Phl in global startup spotlight anew ‘Lean Startup’ conducts intro workshop

MANILA, Philippines - It’s a great time to be a startup in the Philippines, and everyone else around the world is noticing, including Lean Startup Machine mentor and serial entrepreneur Scott Bales. He recently flew in to conduct a one-night-only workshop for local developers and founders.

Bales led the introductory Lean Startup Machine seminar that gave the more than 60 attendees a taste of the full-blown, three-day intensive workshop based on “Lean Startup,” the best-selling book for entrepreneurs authored by Eric Ries.

The event, co-organized by Smart Communications subsidiary Voyager Innovations (Voyager), focused on delivering disruptive innovations, together with community partners Freelancer.com and CBS Social Enterprise Asia.

The seminar, held at the Voyager office in Pasig City, drew marked interest from local startup founders and developers as the slots were quickly filled considering the short lead time for sign-ups.

Bales, also the founder of a number of startups, including NextBank and Moven, said the enthusiasm of local entrepreneurs about the Lean Startup Machine workshop is a testament to the budding startup ecosystem in the country.

“Unlike other Asian countries, Philippine entrepreneurs have the soft skills needed to engage the world in a better way,” he said, citing Filipinos’ English proficiency and service-oriented culture.

Lean Startup Machine conducts full-blown workshops in key Asian cities such as Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore. This is the first time the group tested the waters in the Philippines, although Bales noted that many Filipino entrepreneurs had attended their events in Singapore.

The workshop and its accompanying book, Bales said, offer a method dubbed “innovation accounting,” which outlines how founders can solve common startup problems the scientific way by using concrete data to guide them on the way to success.

“The reality is 99 percent of startup ventures fail. Experienced entrepreneurs often start with an idea, but how do they make sure it’s the right idea? Lean Startup Machine offers a framework for making scientific instead of emotional decisions on startup problems by using data to back those decisions,” Bales said.

During his talk, Bales led the attendees into creating their minimum viable experiment — not a product — which would help them gain feedback from target customers, that in turn would help them make data-backed decisions on the problems that they are trying to solve with their products.

The exercise ultimately led founders to ask the question, “Pivot or Persevere?” The former will require them to change one of the factors of their products, like the target market or the problem they are trying to solve, while the latter will entail their other riskier assumptions about their target customers.

Prior to the workshop, Bales met with the management committee of Voyager, including its president and CEO, Smart founder Orlando Vea. The subsidiary, Vea said, aims to be a “lean startup” within Smart that endeavors to solve what is now referred to as the “innovator’s dilemma” and practice “intrapreneurship.”

“When Voyager was formed early this year, we embraced the ‘lean startup’ methodology the way we understood it,” said Benjie Fernandez, chief operating officer of Voyager. “We had a steep learning curve, and we had to do a lot of experimenting. But we are glad to learn from the experts. It’s very timely, therefore, that Lean Startup Machine is currently focusing on enterprise applications.”

More than just a one-off talk, the Lean Startup Machine seminar was also intended to gauge interest among the Filipino startup community and see how many of them want to have the full-fledged 48-hour public workshop in Manila.

Headquartered in New York, Lean Startup Machine conducts regular workshops that take founders on a learning journey to absorb the theoretical and practical side of the Lean Startup methodology and take them back to their respective startups.

Because of resource limitations, the group only conducts the public workshop in cities with high interest for the module. Startup founders and developers only need to send an e-mail via the Lean Startup Machine website (www.leanstartupmachine.com) to “unlock” Manila and bring regular workshops to the Philippines.

As of the first week of October, almost 300 e-mails were logged from startups in the Philippines, which means Manila only needs 200 more e-mails to officially bring the workshop to the country.

“Helping make Lean Startup Machine available in Manila is one of Voyager’s contributions to the local technopreneur and startup community, a community which we will be heavily collaborating with in the months to come,” Fernandez said.