Why you need to validate your assumptions

This week, our team had to submit the second assignment for the Stanford Technology Entrepreneurship online course. The assignment was to make a list of hypothesis to validate and then to go out and conduct interviews and surveys to validate them.

When we did our survey, it threw up a few surprises.

Here is what we learnt:

Venture lab tech entrepreneurship market survey from Siddhi

Startups: How do you promote your company without being annoying

Most engineer founders are reluctant to actively promote their startup. We always think, "what if they find us obnoxious" or "will they just send our email into the spam" or "will we get a hostile response". So this answer on Quora is a valuable lesson to all of us engineer founders:

Read Quote of Russell Wallace's answer to Startups: How do you promote your startup without being annoying? on Quora

This post is a part of the selected archive.

Why you should attend the Unconference sessions at Nasscom Product Conclave

Unconference? What is that? And why should you attend?

Everyone knows what a conference session is:

• A conference session has a pre-decided agenda, with pre-decided speakers
• Sessions are typically one-to-many between the speaker and the audience
• Interaction is only for a few minutes of Q&A at the end

Often times, an interesting session can leave you with more questions regarding the execution of the concepts. For example, the speaker might talk about key concepts in marketing for a venture funded US startup. But if you are a bootstrapped Indian startup, then what modifications should you do to apply these ideas in your company? And what are other companies like yours doing?

That is where an unconference session comes in. In an unconference session:

• YOU choose the topics. The attendees vote on topics that they are interested in, and we select the top voted topics
• Sessions are discussion oriented. Everyone participates and there are no silent observers
• Sessions are based on peer-to-peer learning. You learn from the other attendees, who are all product companies like you

The Product Conclave will have four unconference sessions, and YOU can shape the agenda.

What would you like to discuss at these sessions? 

This is the process by which you can participate:

1. Take a look at all the questions posed in this Google Moderator - http://www.google.com/moderator/#15/e=1ff83d&t=1ff83d.40

2. Please look through over 20 questions. If you find a topic you like, please vote for it. 

3. If you do not see a topic you like, you are free to create one and describe it a bit so that others can understand it. 

4. We will allow people to vote till 6th of Nov (one day before the Product Conclave starts)

5. On 7th morning, we will pick the top 3 (most voted topics) and assign one session for each

6. If your topic comes up, be prepared to be co-moderator. Your job is not that complex. You ask some seed questions to get the discussion started and share what you know.

7. Typically we expect 20-25 people for each discussion. Every one should get a chance to speak and ask questions. There will be no formal presentations. Just a brief introduction. 

We really look forward to seeing you in these sessions. Learning from peers in your industry is a lot of fun and if you have not done this before, you are sure to enjoy it.