The Lean Startup Method
taking lessons for “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries
If you have a brilliant idea in today´s digital market and need help of how to entrepreneur needs to be launch as though you are from the business, management or administrative area and don´t possess any technical idea or knowledge as well if you have a technical background. This lecture is a must for those in the field of entrepreneurship.
This method applies to both, the once who are working in companies and are entrepreneurs and initiative to lead or suggest ideas and projects.
And for those who are looking for a new way to start your own business. The Lean Startup provides you with the requirements, advantages and experiences you need to know before, during or after your entrepreneurship.
The book is organized into three parts Vision, Steer and Accelerate, during these three parts you can read various cases such as the Sabir Bhatia, co-founder of the Hotmail email and then the successes until Microsoft acquired Hotmail. There are many other great histories such as:
Zappos, the biggest company of shoes that was acquired by Amazon for $1000 million.
Webex the teleconferencing tool which was acquired by CISCO Systems.
Eric refers that any innovator and entrepreneur can exist in any sector from private or to the government or your entrepreneurship anyone who possesses initiative and has great ideas can be an entrepreneur. But the most important thing is courage.
Eric also tells us his story in IMVU and the important facts to succeed also mentioned an important term PIVOT.
1.Vision
“Think Big, Start Small”
This part contents which are the roots of a Startup and the Lean Startup, what is a Startup. the definition, learn from customers to create a brilliant strategy, fix a time to launch the product, how to get value and what is waste, find validation and other UX terms which I also recommend a book “UX for LEAN Startups by Laura Klein”.
Also what is valuable about your product and some ways to experiment with it.
Define your product first and which are your target customer.
Other topics are the experimentation and take advantage of your first errors and get data about your customer demand and the ways you can get also with some examples such as the startup found by the author IMVU,
Also have in mind a very important thing: The value hypothesis (whether a product or service delivers value to customers once they are using your product).
Also mentioned some good examples as one in India with a Startup of laundry service to your home or local area. Also mentioned that Lean Startup is in everything, also in government areas. The almost 72 first pages describe these contents.
The main you need to know and learn is to define your MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the product you can steer with the less risk and money you can spend. It could be a Facebook Profile, a peer to peer personal interaction, an HTML and CSS model or a very archaic prototype.
2. Steer
Alright, once you have an idea it´s time to lead to the steer.
Eric defines this infinite cycle, the core of the Lean Startup:
IDEAS →BUILD →PRODUCT →MEASURE →DATA →LEARN = START with IDEAS again and repeat the cycle.
After you start to apply this methodology is time to leap. This chapter is important because once you have the idea and this could be realistic, you can start your idea and take to the final.
In this part that covers early 120 pages, the important thing here is that while you are developing, launching and maintaining your app or your business.
The first thing is Leap, this chapter starts with the story of Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes in 2004. When Facebook is looking for investors, they were very impressed about how users can spend time in the platform and then return to it. As we know now, Facebook starts a generation of the .com entrepreneurship. Facebook strategy before start making money was selling its product so that the founders of Facebook get their strategy and data to monetize their idea.
The first thing for a new product its to acquire value and as a result growth
In this part Eric write about the GENCHI GEMBUTSU which consist on make decisions based on deep firsthand knowledge, it means you can’t take it for granted or to rely on the evidence of others as, the only way they understand a business problem is to go for yourself. The mos similar translation to English would be “Go and see for yourself”.
This is the Toyota way and one important phase of Lean manufacturing.
Another good point to take into account is to take into account that first customers contact is to gain a definitive answer but clarify and understand your potential customer and what problems they have and you can solve. This means your user archetype.
Secondly, “Test”. As an entrepreneur is important to create an MVP to start learning as quickly as possible. The MVP helps us to answer product design or technical requirements, the goal of this is to test the fundamental business hypothesis.
So you don´t need to create a perfect product as your MVP. Eric mention his own experience at his startup IMVU
Thirdly Measure, measure everything you do. The job of any new startup is to make a rigorous measure of where is it right now, and then confronting the truths, no matter how hard this could then devise experiments to learn how to get your closer numbers to your real business plan.
In this part is important to innovate but using your MVP to establish real data and is necessary to take data exactly where the company is right now.
And the important thing is to realize which are your goals in terms of monetizing in your original business plan.
And finally, the most important of this process the metrics you obtained must fulfil what Eric calls the three A’s:
Actionable: It refers that the metric must demonstrate clarity and cause and effect. This can assure the replication of the success of the company or can improve it.
Metrics that are not causing and effect are vanity metrics and will be destinated to repeat the problems.
Accessible: Must be understood by the employees and managers and for this purpose, be sure to make it as simple as possible because metrics are people too.
Last but not least Auditable: As simple as the data must be credible for the employees and the only way to do this is by talking to customers.
You must not believe in those Hollywood histories where one idea is created after some scenes people are typing a book, a code, etc.
