The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The Lean Startup

How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

2011 • 320 pages

Ratings137

Average rating4

15

Just like most business/self-help books, I get bored of the name-dropping and the long-drawn-out points. Make your point, back it up, move on.

1. Learn to adapt quickly
Start ups are difficult and you can't fully depend on traditional methods always to steer you where you want to go. Chaos–the “just do it”–mentality doesn't work either. Learn to fail, analyze, and implement changes quickly.
From Herve's review: “The main and most convincing lesson from Ries is that because start-ups face a lot of uncertainty, they should test, experiment, learn from the right or wrong hypotheses as early and as often as possible. They should use actionable metrics, split-test experiments, innovation accounting. He is also a big fan of Toyota lean manufacturing.”

From Andy's review:
2. Put out a ‘MVP'. As fast as possible, put out a ‘minimum viable product' and see if anyone is willing to buy it. If you spend forever making the product the best it could possibly be, you may end up with a cool product that no one actually wants or is willing to pay for. Throw the product out there, then improve it bit by bit.

3. Avoid ‘vanity metrics.' Anyone can generate hype and a short-lived interest in just about any product. Real, sustainable success is driven not by hype but by discovering something that people actually want or need, offering it to them, and then continually innovating the product based on a greater understanding of what people want/need.

4. Be lean. Learn from Toyota's manufacturing and respond quickly to customer feedback to provide monthly, weekly, or even daily iterations of your product. Again: don't build it and expect people to come—especially if you're only going to build once a year. Constantly iterate.

Quotes:

“it's the boring stuff that matters most.”

“Remember if we're building something that nobody wants, it doesn't much matter if we're doing it on time and on budget.”

“Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.”

July 31, 2023