Announcing LMS#9 — “Getting early product development & tech execution right”
(TL;DR — fill this form to get an invite to LMS#9 on the 26th of March — an invite-only event by London Marketplace Startups, a 700-strong community of founders & makers building marketplaces)
How can marketplace startups accelerate building an MVP to validate their business model? Is it viable to develop early versions of your product with an outsourced development partner? Does this approach help non-tech founding teams navigate the early product development cycle? What about building a small tech team to lay the product foundations in-house? How difficult is it to hire and start this process? What about decisions on tech stack and toolkit? Are there cost-effective approaches that help founders take a short-cut to validating their business model?
Choosing the best approach to product development and technical execution remains one of the biggest challenges for a marketplace in its early stages.
The next event for the London Marketplace Startups community, LMS#9, brings together three members of the London founders/makers community to talk about the different angles of this debate:
When: 26 March 2019
Start: 6:30pm doors open, 7pm start to the agenda
Where: Stripe Office, The Bower, 207–211 Old Street, London EC1V 9NR
Join us: please get your invite here
Juliet Eccleston, founder & CEO of Any Good will talk about how she, as a non-tech founder, decided to use outsourced development.
Juliet is CEO and co-founder of the crowdsourced talent platform AnyGood?, a network where professionals recommend professionals for roles. After 20 years delivering large scale change programmes, Juliet’s frustration with the process for hiring talent drove her to develop an alternative. AnyGood? launched in 2017 and after proving the proposition, significant growth and expansion is planned for 2019.
Julian Keenaghan, head of engineering at Beam.org will talk about how Beam builds its product in-house and the benefits of this small team approach.
Julian is a full-stack developer and startup product lead and he has been building tech startups for over 10 years. He previously founded Tastebuds, a dating app that allows people to meet partners with similar taste in music. Julian has also been Head of Engineering and first employee at Cleo, the AI banking chatbot. Currently he is building Beam, a crowdfunding platform that helps homeless people train and get into work. Julian enjoys shipping to users quickly and often.
Michael Skelly, co-founder of Stacker, will talk about the wider implications of tech stack and toolkit choices and will discuss the options available to founders of marketplace startups.
Michael is an experienced startup CTO and entrepreneur. He previously ran several marketplace startups in fashion, cleaning and medical industries. He is currently founder of Stacker, a platform that lets non-developers build apps without code. He has masters in computing from Oxford University and Imperial College London.
We will have a bonus segment from our sponsors & location partners, Stripe, about how Stripe Connect solves payment processing for marketplaces.
We look forward to seeing you there. Please get your invite here!
