Lean Startup Machine CEO Trevor Owens wants to help with that. Today, he's launching a free product development tool called the Validation Board that help startups crystallize things like their "Riskiest Assumption," which ideas have been "Invalidated," and what constitutes a "Minimum Success Criterion."

It's already being used by Salesforce, NewsCorp, and Singularity University. Within the next couple weeks, it will also be employed by the White House Innovation Fellows, where Mr. Owens offers coaching services to budding entrepreneurs.

The Validation Board is essentially a souped-up whiteboard with sections for important stages in the testing process--all mapped out according to the Lean Startup methodology codified by Eric Ries, who developed the plan of action after carefully studying 500 startups.

Mr. Owens, a familiar face in New York startup circles, has expanded Lean Startup Machine--his workshops on launching a company--globally to 30 cities, including Shanghai and Sao Paulo. "We were testing it for about six months at our workshops," he told Betabeat by email. "We knew after our first test that it worked well in the context of a workshop but it needed to be improved so that anyone could download it and learn it on their own."

After feedback from Mr. Ries, along with experts like Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics, Tom Eisenmann from Harvard Business School, Lane Halley from Cooper Design, and John Kembel from Stanford d.school, Mr. Owens released the board, which can be printed out as a poster for $4 or used virtually via Google Docs.

The hope, Mr. Owens said, is that "by making it easier and faster for new entrepreneurs to follow through this process that took serial entrepreneurs years to figure out, we will see the accelerated rise of more innovative products and companies."

Aside from the nominal $4 fee, "We're not asking for any money," he said, adding, "but if you hockey-stick because of our Validation Board, we would love a case study," marking the first time we've heard "hockey-stick" as a verb.

There are similar tools on the market already, he noted, pointing to Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas. (Mr. Osterwalder also offered feedback on the tool's design.) "Business Model Canvas is a tool better suited for strategy than process, and isn't focused on product development like ours," Mr. Owens explained. "The barrier to adopting process-based tools is always education, which is why we have over 200 workshops planned in 2013 around the world to teach this process."

With all the data from his workshops, Mr. Owens said the Validation Board was fairly easy to develop. But be warned, this could mean you'll be hearing more of the dreaded p-word, albeit with a pedagogical bent. "The main idea was around how important it is to pivot," he said. "Pivot is the most overused word and the most underused concept. People are afraid to admit when they pivot and would rather reframe their story."

Rather, Mr. Owens emphasizes getting feedback as soon as possible. "One of our goals was to be able to get a team outside of the building and talking to customers as fast as possible. I can usually coach a team through the process in ten minutes to get all of the assumptions out and leave the building."

If it sounds too easy to be true, perhaps Mr. Owens students can attest to its practicality. We noticed Union Square Ventures analyst Brian Watson pop up in the Validation Board's promotional video. "He was at the same workshop as Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal when they had the idea for Branch," Mr. Owens noted proudly.

If you want to try out the product but don't yet have a billion dollar idea to vet, you could test it out in our personal life. "This is random, but we've even seen people use the VBoard for stock trading and their dating life," offered Mr. Owens. "If you think about it, almost anything can be put in the frame of a 'product.'"

Let's not make product the next p-word, shall we?

(Photo: AlleyNYC)

On a muggy evening earlier this week, Betabeat made the short, sweaty walk down to AlleyNYC, a new 16,000 square foot coworking space at 500 Seventh Avenue and 37th Street. We had some inkling we might be onto the next big coworking hub when an entrepreneur on the elevator ride up to the 17th floor said he felt obligated to drop by because he heard about the space twice in one week.

Even after hours, the place was still humming with activity. The mats in the yoga room were unoccupied, but members milled about the lounge, worked heads down in one of the spacious main rooms or huddled with cofounders in the 24 private offices, which are already at capacity even though the space just opened in August. A new platform for entrepreneurs called SocialChange.is was setting up a demo and with bowls of pretzels and other snacks laid out for the event.

The vibe was remarkably congenial; high-fives, daps, and backslaps abounded.

AlleyNYC was cofounded by Jason Saltzman and Jonathan Ende, the entrepreneurs behind Bizodo, a paperwork automation startup currently being incubated at Entrepreneurs Roundtable, a stone's throw away. AlleyNYC just signed a seven-year lease on the office space, financed primarily by investor David Galanter, a real estate lawyer who also backs Bizodo.

Mr. Saltzman

For the next couple months or so, AlleyNYC is partnering with the popular global workshop series Lean Startup Machine, one of the hub's anchor tenants, to offer $1 million in free coworking space and Lean Startup classes through a partnership called M-RGE. Betabeat was a little dubious of $1 million claim, but Lean Startup guru Trevor Owens sent us the calculations, based on a market rate of $500/month for a shared desk--AlleyNYC only charges $300/desk and $1,500/private office, no equity required--and the math checks out.

