Looking Up at How Lean Startup Machine Jakarta 2015 Works

As the organizer of a workshop that validates ideas, Lean Startup Machine (LSM) Jakarta has done a marvelous job this year. The combination of excellent organizing board and prominent mentors has helped participants to explore the unexplored.

Being held from September 4-6, 2015, it was LSM’s second event in Jakarta. I got the opportunity to attend the workshop as one of participants for three days. During the event, I learned that consumers don’t really care about your solution, they’ll be loyal as long as it satisfies they crave.

The workshop was initiated by a challenge, getting participants generating their own creative and innovative ideas to be used as a solution to their main concern. Each of them got the chance to form a group of 5-7 people which will later collaborate to materialize their ideas. Out of 100 participants, 28 unique ideas were generated, which got narrowed to 14 best ideas in the final round. The session represents the best opportunity you can have to show your capability of collaborating with a whole new team.

After the first session ended, every team received an experimental board which functioned as one of their marketing tools, as they may map their target market, define challenges they may face, create hypotheses, and generate a solution.

“There are several phases that must be passed by a startup before producing its solution. Understand the issue and validate the market,” said Zafrul Noordin, Code Army’s CEO and one of organizer.

Fail Fast. Succeed Faster.

Assuming the target market is the start line for the whole adventure of building a startup. The assumption is commonly based on the faith that potential customer has problems to accomplish something. This scheme directs participants to generate their own hypotheses for their own business.

During the Go Out of The Building (GOTB) session, all participants were involved in validating all generated ideas and hypotheses. They collected valuable insight and measured their success by interacting directly with people, who woule be their potential customers. Interestingly, most of assumptions and hypotheses were proven wrong once you interact with real people.

Experiment. Validate. Repeat.

LSM emphasized on the importance of lining up your ideas, market target, interview result, and evaluation after the first session of GOTB. That became jurists’ main assessment to determine the winner by the end of the workshop.

Through LSM, participants were trained to turn the time limit into our advantage while innovating and making a decision. After evaluating their performance in the first trial, each team got the chance to re-define their market target, challenges, and hypotheses. It’s not impossible to see new challenges rising out of that process.

Every minute spent in LSM means endless brainstorming to participants. They discussed about the market’s responses all the time, deciding whether an additional innovation or even a pivot was necessary. Although they passed several meals, their spirit was unparalelled. Some even used their leisure time to innovate.

This whole experiment was believed to save more time rather than launching an unproven product. During three days, LSM helped us finding common problems which usually popped up in longer time frame.

On the third day, every team had the last chance to validate the market by presenting their minimum viable product (MVP). MVP isn’t a final product that it could take form of a landing page. The objective of it was to measure users’ interests, their interaction, and its function as a problem solver.

At the end of the event, 14 teams represented their ideas and business model, as well as experiments they made in front of a panel of jurists and fellow participants. The winners indeed collected attractive prizes, but I believe that experience and lesson learned were the most valuable thing to obtain.

This year, Home911 won the LSM Indonesia 2015. The team presented the idea of bridging families and construction workers.

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Disclosure: DailySocial is Lean Startup Machine Jakarta 2015’s media partner