The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Author: Eric Ries
Publisher: Crown Business
Published Date: September 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0307887894
The Lean Startup is a comprehensive guide to building a successful startup using lean principles. In this book, Eric Ries presents a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in an age when companies have to innovate more than ever. Ries provides a method for developing and testing new products and services, based on validated learning, rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.
Key Takeaways
- Validated Learning: The process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects.
- Build-Measure-Learn: The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere.
- Innovation Accounting: A way of measuring progress when all the metrics typically used in an established company (revenue, customers, ROI, etc.) are effectively zero.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP): A version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
- Pivot: A structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.
Our Verdict
The Lean Startup is a must-read for anyone looking to start a new business or improve an existing one. Its principles are widely applicable across industries and can help entrepreneurs and innovators build products that customers want, efficiently and effectively. Eric Ries’s approach is practical and actionable, making it a valuable resource for startups and established companies alike.