The offer, which extends through September or longer (depending on AlleyNYC’s ability to secure a sponsor) should cover about 500 to hackers, designers, and other startup types, who have to go through a quick vetting process to make sure their idea is a good fit and that the applicants are actually working on a real project.

AlleyNYC has already hosted a number of events and hackathons, like last weekend's Ecommerce Hack Day, sponsored by Etsy and Dwolla. It's home to startups like Brainscape and Socratic Labs. Founder Collective's Micah Rosenbloom has an office there and Mr. Saltzman is in talks with DFJ Gotham to hold office hours. AlleyNYC was formerly associated with the Hatchery, which has since moved out due to a difference in ethos.

When we arrived at AlleyNYC, Mr. Saltzman's palpable enthusiasm was infectious. He greeted us in a black fitted Yankees cap and an endearing Long Island accent. He got the idea for AlleyNYC when he went to pitch events at some of the other coworking spaces in New York and found the vibe clubby and pretentious. Mr. Saltzman, who used to be in real estate, had just returned to his native New York after heading down to Miami after the crash. The serial entrepreneur was "sick of dating aspiring cocktail waitresses," had experience and tried to find a place in burgeoning tech scene.

"I feel like it was very cliquey," he told Betabeat as we sat down in his office. The heating pole was covered with pink Post-Its listing points he wanted to emphasize, like how much building a community around this space has given him a sense of purpose. "I feel like I'm a very approachable person, but I felt like I had to already be successful to be talking to these entrepreneurs. I've had many businesses that made money, it's just that my name wasn't in TechCrunch or Mashable, so 'Who am I?' You know what I mean?" We did.

He wanted to offer something different, working with Mr. Owens, using the Lean Startup method, naturally, to hone the idea behind M-RGE. "We're trying to create a really good friendship vibe," Mr. Owens told Betabeat. "Authenticity around people not caring who your investors are, but who you are."

Mr. Saltzman, not one to put on airs, categorized it more bluntly. "Jason Saltzman's phrase in the AlleyNYC is, 'Leave the douchebag at the door,'" he said, referring to himself in the third person with a laugh.

Through Lean Startup's VP of design, Grace Ng, M-RGE is also trying to target some of the designers from nearby advertising agencies. Ms. Ng comes from an agency background. "I still know a lot of designers locked up in agencies where they're not too happy with what they're doing," she told Betabeat. Coming to AlleyNYC might help them collaborate with programmers. "They have beautiful design aesthetics, but they can only mock up web design, they don't understand any front end of any programming languages."

The centrally-located Midtown location is part of cultivating an environment of inclusiveness, with its proximity to Penn Station and Grand Central.

"Bridge and tunnel has a negative connotation," Mr. Saltzman explained. "But there are amazing people from Long Island and New Jersey and we want all of them to come here. They're frowned upon by the poshy New York City tech community. And we're not that, and we're still fucking awesome," adding, "And you can write 'fucking.'" 

(Photo: AlleyNYC)

Columbus Circle as seen from CityMaps

WICKA WICKA. Turntable.fm is in the big leagues now as the young music based social platform signs deals with Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner, TechCrunch reports. Turntable has over one million users now and a new mobile app since September.

HIPSTARTER. San Francisco based Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform with offices in Soho that competes with Kickstarter, announced the perfection of their "gogofactor," a proprietary algorithm that ranks projects based on popularity and viability. This makes Indiegogo the only crowdfunding platform with this type of merit-based ranking functionality. Your move, Kickstarter.

TAP TAP WHO'S THERE? After wandering around like a lost child in the woods for a bit, Taap.it is back with a newly stated purpose and redone app. Taap.it, originally touted as a hyper-local, mobile-first version of Craigslist, has Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare integration to bring users information about local events and businesses. Users can also follow friends, hunt for deals, make wish lists and compete in weekly contests.

MONEY. Knodes, the company on a mission to make social network data accessible and meaningful, just announced a $250 thousand Knodes Fund for the "best products, websites and applications built on the Knodes platform." Companies who want a chunk of that change should apply here beginning May 1.

SCHOOL OF TECH. General Electric teamed up with Skillshare and debuted their new "GE Works" campaign last week at SXSW. The "GE Garages," which look more like train cars or truck trailers sans wheels, invited participants to make an iPhone case, play with a laser cutter, cold saw and 3D printer. Sexy stuff. Excuse us while we wipe the steam from our glasses. The garages will be appearing in Houston Cincinnati and San Francisco soon.

