Here’s my “Startup” column from the June 2015 issue of Christian Computing magazine.

Over the past few months, I’ve introduced the concept of a “startup” and we’ve discussed why the church should really care about startups.  We’ve developed this definition for our discussion: A startup is a new venture working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is not guaranteed. We learned that the Lean Startup methodology introduces the scientific method into the new venture process, with multiple hypothesis-test-observe-refine iterations, and we discussed how we can implement this in our ministries (and our businesses).  This month, I want to talk about the person doing this – what does it mean to be a Christian Entrepreneur?

What is an Entrepreneur?

In my previous articles, I’ve used the phrase “startup” quite a bit and we even developed a good working definition that can be used whether starting a new venture in business or in ministry, but we haven’t used the word “entrepreneur.”  What does that big word mean, and how does it apply to what we’ve been talking about?

According to Merriam-Webster.com, an entrepreneur is “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money.”  In other words, an entrepreneur is a person who starts a startup.  Of course, the definition that Merriam-Webster uses works great if you’re starting a for-profit business, but just as we had to modify our definition of “startup” to encompass ministry startups as well as business ones, I think it’s worthwhile to do the same for “entrepreneur.”  I propose that we broaden the definition to say “an entrepreneur is a person who starts a new venture and is willing to risk a loss in order to achieve the objective.”

What is a “Christian” entrepreneur?

Hopefully you can get a sense from that definition of an entrepreneur of how we might be “all in” when we’re pursuing the cause of Christ, but I think it’s helpful for us to explicitly think about what might be different about a Christian entrepreneur in contrast to an unbelieving entrepreneur, whether we’re involved in ministry or business.

Some would argue that the word Christian works much better as a noun than as an adjective, and I agree there’s some wisdom in that claim.  If you’re in that camp, then I think it helps if we start by thinking about the term “Christian entrepreneur” as if there were a comma between the two words, so for example I might say: “I want to be a Christian, entrepreneur” – I want to be successful in my calling as a Christian and in my calling as an entrepreneur.

I’m going to look very briefly at what it means to be a Christian, and when I’m done, I’m hoping that you’ll see and believe that the comma we’ve temporarily inserted there can’t act like a brick wall separating how we act as a Christian from how we act as an entrepreneur.  No, in reality, what the comma should be is more like a lens, applying what it means for us to be a Christian on what it means to be an entrepreneur.  I say that now, even though you may not yet agree with me, so that as you read what follows, you’ll have in mind both what it means to be a Christian independent of anything else in our lives and how being a Christian might impact the way in which we act as an entrepreneur.

So, what does it mean to be a Christian?  God has given us the Bible to answer that question.  The entire book speaks to that topic, but especially the New Testament Epistles teach us how to live as redeemed believers in Christ living in a fallen world.  

As a very simple example, I’d like to briefly look at three verses from Colossians: “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.  And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (Colossians 3:15-17). 

I think a very simple summary of these three verses is that we are commanded to do three things.  

First, we are commanded to “let the peace of God rule in your hearts” – in other words, the peace of God, which comes through the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, to those who believe in His name, is to rule in us.  When the unruly passions (described earlier in Colossians 3) rise up in our lives, we are to put them off and put on the love of Christ, living our lives in a way that demonstrates the peace that we have through repentance and reconciliation with God.  In other words, the way we live our lives should be different from how the lost around us live their lives, and I believe the way we operate our businesses will also be different.

Second, we are commanded to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” – in other words the Word of God is to live in us, as a master over our lives.  We must spend time in the Bible and seek the wisdom of God from Biblical teaching, Godly counsel, and even being encouraged in the Biblical truths reflected in hymns and spiritual songs.  Although this commandment comes second in the list, it is a prerequisite for the first commandment, as God’s Word informs us in how the peace of God should rule in our lives.  As Christians, all of our decisions in life (and in our business) must be approached prayerfully and seeking the wisdom and will of God as revealed in His Word.

Third, we are to let the name of the Lord Jesus be glorified in all that we do.  We must be thankful for God’s grace and blessings in our lives (and our businesses), acknowledging that He is the source of all good things, and desiring to please Him, to glorify Him, and to proclaim Him to the lost world around us.  As a Christian, our driving motivation is different from the world’s.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to operate a profitable business, but we can’t let our desire for profits rule how we run our business.  Instead, we must seek to glorify God in all that we do, including in operating our businesses with excellence.

With that as a foundation, I propose this definition: A Christian Entrepreneur is a person, driven to glorify God in all he does, and ruled by the Word of God, who starts a new venture and is willing to risk a loss in order to achieve the success of the venture.

Here’s my “Startup” column for the May 2015 issue of Christian Computing magazine.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve introduced the concept of a “startup” and we’ve discussed why the church should really care about startups.  As you’ll recall, we’ve developed this definition for our discussion: A startup is a new venture working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is not guaranteed. Last month we learned that the Lean Startup methodology introduces the scientific method into the new venture process, with multiple hypothesis-test-observe-refine iterations.  But how can we implement this in our ministries (and our businesses)?  What does it look like in practice?

