The Startup Owner's Manual

Appendix CHow to Build a Web Startup: A Simple Overview

How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition

If you’re an experienced coder and user interface designer you think nothing is easier than diving into Ruby on Rails, Node.js and Balsamiq and throwing together a website. (Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.)

But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, “How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a website?” And the most important question is, “How do I use the business model canvas and Customer Development to test whether this is a real business?”

My first attempt at helping students answer these questions was by putting together the Startup Tools Page at www.steveblank.com. It’s a compilation of available tools for startups. While it was a handy reference, it still didn’t help the novice.

So below, I offer my next attempt.

How To Build a Web Startup – The Lean LaunchPad Edition

Here’s the step-by-step process we suggest our students use in our Lean LaunchPad classes. All these steps are covered in Chapters 4, 5 and 6.

1. Set up the logistics to manage your team
2. Craft company hypotheses
3. Write a value proposition statement that other people understand
4. Set up the Website Logistics
5. Build a “low fidelity” web site
6. Get customers to the site
7. Add the backend code to make the site work
8. Test the “problem” with customer data
9. Test the “solution” by building the “high-fidelity” website
10. Ask ...