SEARCH DOJO. Q-Sensei, a German-American "multi-dimensional" search engine that organizes data sets based on various descriptions, correlations and metadata simultaneously, is laying down offices in Downtown Brooklyn. The startup, which raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2009, serves enterprise clients that need to search the oodles of data on the Internet, in private networks, on private computers and hand-held devices. Q-Sensei also has an API that lets businesses to build their own search apps.

JETSET. Wanderfly, a site for sharing and finding travel recommendations, just went live with a refreshed site and already won best design at last week's LAUNCH in San Francisco. We must admit, it looks good.

THERE'S A MAP FOR THAT. CityMaps just re-emerged from its NYC beta cocoon and went live in San Francisco and Austin for the first time. The maps sort of look like the "clients" page of a big name ad shop but despite the harsh logo-on-white scheme, the site has a ton of useful features such as Foursquare integration with tips, photos and check-ins, integration with daily deal sites and tweets from businesses—like a digital sidewalk sandwich board. A brand new iPhone app rounds out CityMaps' big changes.

WORK IT! OMGPOP needs a mobile QA tester to test mobile games and log bugs. Every boy's dream. Apply here. ZocDoc wants a software engineer and Table Tennisseur with OOP language experience who is driven by an "unknown force to change healthcare for the better." Applications go right here. Lean Startup Machine is looking for a workshop coordinator, web engineer and a "sales or sponsorship hacker." Find job descriptions and apply here.

Mr. Owens in action.

This is a guest post by Trevor Owens, founder and CEO of  the Lean Startup Machine, a three-day workshop on Lean Startup methodologies. Mr. Owens has also been a guest speaker at Princeton, Columbia, Fordham, and New York University.

The implications of the Lean Startup movement have been significant for entrepreneurs all over the world. At long last, founders are spending less time building products in isolation, and more time embracing their customers. Validating assumptions early and methodically has allowed entrepreneurs to fail fast, turning startup failure into a scientific process that ultimately leads to success. This movement, however, may have even bigger implications in store for established companies. Lean Startup isn't about being cheap, but about being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.”

Can Corporations Be Startups Too?

Applying Lean Startup to corporations remains contentious. But of the 1,000+ LSM workshop attendees trained to date, a significant portion consistently includes corporate intrapreneurs. These are the people that drive innovation from inside the enterprise, whether through an explicit product development and R&D role, or through their personal influence within the organization regardless of their title.

Intrapreneurs are a precious commodity to companies that know how to turn innovation into profits. Keeping them from going out “on their own” does not simply imply better compensation, but requires a corporate culture of innovation, with the leadership setting the example. Given the right culture, intrapreneurs gladly share much of the returns (and risks) of their innovation work with their employer. With thousands more attendees to go through LSM internationally before this year ends, the message is clear: corporations want to try Lean Startup on for size.

Lean Startup Machine Goes Corporate

Two weeks ago, LSM hosted its first on-site corporate workshop in partnership with The Library Corporation (TLC), which provides software that runs more than 2,500 libraries around the world, including the public libraries of Los Angeles and Chicago, the National Library of Singapore, and school districts in Dallas, Atlanta, and Nashville.
TLC had sent several employees to the LSM weekend in New York. "Based on the feedback, we realized that this was something we wanted our whole product team eventually to experience,”  said Simon Marcus, TLC’s COO.

Mr. Marcus and his counterpart, CTO Jabe Bloom, spent the last five years optimizing the company’s software development and customer support operations. But beyond operations, they invested their energy heavily into creating a culture that rewards talent, initiative, and cooperation. They now see disruptive innovation as the 38-year-old company’s natural next step in its evolution.

TLC then reached out to LSM to ask for an on-site workshop for its 40-person product group.

So, How Did It Go?

To maximize the use of LSM team’s time, Mr. Marcus and Mr. Bloom conducted the initial idea pitches and team selection prior to the workshop.

The evening before the workshop, Lean Startup Machine’s four-person leadership team headed down to West Virginia with a quick stop in D.C. In keeping with the Lean Startup methodology, it was critical for the four of us to get first-hand experience with our first corporate customer. It was as much about ensuring top quality of what we delivered to them as it was about getting as much learning out of the experience as possible for ourselves to iterate on our own “corporate workshop” product.

This corporate on-site was planned to take place not entirely on TLC’s Inwood, WV, site. The LSM team rolled out of their beds at Inwood’s best Hampton Inn at 6 a.m., put on our signature yellow “GET OUT OF THE BUILDING” tees under otherwise business-casual blazers, and took a short drive through town to TLC’s wooded campus, where a charter bus was waiting.

