Business Model Canvas developed by my team at 3 Day Startup

I would like to share a story about one of the most exciting weekends of all time. This past April I was accepted to participate in 3 Day Startup in San Antonio, hosted by the Rackspace Startup Program and sponsored by Trinity University. The 3 Day Startup organization is based out of Austin, but travels the world to facilitate 3-day startup boot camps. A few dozen aspiring entrepreneurs from a wide range of backgrounds are pulled together, injected with unhealthy levels of caffeine and sugar, and set loose to develop viable, investment-worthy concepts under the guidance of a roaming mob of mentors who had all built successful businesses in the past. Our “mentor mob” included Dirk Elmendorf and Pat Condon (Rackspace), Jason Seats (Slicehost), Bart Bohn (ATI, Ravel), and Nick Longo (CoffeeCup Software), just to name a few. The insights and encouragement these guys provided was incredible. My friend and NeighborFarms co-founder BJ Dierkes also made the cut. The planets had aligned.

The event was timed perfectly with the final design phase of my thesis research, which explored the business model mechanics and social dynamics of small-scale, independent food production. Over the previous months of data analysis and prototyping a vision had emerged for a simple web service that could foster greater market resiliency by enabling new opportunities for collaborative value creation, emergent creativity and self-regulation. I’ll be posting more on this project in the coming weeks.

The 3DS workshop model is straight-forward: participants bring their business ideas and teams will form around the most compelling proposals. These teams will then have 72 hours to define, prototype, validate and pitch their idea to a panel of investors.  In anticipation of the workshop, I knew the most important pitch wouldn’t be on the last day, but on the very first round of idea-vetting. I needed everyone around me to be as convinced as I already was, and to believe something great was within reach, but with only a few fleeting minutes to make a year of exploration and insight meaningful.

Opening night pitch: participants show their stuff

Dirk Elmendorf quickly destroyed that notion with a reality check of epic proportions.  After several minutes bludgeoning my group with a primer on innovation drivers and market trajectories, he cut me off and said “You know what? I believe you. You’ve done a TON of research and know this stuff and the complexity and intricacy and all that – great – but I don’t need to hear about it. Just tell me what I need to know to support your idea.” YES! I needed to hear that so badly. I realized I was too damn proud of the complexity of the opportunity space to actually let anyone into it in the first place. I was defining my offering as a better solution than that of competitors no one had ever heard of, in a space no one had ever experienced, wrapped in convoluted jargon no one cared to follow.

A huge weight fell off my shoulders. I was ready to build something. I shuffled through my library of slide decks, grabbed eight slides, and penned a quick story.  A few minutes later I was pitching to the group.  When pitches were complete there was a blind vote for the best concepts that people either supported or would actually like to work on. My proposal won with 12 votes, the next 3 concepts had between 6 and 8 votes. Half a dozen participants joined BJ and I and we began a 48-hour marathon to refine and test the concept, build a convincing prototype and boil everything down into a compelling pitch for a panel of investors.

Visualizing ideas, breaking through complexity

My biggest challenge with regard to the team was to catch everyone up on all of the few relevant research findings that would get us moving forward while extinguishing the bursts of doubt and critique that threatened to derail our momentum. Fortunately, the workshop also aligned with a weekly farmers market here in San Antonio. I took the team out and set them loose with a series of questions for vendors. I also took this time to test a few new concepts that we had developed during the first night’s idea session. One concept included a mobile app, so I sketched a deck of simple interfaces onto a few Post-It notes and stuck them to BJ’s broken iPhone. This quick paper prototype debunked a potential distraction with an investment of less than 20 minutes of prep time.

Test early and often: paper prototyping within hours on inception

Move the team forward: a nice healthy dose of contextual immersion

The goal of the field trip wasn’t to learn anything new (though we did), but to get the team immersed in the context and spur some excitement in the human element behind the project. It worked. We spent the rest of the afternoon littering whiteboards with observations and sketching concepts.  That evening we developed a rock-solid revenue model and built an awesome prototype that I could demonstrate from a series of user task narratives.

An endless supply of whiteboards, courtesy of Rackspace in San Antonio

On the final evening we delivered a knockout pitch and had overwhelmingly positive feedback from the mentors and investors alike. BJ and I are now in early-stage development and are preparing for an off-season pilot with the growers I interviewed in Georgia.

Curious to know what the big idea is? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see when we get closer to launch!

This workshop was absolutely amazing, from beginning to end. The time spent with mentors was really the best part of this experience. They held extremely high expectations and were necessarily difficult to convince, which pushed me to a level of focus and refinement that I wouldn’t have found on my own. It was stressful, to be sure, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun.

