The Lean Startup

A great book full of anecdotes and ideas/concepts to consider while you are building the scaffolding of your startup. If you are looking for clear recipes about how to navigate the startup landscape (what to do now, next), the book by itself is not enough, but it is by not doubt the one that connects them all: the ideas of costumer development promoted by Steve Blank, its continuous interaction with agile development (with methodologies such as extreme programming or SCRUM) to improve the value proposition while finding product-market fit and the framework where hypothesis/lessons/facts about the rationale of creating/delivering/capturing value are stated, the business model canvas created by Alexander Osterwalder.

At the core of the lean methodology we find the scientific method. One of the kernel lessons is to use it to validate ideas in every step taken before, during and after the creation of the startup. In this regard, I saw lot of confusing comments about science and its relationship with the book contents. “The lean startup” is not about describing the act of creating a startup as a science (which it's not) but about how to move through a complex/uncertain process and use the scientific method (validated for centuries) to make progress: generate hypothesis, create experiments to evaluate those hypothesis, run the experiment, then redefine the hypothesis according to the new findings. Based on this idea, Eric proposes the cycle build-measure-learn as a way to explore the complex and uncertain landscape of starting a new venture. He mentions that management (understood as human systems engineering) is at the core of building a startup and that it can be implemented in such a way that reduces risk and uncertainty. He then goes to present all of the ideas of the cycle build-measure-learn and management in detail, with stories occupying a central spot in every chapter (these were after all, the most valuable lessons taken from the book).

I recommend it, specially if you think you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur and want to bring more light to your understanding of the basics of the startup life as it did for me.