Lean Startup Machine NYC: RoundTable Wins!

Well I’m back in LA and it’s still a very surreal feeling, working for over 48 hours almost non-stop is insane, and the amount we were able to accomplish even crazier. I’ll be posting a lot more about what I learned, what we built, and what we’re doing next, however I wanted to make sure to do a full post on the winning team Roundtable.

winning_teamLean Startup Machine is part Lean Startup MBA, part networking even, part competition, and plenty of bootcamp. We all go through an unbelievably rigorous process and really get to experience the lean startup principles first-hand and in practice. At the end of the event we give presentations which are then voted on by a panel of judges.

The winners are the team that the judges feel did the best job of going through the lean startup process. At Lean Startup Machine NYC Roundtable was the winner and it was very well-deserved. I wanted to quickly cover some of the things they did that really exemplified the lean process they followed:

  • The team came-up with an idea they thought was great, created assumptions, then went to test the assumptions with customers
  • It turned-out their initial assumptions were wrong so they came-up with a new idea, new assumptions, and tested again
  • Once again the assumptions were invalidated but they kept on coming-up with great ideas until they came-upon Roundtable
  • This wasn’t just the evolution of their original idea, no they had to kill their original idea and come-up with something completely new
  • Roundtable is an absolutely brilliant idea for how people can turn Twitter conversations into direct chat’s
  • After coming-up with the idea they came-up with assumptions, validated those assumptions and found real customers that wanted to use the service
  • You can see a live demo of how this would work here – Roundtable Screencast

Not only did this team do a great job of coming-up with ideas and testing their assumptions with real customers, they stayed positive and engaged, and in the end created a real innovation. You can follow them on Twitter at twitter.com/joinaroundtable and I’m sure there will be lots of exciting updates as this idea becomes a reality.

I’d like to give a huge congratulations to Team Roundtable for winning Lean Startup Machine NYC and I can’t wait to follow the progress and evolution of Roundtable going forward!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton