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The Lean Startup
How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
The Lean Startup (2011) helps start-ups and tech companies develop sustainable business models. It advocates continuous rapid prototyping and focusing on customer-feedback data.
The method is based on the concepts of lean manufacturing and agile development, and its efficacy is backed up by case studies from the last few decades.
- Anyone interested in entrepreneurship and/or in starting their own company
- Anyone interested in quick product development and testing
- Founders, managers and employees in tech companies
Eric Ries is a successful entrepreneur. He co-founded IMVU, a social network that uses 3D avatars. Today he is a sought-after consultant and public speaker.
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The Lean Startup
How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
- Read in 18 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 11 key ideas
Synopsis
The Lean Startup (2011) helps start-ups and tech companies develop sustainable business models. It advocates continuous rapid prototyping and focusing on customer-feedback data.
The method is based on the concepts of lean manufacturing and agile development, and its efficacy is backed up by case studies from the last few decades.
Key idea 1 of 11
The purpose of a start-up is to find a sustainable business model.
The main goal of any start-up is to find a business model that is profitable and sustainable.
The most intricate and detailed milestone plans, the most efficient execution of those plans or even the undivided and devoted attention of the press won’t help the slightest without a sustainable business model.
If you want your company to be more than just a temporary pet project that will sooner or later dwindle and die, you must find a way to acquire customers and earn money by serving them. Say you want to build your business around online kilt-knitting instructions. Ask yourself, does anyone want these instructions? Is there any way to make money out of them? If the answer in both cases is no, find something else that people do want and will be willing to pay for.
Thus, the one and only goal for your start-up is to find a sustainable business model, one that works today and can work in the future as well. In practice, this means finding out which products your potential customers want and how to turn their desires into constant revenues.
The main responsibility of any start-up’s management should be to focus the whole company, including everything being done on a day-to-day basis, on reaching this one main goal. The faster a start-up finds its way to a sustainable business model, the likelier it is to succeed.
The purpose of a start-up is to find a sustainable business model.
Key ideas in this title
- The purpose of a start-up is to find a sustainable business model.
- Find your sustainable business model through validated learning.
- The leap-of-faith assumptions: test your value and growth hypotheses.
- Develop a minimal viable product to test your idea in the market.
- Build, measure, learn – as fast and as often as possible.
- Use split-tests to optimize your product.
- To find the right business model for your company, you usually have to pivot.
- Every start-up should initially focus on one engine of growth.
- Vanity metrics are often flattering but misleading – they won’t help you find a sustainable business model.
- Every start-up has to define its core metrics and analyze them properly.
- Final summary
