The Chicago Lean Startup Challenge Finals: Four startups share the path to epiphany
This event will be an unique demonstration of the process used to take an idea, and bring it to market with a higher probability of success. Sign up for the event now!
Every entrepreneur is certain his or her journey is unique. Each travels down the startup path without a roadmap and believes that no template could possibly apply. What makes startups successful often seems like luck. But it isn’t.
Winners recognize their startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model. Those in the know recognize their model is a series of untested hypotheses, and they iteratively build, test and search for a business model. They turn unknowns into knowns by going to the source and validating their model through customer interaction. Customer Development & Lean Startup is the processes to organize the search for a business model.
For the Chicago Lean Startup Challenge, we sent 107 startup teams down this path. While many of the teams showed remarkable progress and will surely be successful if they continue to work at it, four startups had extraordinary performances that we knew must be shared with the Chicago startup community.
The four Challenge finalists will each have 10 minutes to present how they used Lean Startup and Customer Development processes to create validated learning for their business model. Each team will face 5 minutes of questions from the audience via GoSoapBox, before our distinguished judges ask a final round of questions.
Join us for the finals to learn from Cardoona, CareContent, Unbranded Designs, and UnWined as they share their experiences using the Lean Startup.
Meet the Startups:
Cardoona is an online marketplace that saves restaurants time and money by facilitating their relationship with food distributors. Restaurants can shop across vendors and place orders directly online saving them time and money. Food distributors can post their products online and increase their market share by reaching a wider audience with lower costs.
https://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/cardoona-chicago-lean-startup-challenge-2012
CareContent helps healthcare organizations engage patients online. We license a reserve of customizable web content: feature stories, patient quizzes, slide shows, current medical news articles and patient videos. Health care organizations can customize the content to promote their own clinicians and services, then publish it on their websites and in e-newsletters.
https://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/carecontent-chicago-lean-startup-challenge-2012
Unbranded Designs is a web-based furniture company that funds, manufactures and sells the most promising pieces from our community of independent designers. Our goal is to create the most innovative, unique furniture in the world while simultaneously showcasing amazing furniture designers. We are the Threadless for furniture.
https://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/unbranded-designs-chicago-lean-startup-challenge-2012
unWined provides a touch screen decision-making guide for wine and wine related products positioned at the point of decision-making. By offering consumers multi-faceted search criteria, consumer behavior data is captured and allows for targeted marketing by the stakeholders down the value chain. No longer will the wine aisles remain a point of confusion for the consumer and a missed opportunity for matching the customer with the perfect bottle of wine.
https://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/wine-shepherds-chicago-lean-startup-challenge