The Business Model Canvas

For startup businesses, the Business Model Canvas has become the foundational tool for building a Lean startup.  Strategyzer.com developed the canvas and makes it freely available for anyone’s use.  The Canvas replaces the traditional 100 page business plan with a one page summary of how the business will work.  In the center of the canvas is the Value Proposition.  The right half of the Canvas is about the target markets, channels to reach those markets, relationships to deliver the value proposition to customers, and the resulting revenue.  The left half of the Canvas is about the key partnerships, resources, activities and resulting costs of running the business.  In each of these 9 boxes, you would spell out your hypotheses.  What do you think the value proposition is?  Who do you think the target market is?  What do you think are the key resources?  Who do you think will be key partners?  In the Lean methodology, the key then becomes testing all of those hypotheses, continuing to refine the business model until you have something that will really work – delivering real value to specific target customers in a way that is financially sustainable.

Steve Blank is one of the best teachers on the Lean Startup methodology.  He has created a series of videos for the Kauffman Foundation that provide an excellent introduction, explaining these different components of the business model and how to test hypotheses.  The videos can be found online at http://www.entrepreneurship.org/Founders-School/Startups.aspx.  One of Steve’s students at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Reis, has written an introductory book on the topic, simply titled The Lean Startup. If you like having a book to guide you through the process and as an ongoing reference, I highly recommend this volume.

The LEAN Startup Machine Validation Board

While the Business Model Canvas is a great tool for startup businesses, it likely is a poor fit for startup churches, ministries, and programs.  We care about loving and serving others to the glory of God rather than being focused on revenue and profits.  A much more streamlined tool has been developed by LEAN Startup Machine, an organization that holds 3 day workshops around the world to help entrepreneurs quickly launch new startups.  The initial version of their tool was called the Validation Board and it can be found at https://www.leanstartupmachine.com/validationboard/.  The company has developed a new version called the Experiment Board, but for our purposes I prefer the simplicity of the Validation Board.

The Validation Board is designed around three key elements: the customer, the problem, and the solution.  You start with hypotheses around the customer and their problem.  Who needs to be served and what is their problem that you can address?  The problem needs to be stated in the terms they would use, not the terms that you would use looking at their situation from the outside.  For example, you might identify male college students as the people who need to be served, and from your perspective, the problem is that they aren’t coming to church.  But from their perspective, the problem might be that they have no transportation to get to church.  The problem you need to capture is the one from their perspective.

The very first thing you need to do is to recognize that you have made a number of assumptions to reach the conclusion that this group of people has this particular problem.  For example, assumptions could include that college men want to go to church, that they aren’t currently going to church, and that they don’t have their own transportation.  Once you have a good list of assumptions, you need to decide which is the riskiest assumption.  Which one, has a decent chance of being wrong, and if it’s wrong then your whole opportunity will be redefined?  For example, from the above list, I might identify the assumption that college men want to go to church is the most risky assumption.

Before you even start to consider solutions to the problem, you need to validate your highest risk assumption.  You need to develop a test and determine what criteria you will set for whether your test validates the assumption or invalidates it.  For example, you might decide that you’re going to go on campus and talk to 50 young men to see if they want to go to church and if even 5 of them do, you might determine that your assumption is valid.  (While you’re talking to them, you might as well go ahead and ask any that do want to go to church whether they are regularly attending a church service and if not, why not.  This could save you some time and trouble later.)  You may find that you were exactly right, but more likely you’ll learn that you need to redefine the definition of the “customer” (maybe it’s college-aged Christians) or that you need to redefine the problem statement (maybe campus commitments conflict with church service times).  With this new hypothesis, it’s time to test again, observe again, and continue to refine until you understand the problem well.

Once you understand the problem, you can start to consider potential solutions.  Of course, throughout this entire process, the most important test is alignment with God’s revealed will.  Prayer and time in the Word are integral to all decision making.  As Psalm 119:105 says “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”  Will solving the problem that you’ve identified honor God?  Is the solution that you’ve envisioned one that would be pleasing to Him?

Testing potential solutions in Lean fashion will involve multiple iterations with increasing levels of confirmation.  People may say that the solution will meet their needs, but are they willing to sign up (e.g. give you their e-mail address or phone number to be notified when you implement)? Do they really show up when you try a small scale version of the solution?  A video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhoducyStMw explains the complete process.

Titus 3:14 tells us “And let our people also learn to maintain good works, to meet urgent needs, that they may not be unfruitful.”  It is my hope and prayer that these articles will help you be fruitful to the glory of God.

Here’s my “Startup” column from the April 2015 issue of Christian Computing magazine.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve introduced the concept of a “startup” and we’ve discussed why the church should really care about startups.  As you’ll recall, we’ve developed this definition for our discussion: A startup is a new venture working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is not guaranteed. Starting this month, we’ll talk about the latest thinking on how to successfully launch a new startup.

