About

LeanFounder is the blog of the Eastside Incubator. It is designed to help software startups get started and get profitable. It is a work in progress, and will probably never be quite finished.

What is the LeanFounder vision?

Actionable advice for new software entrepreneurs.

LeanFounder helps new entrepreneurs get started. Specifically, we break down the complex art of starting a new software business  into a set of actionable steps…start with step 1, move to step 2, etc. We do not claim to have a secret recipe for avoiding hard work, but we have built a rational plan for translating your hard work into meaningful progress and building a community of people who are also going through this journey.

What is a actionable advice?

There are a ton of websites and books out there that can help new founders learn about starting a company.  But, we have not found a directive guide that actually takes you from idea to business. By analogy, when you are learning a new software framework, you can pick up a book that takes you from installing the bits to rendering your first “Hello World” to building a fully functional site. Anybody with a technical mind can become proficient by starting at the beginning of a training program (e.g., page 1) and working hard at the proescribed tasks. Similar approaches work to train for a marathon, learn martial arts, or prepare for a first sky dive. Our goal is to provide a directive guide for building a business–we provide the general plan and allow you to spend more of your time in execution mode. To that end, we have prepared a 5-month plan to help you start your startup.

Is this the only way to start a business? No. We have proven that there are many ways to start a business, including the “code for your life” approach where you just start writing lines of code and stop only when you realize that there is absolutely no chance of building a business out of your bits. There are countless ways that your business can succeed or fail. The goal is not to provide you with an understanding of every decision that you could make, or to make you an expert in any particular field. The goal is to provide you with a rational plan that can get you from where you are today to operating a startup within 5 months.

What would you do if you decided you were going to run a marathon? If you would lace up your shoes and start running, LeanFounder is not for you. If you would read stories about professional marathon runners, LeanFounder is not for you. If you would look for a training program that makes sense to you, that works given your  schedule and competing priorities, that provides a demanding but doable roadmap so that you can prepare for an incredible challenge, then LeanFounder might be for you.

Who is the target audience?

• Moonlight entrepreneur, working on your own time to make yourself more valuable to your current or future employer.
• Academic entrepreneur, getting your MBA, JD, graduate degree, or undergraduate degree by day and wanting to apply your education in a real world business.
• Plain old entrepreneur, who just wants to build a company.

Basically, anybody who wants to make meaningful progress against their goal of becoming a viable founder. You do not have to be a software founder, but we will approach the subject from the perspective of a software founder. Technology is a small but important part of the plan, because technology tends to be a small but important part of most businesses.

How can you get involved?

• You can subscribe to the RSS feed.
• You can subscribe to the monthly newsletter on the right.
• You can tell a friend about LeanFounder.
• You can comment on our plan for 2011.
• You can email [email protected] with suggestions for additional topics or resources or to share other ideas.

Recommended Reading (warning-reading enables progress, but is not progress):

• Startup
  • The Four Steps to the Epiphany - customer development.
  • Business Model Generation – figure out the business model that supports the customer need.

• Websites
  • Lessons Learned – Eric Ries, Lean Startup blog.
  • OnStartups – blog about startups.
  • Techflash – Seattle technology blog.
  • TechCrunch – Silicon valley technology blog.