It was also really exciting to have a chance to apply so much of what I have been learning and developing over the last two years with the Design Management department at SCAD. Contextual research, idea visualization and facilitation, concept mapping, prototyping, and presenting – all compressed into 72 hours of nonstop madness, which was also quite familiar :)  In the zombie hours of the early morning, long after so many had gone home to sleep and shower, I felt proud to have been apart of the workshop culture and the high expectations of our department back in Savannah. This is what we had been prepared for. I also felt an unmistakable sadness in knowing that I’m on my own now. I want to create that same energy and creative cohesion. It’s time to build something.

Read more about the weekend:

» Alamo Entrepreneurship: 3DS Trinity Spring 2011

» 3-Day Start-up @ Rackspace in San Antonio

My MFA thesis sent me into a Design space that I can’t imagine any of my friends or colleagues guessing I would have ever found myself in. Local food?! At twenty-seven years I could barely feed myself, let alone feed myself well. The topic was a total departure from my comfort zone, which had a lot to do with why I chose it in the first place. After spending a few weeks buried in USDA reports, activist blogs and market studies, I realized that I had more false assumptions and biases informing my research plan than true understanding.

I decided to address my misinformation about independent food by brain-vomiting everything I “knew” – or otherwise thought I knew – on the wall of my office. Then, as with any other empirical data set, I began sorting these notes into affinity clusters.

Themes emerged, and soon I had a nice tidy outline of thoughts with absolutely no factual basis whatsoever. By confronting this mess outright I was able to establish a solid roadmap for secondary research. It would have been impossible to engage producers and their customers in meaningful conversation, or to analyze data from those encounters, without a basic fluency in the reality of the context — not only for objective clarity but also to establish the level of trust required to really be invited in. In hindsight it sounds painfully obvious, but how often do we really stop and consider the biases, assumptions, and foreign determinacy that stows away in the background of contextual research and analysis.

This evolving list of uncertainties and “known unknowns” informed a more critical background analysis of the design space and, like a good set of questions should, led not only to exact answers but better questions, and a conversational interview protocol that unlocked hours of incredible data from every interview participant. This was by far the most comprehensive and effective research project I’ve ever conducted, but it wouldn’t have been so without first challenging my own assumptions and biases.

The heart of this issue isn’t particularly new. Trust is a function of reliability among actors within a given context, and one of our top projects in life is to continuously sort this out. The difference is that Airbnb’s users have neither the years of history that you have within your own networks of friends, family, and colleagues, nor the consequences of violating that trust once it has been formed. Who would you be more willing to open your home to: a total stranger from another corner of the map, or your best friend from college? Easy answer.

On the other side of the transaction, however, Airbnb offers affordable alternatives to hotels and hostels, with the added potential of a warm welcome from your hosts, along with friendly conversation and a local’s perspective on the place you’re visiting.  I believe this is (and always was) possible just by leveraging the full scope of the many networks you already belong to.

One degree: your friends

Consider your immediate network of contacts — the people you interact with on a regular basis. Chances are, if you were to plot these contacts against a map, you’re not going find many places that you haven’t already visited. In my case, this network plot reads like a map of places I’ve lived long enough to form solid friendships, or places my fellow classmates have recently moved to since graduation. There are a few new places that I would like to visit, but only a few.

Next, consider the networks that these friends belong to: your friends’ friends.

Two degrees: your friends’ friends

As a general rule of network analysis, all of your friends have more friends than you do. They’re also slightly more central in the crowd than you are. This is the 2nd degree of your network, and it dots the globe, reaching to far away continents and clustering around the immediate vicinity of your friends, just as they are clustered around you.

Now let’s jump out just one more degree:

Three degrees: friends of your friends’ friends

These illustrations really don’t capture the true density of the network that surrounds you at greater degrees of association. The leap in connections is massive. Imagine if you could visualize the 2nd and 3rd degree geography of your network, and trace the relationships back to your immediate friends and relatives responsible for that connection. Now imagine you want to spend Christmas in Prague. There’s a great possibility that you are one or two polite introductions away from making that happen.

Granted, this model still lends itself to the potential for manipulation. For better or for worse, you just can’t design human nature out of the system. However, what this model does have is one of the most sophisticated filters ever devised: trust. Social clusters are inherently self-validating, and unsavory characters are typically denied access to our most important connections. The consequences for violating trust across your close friends’ networks would be far more severe than doing the same to a perfect stranger.

The challenge to pulling something like this off is to develop a critical mass of participants within a traceable network, so that multiple degrees can be calculated. With over 750 million members, Facebook is the perfect network to make such a service possible. Many network graphing apps already exist, so it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable technological feat.

