Book of the Week: The Lean Startup
16 Jun 2014
I try to practice lean startup methodologies, but I have never read the book behind it. This week, it was time to correct that oversight by reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, an entrepreneur who has navigated through failure to success. The lean startup method takes a scientific approach to creating a successful company through validated learning. Minimum Viable Product
Personally, I was worried that the low quality of the product would tarnish my reputation as an engineer. People would think I didn’t know how to build a quality product.
The minimum viable product (MVP) is not a crappy product, but something that can test the value you are offering to the customer. Zappos started by taking photos at the local shoe store and only buying the shoes from the store if people bought the shoes online before building a warehouse. The success of startup depends on certain assumptions to be true. These need to be tested in the most efficient manner. The longer you delay in testing these assumptions the more time you waste.
Success is not delivering a failures; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem - Mark Cook, Kodak VP of Products
The worst thing that could happen is that you spend a lot of time building out a product, creating marketing materials, buying ads and find out at launch that nobody wants your product. You need to do things to find things out ahead of time before you invest time and one building. It is okay to do things that don’t scale if it will help you get learning from the MVP faster. Learning is more important than building. You don’t want to optimize and build for the wrong problem.
As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
As a technical person, it is easy to get bogged down in building a product and adding features. That is what I enjoy doing, but it does not necessarily prove the product is something that I should build. Pivot
Second, when an entrepreneur has an unclear hypothesis, it’s almost impossible to experience complete failure, and without complete failure there is usually no impetus to embark on the radical change a pivot requires.
Eric Ries is the person who popularized the notion in pivots in the startup community. One of difficult positions to be in, is when something is neither a complete failure or a runaway success. What do you do in that case? This comes from having the wrong measures of what it means to succeed and not doing conclusive tests on your hypotheses. If you look at what’s truly important, it should become clearer whether you should continue on the present course or incorporate your learnings into a pivot. Pivots aren’t necessarily bad. They are the results of your learning. Five Whys
A the root of every seemingly technical problem is a human problem.
This is probably more of an issue when you have a larger company. Keeping asking why five times until you get to the root cause of the issue. By correcting the real issues, it is easier to make progress. You need to solve the right problems to add value. Build-Measure-Learn Loop If you are a venture backed startup, your chances of success depend on how many iterations you can do before money runs out. You first build something out to test your hypotheses and measure the results and then take in those learnings to iterate on your product. As you iterate, you should be able to measure that you are succeed at what matters. This is why is important to focus on the metrics that matter, not vanity metrics that make your company look good. An entrepreneur needs to confront the truth or they will waste their time. I’d put this book pretty high on the reading list for entrepreneurs, because it will save you time, the most valuable resource of all.