The Old Model and Why It Changed

For the past dozen years, I’ve served as an executive for a large corporation.  I’ve worked with startups in various ways over those years, but my head hasn’t been completely “in the game” of entrepreneurship.  Over the past several months I’ve reimmersed myself in the startup community.  What I’ve found has been very refreshing and encouraging.

In the past, the generally accepted approach for starting a new business was to spend a few months developing a detailed business plan, raising all the funding needed to get the business off the ground, and then seeing if it worked.  One way this has been described is that startups were managed as if they were simply tiny versions of big businesses.

The general rule of thumb is that 9 out of 10 new businesses fail.  In the old model, if your business failed, you would have invested months of your time and significant amounts of money typically invested by family members, friends, and others.  This type of failure can be devastating and often makes a second attempt impossible.

This approach naturally constrained the number of new businesses that were even attempted.  Most successful small business owners continued to run their business just like big businesses and didn’t feel significant kinship with other “entrepreneurs.”  That started to change, somewhat, with the emergence of “rock star” entrepreneurs emerging from the computer revolution including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  However, it was the Internet revolution that fundamentally changed the nature of startups.

The New Model

With the emergence of the Internet, and follow-on capabilities, such as e-commerce, social networking, and cloud-based services, the upfront investment (in time and money) to launch a new business has been dramatically reduced.  Also, the Internet has ushered in new models for funding startups including Angel Investors and Crowd Funding (e.g. Kickstarter).

While I was quite aware of these changes, what I had missed was how these changes fundamentally altered how entrepreneurs launch new businesses.  I think the two most significant impacts have been the emergence of startup communities and the development of the Lean Startup methodology.

When I founded or co-founded my first two startups, I felt very much like a lone wolf.  Today, entrepreneurs are blessed with tremendous opportunities to network with other startup-minded people who help share the burden and provide encouragement along the way.  This community networking takes many forms from fairly informal meetup opportunities (like 1millioncups.com groups which meet in over 50 cities around the world), to short term opportunities to engage on new business ideas (like Startup Weekend) to extended support engagements including accelerators and incubators.  While most entrepreneurs, and therefore most startup community activities, won’t be focused on advancing the gospel, some (for example Praxis Labs) are emerging at the intersection of faith and entrepreneurism.

Seeing this level of community support for entrepreneurs has been incredibly encouraging to me, but the biggest change that I’ve noticed is in the process of launching a new business.  As I implied above, new technologies have made it easier to launch startups faster and with less upfront investment.  While this hasn’t necessarily changed the rule of thumb that 9 out of every 10 startups will fail, it does mean that startups can fail faster and less catastrophically.  It also means that many more entrepreneurs can take a shot at starting a new business, and can try and try again without crushing discouragement.

The Lean Startup methodology has emerged as the most accepted process for launching a new unproven business model.  In my simplified way of thinking about it, Lean Startup changes the model from emulating how big businesses operate to instead emulating how scientists discover and better understand the wonders of God’s creation.    In the Lean Startup methodology, the business model is viewed as a collection of hypothesis to be tested.  

While we, as founders, probably have a good basis for making a good guess at what customers want or how we can make money, it’s still a guess.  In the old model, we would take our collection of guesses (which we actually considered to be facts or truths), spend months doing as much old-fashioned research as we could to prove they were true, collect the “truths” and research into a 100-page business plan, and then try to convince investors to give us the money to implement this untested business model.  

In the Lean Startup methodology, we acknowledge each hypothesis and figure out how best to test and refine each one.  As with the scientific method, we iterate multiple times through a loop of hypothesis-test-observe-refine until we have great confidence that our hypothesis is true enough to go with.  In fact, even after we launch, we continue to test and refine to improve the business and to adapt to changes in the environment.  Testing may involve hitting the streets and talking to real customers and potential partners.  Instead of assuming what they want and need, we ask them and match that up with the value proposition we are building.  Testing may also involve launching an early prototype of the business and letting real customers use it to see if it really creates value for them in the way we imagined and to see if they really use it in the way that we thought they would.  Depending on the nature of your product, the Internet may make this easier and less expensive than you might imagine.

While this discussion has focused on business startups, I’m guessing that many readers see the old 100 page business plan approach at work in their churches and ministries, and I hope you are starting to see how the Lean Startup approach could be a better model.  Instead of spending months planning and gaining approvals and funding before you test, why don’t you start testing in small ways now?  Instead of waiting until everything is in place before you launch, why not launch a minimized version of what you’re envisioning now and see how the community starts to engage with it?

Of course, we know that “A man’s heart plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9) No matter what methodology we use, the most important thing we can do is to pray for God’s wisdom, direction, discernment, and blessing on our efforts.

With that as encouragement, I hope that this series will prove beneficial to you and that some will start to consider yourselves to be entrepreneurs who can pursue new ventures for the glory of God!

Titus 3:14 tells us “And let our people also learn to maintain good works, to meet urgent needs, that they may not be unfruitful.”  It is my hope and prayer that these articles will help you be fruitful to the glory of God.