Over the last three years Acquia has had to make two key pivots, and half a dozen minimum viable products in it's business. In this session, Barry Jaspan will address the innovative technologies that lead to developing a platform as a service instead of another Drupal hosting solutions. He will also address how we used innovation accounting to develop a half dozen minimum viable products(MVPs) to reduce the uncertainty in our start-up. Kieran Lal will talk about our customer development techniques and how we moved through the 6 stages of a start-up to grow our business. These real world examples of lean startup techniques will address pivots, MVPs, innovation accounting, and business model types. We will show how by listening to our customers we were able to grow a sustainable business and keep our costs of acquiring customers below our lifetime total value.

Questions answered by this session:
How can you use minimal viable products to learn your customers' real needs from day 1
What are minimal viable products, pivots and the business model canvas
What is wrong with alpha and beta release mentality
What tools do lean startups use to maximize learning about their customers
How can you use the business model canvas to run any project like a lean startup and prevent the-community-that-never-was syndrom.