Recap: Lean Startup Machine Shanghai 2012

We heard from our good friend Duncan Leung that the first-ever Lean Startup Machine Shanghai 2012 was a great success. In short, the two-day workshop aimed to help entrepreneurs understand the “lean startup” model – as popularized by the organization’s global bootcamps – better, and to put it into action.

The session comes with some hands-on practice as participating teams are required to think “lean startup” by going through the rigorous process of validating a hypothesis and introducing the right pivots. The final day saw a startup team crowned the winners – and that was Byoyo, consisting of Yawen Hsu, Ying Chen, and Jack Wang (pictured above). They, according to the site of the organizers, Techyizu, not only came up with a great product, but also did it in the exacting and logical way that the lean startup methodology demands:

[Byoyo’s] product, “Timelapse,” […] aims to help parents document and share their children’s childhood photos […]. Although they expressed their difficulty in learning to think lean, and asking the right customer questions, they demonstrated that they had validated and invalidated the most assumptions and made the most impressive pivots. Starting from an initial idea of wanting to create a whole social platform for parents, they made several pivots after realizing that a mobile app would be a better fit for their target audience.

My short brief doesn’t do justice to all the action at Lean Startup Machine Shanghai 2012. So I encourage you to read the full day 1 and day 2 recaps.