The first day of the workshop started with a two-hour ride from TLC’s offices to Washington, DC, during which TLC employees immediately started working on their initial minimum viable product ideas. The LSM team wobbled up and down the middle isle, meeting and mentoring the TLC team throughout the bus ride.

The rest of the workshop was similar to the usual LSM’s experience. The difficulty of getting out of the building and talking to customers, the disappointment of learning that the idea you thought was great likely had no market potential, and the tension within teams as they had to align on their next pivot, were as exhausting and rewarding within corporate walls as they were at the public workshops.

Interestingly, the open organizational culture that TLC had created held the teams back when they ran into a highly structured and constrained mode of a startup. While the TLC team was certainly disciplined, being forced into almost impossible deadlines and an imposed learning curve was clearly somewhat of a shock. This highlighted the potential difficulties with creating a culture of innovation in corporate environments that are otherwise employee-driven.

What helped was the clear process and methodology that LSM delivered to TLC. Down to the type of sticky notes, using all caps and black markers, and staying strictly inside the lines (literally) on the Validated Learning Canvas, the learning process that had been validated in LSM’s public workshops got the corporate teams through the two days.

“No one would argue that the U.S. Marines don’t take extreme risk and innovate on the fly, but they do that within a highly rigorous, disciplined framework that protects them from obvious mistakes and supports them in complex evolving environments," Mr. Bloom said.

Startups demand a high emotional cost from their co-founders, and corporations tend, rightfully, to focus on their employees' well-being. Perhaps more than for the typical entrepreneur, the LSM experience was a true bootcamp for the corporate innovator.

LSM workshops are consistently populated by corporate executives, senior software developers, and project managers, who see learning Lean Startup as an investment into their own careers and their companies’ futures. To avoid the risks illustrated in The Innovator’s Dilemma, companies desire to diversify by investing in new product creation.

Today marks the first day of Lean Startup Machine, the weekend hackathon, taking place at the SAIF Innovation Center in Lahore, Pakistan. "It is so exciting to see a buzz of activity around Startups and entrepreneurial ventures. It’s just what needed to happen in Pakistan," writes an excited Pakistani entrepreneur on her blog.

Pitches will take place at 6 p.m., teams will form at 7:30, and the real work starts at 9 p.m. Hashtag #LSMPakistan. LSM's Trevor Owens will be liveblogging the event. "We have a crazy amount of startup founders signed-up for the event," he writes. We'll be following along, as this reporter is curious as to whether Pakistanis eat pizza at their hackathons.

Eric Ries providing pointers

“There is no point in building a mousetrap, if there aren’t any fucking mice around,” said Patrick Vlaskovits, leaning his back against the wall in the kitchen of General Assembly. The broad shouldered Californian was in town for the weekend as an advisor to the aspiring entrepreneurs participating in Lean Startup Machine, a 48  hour event where 12 teams conceived, built and tested a business. “A lot of engineers are great at building things, but not at finding out what customers really want.”

Welcome to the human side of debugging a business. In some ways the weekend resembled the numerous events put on locally by companies like Foursquare and Etsy. But instead of just hunkering down at their keyboards, the aspiring entrepreneurs staked out coffee shops and blasted their social media streams to connect with potential customers and uncover flaws in the marketing and direction of their new born product.

“You get that same adrenaline rush as a hackathon, rallying with a team and trying to create something in such a short period of time," said Obie Fernandez, who just sold his web design and development business, Hashrocket, to move to New York and launch a startup. "But instead of focusing on coding, tacking on features and accessing APIs you're doing what engineers hate, which is engaging with real people and trying to find the ways in which the company might succeed or fail."

Teams of four and five were spread around the General Assembly, some on the long tables, others sprawled out prone on couches. One was tucked into a closet. “You guys are working on travel stuff right?” asked Giff Constable, another LSMNY advisor. “My mother in law is on the line, she’s a flight attendant in Australia. Who wants some feedback.”

The Lean Startup methodology is the brainchild of Eric Ries, who has parlayed his success as a blogger on startups into a position as a book author, startup guru and entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard. The focus on stripped down companies that don't raise big venture funding and put a premium on market research is attracting a lot of attention in the press. With the boom in seed funding for tech companies in New York, it's an interesting time to be preaching a reliance on less capital and a focus on scientific testing as opposed to passion and perseverance.

"We have both lived through the ups and downs of the tech world of last decade.  We know a downturn will come in the next few years" wrote Hunch founder and angel investor Chris Dixon, a long time reader who met Ries for the first time this week. The Lean Startup approach, Dixon believes, will help startups prepare for when the party comes to an end.

