences as well as networking among equals. Meet us here on March 17 – 19th in Bruehl, Germany.

Microsoft Hosting Summit
We also plan to visit the Microsoft Hosting Summit for the third consecutive time. This is due 28 – 29th of April in Seattle.

Last year we met a lot of new business partners on these events. This year we look forward to meeting up with them again to brainstorm on further growth of the online backup business. Next to that, we do expect to meet new potential partners as well.