So what do you think? As either a traveler or a host, does a service model based on this premise sound appealing?

In universal algebra and in model theory, a reduct of an algebraic structure is obtained by omitting some of the operations and relations of that structure. The converse of reduct is expansion. Wikipedia

Early-stage collaborative way-finding is a messy good time.  Teams dive head first into abject calamity, gobbled up in an avalanche of complexity and losing all sense of up or down, but soon identify patterns and relationships to help make sense of what they’re experiencing.  These patterns then mature into models of causalities, agent incentives and other perceptual gravities, which can then be recycled or validated through iterative storytelling and prototyping.

Much of this exploratory process occurs as a conversation in a language that pre-dates verbal communication – visual association, dissociation and self-projection.  Objects and concepts are clustered into categories and topics, possibilities are sketched, stories are developed and prototypes are built, all the while fueling a recursive reinterpretation of an emerging design opportunity.

The problem is that these methods go to hell when your team is scattered around the globe.  Enter the idea.  This concept was developed over coffee with Robert Fee, professor of Design Management at SCAD, while discussing something entirely unrelated (as is often the case).

This app is an augmented reality harness that synchronizes a canvas across all teammates’ devices, and projects that canvas into real space through the camera viewport.  Ideally it will be able to inherit existing canvas-based applications like Adobe Illustrator.

Starting or joining a project requires a quick and easy calibration.

Rest the device face-down on the table (or flat against a wall) and press a large “calibration” button.  The app calculates it’s location, elevation and orientation, which will all inform the projection until the project is re-calibrated in a new location.

Step back and look through the viewport.  The canvas will remain mathematically true to the point of calibration.  Rather than saving your project into a folder, you save it on your coffee table, or perhaps on the wall above your desk.  As you glance around your office through your viewport you’ll see all of your active projects in constant flux as teammates sort, sketch and synthesize in a shared space.

I expect this app will require some heavy-lifting in the background, similar in nature to GitHub’s project forking and version management.  Perhaps a “host-it-yourself” switchboard service (think Diaspora) would be an effective way to keep devices synced in real time.  It will need to be fully plug-and-play with as little configuration or maintenance as possible, with uncontested and irrevocable content ownership to speed adoption by enterprise-level design research teams.

Would anyone like to make this happen? I welcome all comments, questions and suggestions.

The trip uphill took a couple of hours, but in that time we changed elevation from about 11,500 feet in Leh to 18,380 feet at the pass. Now of course there’s a real danger of sliding off a cliff, but there’s also a danger of developing high-altitude sickness (if you didn’t already have it at 11,500ft).  One common complication is high-altitude cerebral edema.  HACE can really screw you up, but in all likelihood if you just take it easy and rest for awhile you can recover fairly quickly.  High-altitude pulmonary edema, on the other hand, will kill you dead.  It will start as a rough, dry cough, and then your lungs will be filling with fluid.  Your options are suddenly A) descend as quickly as possible without exertion, or B) make a statistical contribution to the #1 cause of high-altitude death.

HAPE-free is the way to be!

Once we reached the pass we were able to stretch our legs and take a few pictures.  I could definitely feel my blood desaturating… I was high as a kite!  Our instructors cautioned us to take it slow, but we chose to have a snowball fight instead.

I decided if it’s the only time I get to visit the highest motorable roadway on the planet, I might as well climb a little higher.  The first few meters up the hill were fine, but then my enthusiasm was washed out by a type of desperate dread that I’ve never experienced before.  I was out of breath.  Not just winded, but empty.  I was standing in the doorway of panic, and thought “I feel it.  I could fucking die right here, today, the jackass who decided to go a little higher, when he’s clearly already standing above all but a handful of other other people on Earth.”  It was real.  One exhausted lunge at a time I made my way a few dozen meters further up to an enclosed, circular building enshrouded with prayer flags.  I could see distant mountain ranges in distant countries, a patchwork of settlements, rich biomes and infinite microcosmic complexity, all planted beneath the bluest, sharpest sky I’ve ever seen in my life.  My worn out heart was screaming for air but the planet was alive and rested beneath me.  The clarity and completeness of that moment will never be matched.

It may be hard to throw out old CD’s, but it’s fairly easy to box them all up and mail them to your friends. A few years ago I tried replacing the jewel cases with soft cases, but ended up with a 50/50 split. This time around the pile was small enough to get them all into a USPS flat-rate “If it fits, it ships” mailer and sent them all off to my friends in Colorado.  Each of us will get a brief turn with each other’s archive before passing it on to the next guy. Except I don’t have a return address at the moment, so someone will have to hold on to mine for awhile :D