I’ve been focused on the care and feeding of young businesses for over three years now. It’s my passion. It’s what compels me to run Terralien. It’s what got me interested in the ideas behind Spreedly. It’s one of the skills I’m most excited about passing onto each of my children. It’s something that I’m on a never-ending quest to get better at.

So when an idea comes along that has the potential to make more young businesses successful, I get really excited about it. Sometimes so excited that I have to do something to promulgate it right away. When I ran across the growing Lean Startup meme last week, it intersected with my passion so powerfully that I spent most of the weekend building the Lean Startup Primer.

Now, my interest in Lean Startup concepts didn’t begin last week: I’ve been applying some lean principles for years, mostly under the auspices of Getting Real, and have further been studying lean manufacturing concepts for months seeking ways to help Terralien deliver better value for our clients. As a matter of fact, just this past Tuesday I had a discussion before the Agile RTP meeting about wanting to put on a course about lean principles and how they apply to young software businesses. But I was missing Customer Development, Steve Blank’s excellent methodology for finding out what the market really wants before spending time building the wrong thing.

With a (more) complete picture of how to apply lean principles to formational businesses, I knew it was time to get real and actually teach the material, and thus the Lean Startup Primer was born. The goal is not to teach you everything there is to know about Lean Startups (the mind boggles), but rather to give you an overview of the powerful principles involved and a jumping off point from which to learn more. With a very small class size (12 people max) and hosted at the wonderful Carrboro Creative Coworking, it should be a fantastic experience. If it goes at all well there will be additional events, though the price will go up after this inaugural session.

I’m really, really excited about the Lean Startup Primer, and I hope to see you in Carrboro on June 17th: sign up now!

Posted by Nathaniel on Jun 8th, 2009

You can still contact Nathaniel at nathaniel@terralien.com