On Thursday, May 27, many of us from the VisibleGains team went to the Rattlesnake on Boyleston Street for “Lean Into Spring with MassChallenge and Lean Startup Circle Boston”.  It was a packed room with 250 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, and other Lean Startup practitioners.  We’ve been practicing Lean Startup since the early days here at VisibleGains, so it was great to see such a vibrant culture of like-minded folks right in our backyard.

One thing I noticed was that there were a number of marketers from medium and large companies in attendance at the event.  The marketing department, across every company size, often has autonomy to try new ideas, interesting campaigns, new technologies, etc. like no other department in the company.  In selling to marketers, we’ve noticed that our product rarely has to go through the bureaucracy that other software products do.  Marketers are expected to innovate, and the ones that don’t will lose their job in 18-24 months.

The question is: How do you innovate while reducing the risk of failure?  I think one answer to that question can be found in the principles of Lean Startup.  Look at the graphic above.  Your job is to minimize time through the loop from an idea to a learning.  So, if you have a great idea for a new campaign where you’ll have to spend $30k to build the interactive microsite, develop a killer product demo, video some customer testimonials, etc., instead try to focus on the minimum that you can do which results in validated learning from your market.  What would happen if you bought some ads and nobody clicked through?  All of the work you did on the microsite would be a waste (and might get you fired).  In this case, you might be able to get away with a simple landing page that describes the offer, a few graphics that allow the visitor to visualize it, and lead capture form.  If you bought ads and nobody clicked through, you would have wasted about a day of effort and minimal company resources.

A nice side effect of adopting a lean, test before you invest, methodology is that you are expected to fail most of the time.  Most campaigns will be flops.  But when one of them works, you’ll have the resources and time to focus on them to get even greater returns.