Ries is the co-founder of IMVU, which bills itself as the “World’s Largest 3D Chat and Dress-Up Community” and was the proving ground for his philosophy. The company threw away 40,000 lines of code when they trashed their first product, not because it wasn't working, but because it became clear to Reis that customers were really interested in something else. "Visions are not created, they are discovered," he told the bleary eyed teams  at General Assembly putting the finishing touches on their second or third pivot.

The last Lean Startup Machine held in New York was open to all comers and cost just $50 to enter. This time around participants had to apply and pony up $250 for a chance to spend the weekend immersing themselves in the LSM philosophy. Hyper-connector Trevor Owens helped to organize the local chapter of LSM and guide teams over the 48 hour marathon build.

“For me it’s about getting outside the bubble,” said Daniel Loreto, a former senior engineer at Google, who worked on search and data extraction. “A lot of what happens at Google is about grinding out the technology to make it a little better. You can see a product like Google Wave would have benefited a lot from more user engagement and feedback before it launched.”

There is an evangelical tone to the reaction from some participants, especially the younger aspirants.“I have no reservations in declaring that this weekend was a life changing event,” said Ben Solari, a junior at UConn majoring in finance. He’s decided to stop focusing on building a career on Wall Street, after some customer development exercises taught he wasn’t alone in feeling like finance was a manipulative art. “I can address that issue as soon as possible by "pivoting" and working my ass off to do what I love and that is to be involved in a startup of some kind.”

For the more experienced attendees, there was some sadness in putting a good idea out to pasture. "We had to take old yeller out back and shoot him, twice," said Craig Lipka. Their original concept, Project Jesus, was a online platform for startup founders to practice their public speaking. When that flopped, they decided to pitch it to executives, but that market was taken. So in the final eight hours the team shifted gears and produced Lardspotting, which lets users take pictures of their meals and crowd source the calorie count. Gives a whole new meaning to Lean Startup Machine.

In the machine.

Lean Startup Machine teams are on their marks for the biggest iteration of the event yet. This time, LSM eschewed the "first-come, first-served" policy and asked for an application in addition to the $250 fee. About 130 people applied; they accepted 50 and "ended up overselling to 70 people, and had people still fighting to get off the wait list," organizer Trevor Owens said.

LSM is a 48-hour conference where entrepreneurs and coders form teams, build and pitch products in a weekend. The conference attracts people from all over the world, but it's about 80 percent New Yorkers, Mr. Owens said.

The event takes place at General Assembly, starting with pizza at 6 p.m. on Friday and pitches at 8:30 p.m. Mentors coming in this weekend will include Steve Cheney, business development at GroupMe; Emily Hickey, marketing officer at Hashable; Kyle Bragger, founder of Forrst; Brandon Diamond of NYHacker; Jason Baptiste, co-founder at OnSwipe and Ben Fisher, co-founder of LSM and about ten others.

The participants are "not the normal scene," Mr. Owens said. "It's a lot of people we know but the vast majority are people that are currently maybe employed somewhere in the tech community and maybe are making that jump to entrepreneurship. It's not people you would normally see on the scene."

So it's not the hackathon tourists, you know like those same people who go to all the hackathons? Betabeat asked.

"It's tough to compare it to a hackathon," Mr. Owens said. "There's not as much programming. We call it a customer development-athon. A cus-dev-athon."

That's terrible, Betabeat said, and suggested start-upathon.

"Learnathon?"

Leanathon?

"I don't even know. There's not really a good word for it," he said.

But for ad agency suits looking to spot the best emerging trends, SXSW can be a nightmare week of late night parties and missed opportunities.

Enter Ben Fisher, the man behind programs likeLean Startup Machine and Adopt-a-Hacker. He's headed to SXSW, and eager to play fixer for corporate types.

"My blend of creative and technical expertise is perfect for an ad agency interested in what—and who—is relevant to their business at SXSW. I also graduated from college recently enough to still take good notes ... and hold my liquor. Heck, I'll even bring you back a shirt."

Fisher is prepared to offer:

• Intros to the hottest startups and technologists relevant to your company
• Comprehensive review of relevant SXSW startups and techs, and analysis of how they relate to you
• Consultation before SXSW to discuss your company and any specific areas of tech interest and more

Given that SXSW was the launching pad for billion-dollar companies like Twitter, it could easily pay to be in the know about the breakout stars of this year's fest.

"The dead-ends of SXSW are numerous but easy enough to circumvent with a strong technical and creative background and a calibrated bullshit meter," writes Fisher. "I just WD-40'd mine; I'll loan it to you."

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper