On today’s episode we’re going to talk about the value of thinking small. Recently we had a session at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco, and it turned out to be a rather intimate affair. We don’t mind small crowds, but there are businesses out there who would find a small turn out (less than 15 people) distressing.

During this episode we’re going to tell you why having small projects that don’t have this massive audience can actually be a good thing. We tell you how starting small is a good way to connect with your audience. Always be prepared for the massive media success, but when it isn’t there is a cool dynamic change that can make the event special. Our event in San Francisco, may have been small, but it opened up new opportunities for questions most people wouldn’t ask at a larger event. That small event had big value.

Today’s points:

Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli Efti: Hi everyone, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat we’re gonna talk about the value of thinking small. Maybe ways to do things in your business that don’t always scale or have massive reach or impact, and what the value of that is now, and how to think about that in a world where everybody’s just pointing into how do you scale? How do you grow? How do you do things that are impacting as many people as possible? How do you automate things and all that stuff? And the reason why we’re even considering to explore this question is that yesterday we were invited to give – to do a Q & A session of the Startup Chat at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco and it kinda went down in very unexpected ways. Right, Hiten?

Hiten Shah: Yeah, absolutely. We had room for about 40 people and we got there – Steli was about five minutes late because of traffic and Uber and all that stuff from South Bay. I was about right on time after finding some parking and I walked in the room – the elevator was full. There was like five, six people. I didn’t know what to expect of how many people were gonna be there. I had a feeling there weren’t going to be as many just from the vibe that I got. But, then I walked in and we literally had less than about 15 people in the room. And yeah, we – Steli and I have no problem with that. We roll with it.

One thing we said actually before we started was like, if it was just the two of us, that’s great. We would’ve turned on the recorder and just went for it and it would’ve been fine. But, there were 15 people in the room and we actually decided not to record it and had a – I think Steli, you used this word when you were describing it to your family. But, it was the word intimate and it was a very intimate sort of experience. And we didn’t record it unfortunately – or fortunately and we got into a lot of interesting topics that we’re not gonna share just because it was very intimate and t...