You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other, way around.
—Steve Jobs
The Reverse Startup is a new process for learning how to create a startup. Instead of getting bogged down with the typical startup process—writing a business plan, applying for trademark or patent protection, figuring out funding, etc., the Reverse Startup process is to start with the vision of the product or service and work backwards from there.
The Reverse Startup uses proven startup techniques such as rapid prototyping, tight feedback loops with potential customers and agile development to get up and running quickly. Why does this make sense? Because a startup isn't a smaller version of an existing business; a startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.1 With the Reverse Starup, the search for the business model is done as a community.
In a nutshell, the process looks like this: Idea --> Build/Learn/Develop (repeat as needed) --> Present --> Launch --> Change the World.
In addition, the Reverse Startup is also a not-for-profit organization that supports a community that's interested in learning how to create a startup from scratch. All work produced under the Reverse Startup meetups, message boards and select correspondence is conducted under the Open Software License (OSL 3.0). Work, source code and materials produced at each meetup will be made publicly available for the world to see and use freely.
Footnotes
-
The Startup Owner's Manual, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf ↩