Gumption!

Gumption
—noun Informal.

1. initiative; aggressiveness; resourcefulness: With his gumption he’ll make a success of himself.
2. courage; spunk; guts: It takes gumption to quit a high-paying job.
3. common sense; shrewdness.

Origin: 1710–20; orig. Scots

This is the home of Jeff Helman’s side projects — “experiments” to grow value.

A core tenet of the Lean Startup movement is to treat ideas (ranging from a full business startup to a single process improvement) like scientific experiments–with a successful outcome being defined in the context of what was learned by testing the hypotheses in each experiment.

In that sense, I have been a Lean Startup guru since before Eric Reis(1) was out of diapers. I have always jumped in–to try ideas on for size–as a way to learn.

Recent experiments and ideas:

ThinkingBudget – Yet another personal budgeting concept–because existing solutions out there require too much work.

SpendAbility – (Coming soon): Lightweight tool to “Just tell me how much I can spend.”

Reconcile Healthcare (percolating). Hypothesis: An app which gathers medical bills and insurance paperwork to let us know when we are “done” paying our share of a medical encounter.

Demonstrable  (percolating) – Hypothesis: There must be a better way–for both job seekers and hiring managers–to figure out who should get an interview.

1. Eric Reis coined the Lean Startup term and built a cottage industry around its practices–from his own startup experiences and the conceptual foundation laid by Steve Blank’s “customer development” concepts.