The lean startup is a method for developing businesses and products created by Eric Ries. Based on his experience on failing and successful startups, Ries claims that startups can shorten their product development cycles by adopting a combo of efficient experimentation, product releases, and validated learning. By pushing out an initial product that is not perfect but is functioning, they can reduce market risks and sidestep the need for large amounts of initial product funding. It has 3 components to it. Eric Ries related them all to driving a car. The first thing you have to do is have a destination. Before you start any journey, you must have the end destination(product) well thought out. Then, you must find the quickest path to the destination. As a startup, you must find/create your minimum viable product as quick as possible before running out of funding. The last component is to accelerate to your destination. You should be trying to hit all your goals in a short time span and gain as much attention as you can. You should be rolling out new versions of your product every week that fixes bugs and slowly adds features. Your customers don’t want all the bells and whistles yet, they want a barebones product that actually works!

How Does Follow My Vote Exemplify the Characteristics of the Lean Startup?

The team at Follow My Vote seeks to minimize the costs of production while showcasing how blockchain based voting can be the future. We don’t want to squander the money we raised from our kickstarter; therefore, we will continue to release new versions of our software as fast as we can. Our initial alpha came out recently (click here for more info) and we don’t want to slow down.

About the Author: David Brock is a marketing intern at Follow My Vote. He hopes to apply his education at Virginia Polytechnic and State Institute to help fix problems around the world.

The post The Lean Startup Method appeared first on Follow My Vote.

“The new hot ticket on the tech conference scene” – Forbes

Only the most innovative, disruptive, and scalable tech companies get accepted for the Alpha Program and thousands of companies have applied. Each Week Web Summit is selecting the most impressive early stage startups from around the world to exhibit for free. We credit our recent successes for this selection. For example we were named one of the top 25 non-financial startups in the world by Venture Radar.

Web Summit 2015 is now considered globally, as one of the most influential events in the tech industry. We will have the chance to present Follow My Vote and what will be our end-to-end verifiable online voting platform in front of thousands of investors and over 30,000 attendees. Representatives from the most well known companies and publications will also be in attendance. Some to note are Forbes, McDonald’s, The Guardian, BBC, Slack, Facebook, Tinder, and Coca-Cola.

Words cannot describe our excitement when we got this email:

Unfortunately, due to this event we will have to miss election day this year! Check out this video to see what we did:

Stay tuned for updates on our preparation for the event and be sure to check out the Web Summit 2015 website for more details.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post Follow My Vote Accepted To The Alpha Program: Make Way For Web Summit 2015 appeared first on Follow My Vote.

TechDay is an event where both startups and established businesses can debut their new tech related products and services in an effort to attract top talent and potential investors. Companies compete to showcase their exciting new products to financiers, industry leaders, and press.

This event was huge for Follow My Vote and was extremely helpful in creating more awareness for our brand and receiving genuine feedback on our latest project, the development of an online open-source voting platform. Some of the highlights of our experience include talking to advocacy consultants for state and local government relations, as well as strategy consultants. These individuals expressed interest in helping Follow My Vote navigate the complex space of voting and government regulations. We also talked with companies who support crypto-currency related technologies, such as Bitcoin, to possibly hold elections for executive positions.

DC TechDay 2014 was a crucial recruiting event, as we had several full stack developers interested in employment with Follow My Vote. Investors and financiers found our ideas and value propositions a warrant for serious follow ups. We even talked to futurists who loved talking about the possibilities of voting technologies and verification of identities. We’ll likely gain some new press coverage in the near future, as we talked to radio startups and live internet television sites.

The biggest highlight of DC TechDay 2014 was most definitely our opportunity to pitch online open-source voting to Congressman Tony Cardenas (@repCardenas), whom represents San Fernando Valley (California’s 29th District). He voiced his concerns about the security of online voting and was very excited that we are addressing this issue. We were excited to prove our knowledge of recent legislation, such as California’s Senate Bill 360, and are convinced we made quite an impression.

Check out the photos below for an idea of what the event looked like and how impressive it was!

The post Amazing Progress at DC TechDay 2014 appeared first on Follow My Vote.