Lean Startup

Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning.

Lean startups emphasizes feedback from customers and flexibility, rather than just relying on intuition and strickt planning.

The main idea of lean startups is to learn what the customer actually needs, and then iteratively engage in a building process for the service or product. One clear benefit of doing a lean startup is that the business will recover from failures and you'll have this learn-as-you-go approach.

Lean Startup Key Principles

Minimum viable product (MVP) is an early version of a product, not a finished product, perhaps more evolved than just a prototype, but just something with just enough features, so that it can be used or tested by customers or potential customers. The customer will then provide feedback which could be used to improve the product. This approach eliminates the need for doing unnecessary work. The key thing is to iterate on product versions based on the customer responses. MVP's is like business experimentation, you don't know if it will work, but you create hypotheses and seek to validate those.

In software, there's something known as continuous deployment. This means that you deploy directly, meaning, all code you write will be immediately deployed into production environment. The benefit is the reduction of cycle times.

Split testing is another central topic in lean startups. You don't know what will work best, so you do an A/B split test. You'll then experiment with the product versions between customer groups, and then observe the behavior in each group.To be performed correctly, these test must be done at the same time, and not in serial.

Actionable metrics are the metrics of a business or product that connects some spesific action that can be performed repeatedly.

Pivot is a lean startup method for developing businesses and products by changing direction. You'll be structurally testing new fundamental hypothesis for your product, business strategy and growth.

Innovation accounting is based on maintaining accountability and maximize outcomes by measuring progress, planning milestones, and prioritizing.

Build–Measure–Learn is the loop in lean startups which emphasizes customer development speed. Through a learning cycle from idea to product, customers' behavior tracking, and finally decide to dump or pivot the idea. The full cycle is as follows: 1) Ideas 2) Build 3) Product 4) Measure 5) Data 6) Learn, and then repeat (it's a cycle).

Create Customers

You won't find customers anywhere. You make them.

Customers have problems. They always do. Perhaps even problems they aren't aware of. If you can solve their problems, you might have a business. If you can profit from solving their problems, you might have a business. In addition, if you see purpose in solving those problems, you do have a business. If you want to spend more time on this business than anything else, and if you deeply enjoy working on these problems, you might have found your dream business.

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
― Peter Drucker

Startup Questions

• Does it compound?
• Does it matter?
• Do you iterate?
• Are you going in the right direction?
• Are you making opportunities?
• Are you curious? Are you questioning your beliefs?