Lean Startup Basics
OutcomeTest if your intuition is solid enough to build a business
around it
Test with experiments your assumptions.
Measure your progress
Make decisions based on numbers
Reduce uncertainty
What is Lean Startup?“The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup-how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere-and grow a business
with maximum acceleration.”
Origins
Origins
• Lean Manufacturing (Toyota): Systematically eliminate waste, continuously improve
• Agile Software Development: Deliver often, deliver early, rapid iterations
• Customer Development: test & validate your assumptions
Why
• Eliminate uncertainty with tools that help you test your vision continuously
• Human beings suck at predicting what customers will buy
The right question
Can we build this product?
VS
Should we build this product?
End Game
• Find your market before you run out of resources
• Building a product is the easy part
• Don’t build a solution and then search for a problem
Traditional Entrepreneurial Process
Idea Business Plan Raise Money
Build Launch Market
Fail
Issues with Traditional Path
• Feedback from customers begins once product is launched, making changes often impossible
• No way to track success
Forget the business plan
• They don’t survive the talk with the first customer (S. Blank)
• projections based on nothing
Customer DevelopmentFramework for:
• Discover & Validate right market for your idea
• Build right product features to solve customer needs
• Test correct way to acquire and convert customers
• Deploy right organisation and resources to scale
Objectives
• Problem/Solution fit (Customer Discovery): Find a problem big enough customers will pay for your solution
• Product/Market fit (Customer Validation): Build the product with only features that deliver value to the customer
• Scale (Company Building): Increase exponentially your user/customer base
Tools
• Business Model/Lean/Value Proposition Canvas
• Javelin Board
• Lean Stack
• Lean Launchpad
Test your assumptions: Experiments
• Turn a hypothesis into a measurable outcome
• Identify riskiest assumption
• Define Success Metrics
• Run the Experiment
• Pivot or Persevere
Experiment Objective
• Make your build, measure, learn loop faster all the time
Build
• MVP = Minimum Viable Product
• Easiest/Fastest way to deliver value to your customer
• Not perfect
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. Reidd Hoffman - Linkedin
MVP Types
• Discovery Interviews
• Landing Page
• Concierge
• Mockup
Measure
• Qualitative not quantitative
• Do things that don’t scale
• Focus on important metrics: AARRR (Lean Marketing Funnel)
Learn
• Change hypothesis
• Proceed if hypothesis is validated
• Discover new problems to solve
Pivot
• Structured course correction to test new fundamental hypothesis
• A change in your plan in the process of finding a repeatable and scalable business model
• Based on data
Grow
• Do things that scale
• Use best performing tested channels
• Build infrastructure needed to scale
Get Out Of The Building
• Talk face to face with customers
• Best way to focus on qualitative data
• Avoid engineering approach
Case Studies
Books
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development - Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits
• Running Lean - Ash Maurya
• Lean Customer Development - Cindy Alvarez
• Value Proposition Design - Alexander Osterwalder
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