The reality is that only 5% of entrepreneurship is a big idea and the rest need order, a grand vision, prioritize in decisions.
The last chapter of this part is a very hard one, but realistic. Eric uses the term of PIVOT, it means the correct the errors, accept the challenge again an try the goals. But if this is not enough and after attempt after attempt you don´t perceive success maybe the best decision is to leave it.
This PIVOT could be how many users you can obtain in the last month and if this month you reach your goal of duplicate it for exemplify. And then how many users pay a subscription in your platform after signup or signup for purchasing your product.
But remember PIVOTS required specific mind-sets and goals.
3. Accelerate
After you have a solid foundation of which is the destiny of your company, it´s time to accelerate.
In this part, changes require less time to be in the real world, so by the time Eric wrote the book the technology of CI/CD (Continous Integration/Continuous Deployment)in which you can upload the changes in just a few minutes.
If you’re not in the app or web development there are other terms you can search and learn and are mentioned in the book for example Fast production changes and 3D printing and rapid prototyping tools.
Eric put as an example the batches with the SWG Designworks as follows:
The project: 1. Design and engineering the initial prototype (1 day), 2. Production and assembly of the initial hard prototype (3 days), 3. Design iteration: two additional cycles (5 days), 4.Initial production run and assembly of the initial forty units.
In this case, it was a physical product that requires 3d printing. Another useful technique here is to apply Agile Methodologies.
The next path is to grow. But Eric says grow needs to be sustainable. For example, if you obtained 3000 customers last week you need to add more 2000. But without losing the other customers.
Another example is how many times your customer is available to do a purchase or re-enter in your site?
Eric explains very good examples of real and interesting stories.
Now the next part is to Adapt. A question here is Can you grow too fast? Your organization must be adaptive and if your employees can adapt too.
Eric includes some ways of doing that, the five why’s for example. You can do this when your comment section or redirect section does not work. Join your team or teams involve in and find the why’s?
Why the API doesn’t work well?
Why the page shows a 500 error or 404 error.
In most cases either small or big batches adaption is the fact that give and organization years of life.
The Innovation is the last to accelerate, imagine Facebook still operates without using React or Graphql, redux or any other tool in the front-end, back-end or mobile app, security systems, data centres or just show the same interface with the same functions in 2004.
The most probably VK or Wechat copy Facebook and then replaced its user preference as probably they made those changes and accelerate loading and presentation as well as user interaction and options and by the end its business models.
But Eric suggests innovation must respect the needs of the existing customers and find new lines of business and explore new business models. All at the same time.
You must provide mechanisms that empower your innovation teams but don´t forget its productivity if it’s working in that area.
Also, I quote the PIXAR model which consist of innovation as well as many other companies large, medium and small.
All companies need to innovate to expand but carefully and with not to destroy the cell that works in the company.
What I learned about this book is gold
“People-Culture-Process, Accountability” The Startup process
My background is in the technical field as a web developer and first as an electronic engineer, so there are some lessons I knew but I want to remark that is book is contained.
On the other hand the technical field, the development is faster than the one in the Amazon or Facebook beginning, so you and your team if its the case need to configure a CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment). There are several services right now. I listed a few
- AWS Codepipeline
- Circle CI
3. Digital Ocean
I use AWS Codepipeline as I integrated almost everything in one Cloud Provider and from my point of view, AWS has all the solutions I need.
Before you start your project, analyze which services you will need for security and to host, meanwhile you can deploy a full-stack project in Heroku for free you must consider security.
Cloud infrastructure offers you, the only thing is you need you to learn and configure overall if you save payment information, personal data or personal documents of your users to verify its identity. You must provide security first over design.
Design is secondary. Guarantee your development environment as well as your deployment environment, database service and storage is secure and well-configured.
Consider when you are new, the time you required to make changes or improvements will need to be faster, so have a good configuration in this part can avoid you wasting of time and work in teammates.
Also when you start a project and need to lead a team to fulfil their goals but primarily your ones is necessary to implement agile methodologies to accelerate the process of development, test and generate ideas.
Each member of your team and areas of the startup needs to find the best way to generate ideas to solve problems to future problems and resolve the recent ones.
Agile methodologies, find the way your team can work in the different areas efficiency and quick while you are a startup is very important.
I want to add something, in every biographical or every history of success I think is important that you as an entrepreneur have a close and trust person who never let you give up or give up with you, not against you.
Conclusion
I highly recommend this book, whether you want to create your idea inside your company or if you want to be in dependable, make your boss or start your own business, you must read this book.
It has lots of good stories of success to explain each of the terms contained in the book.
And it guides you to avoid the common mistakes and many other startups make including the experience of the same author at IMVU, which I found very interesting and helpful.
This book will help to understand your customer and discover if your product is a perfect fit and solve the problem of your target customers.
The price of the book is reasonable, the time you need to read it it´s about three days but I think from my point of view is that kind of books that must not read once and quick.
This book needs analysis and taking notes. Also is a guide to read constantly when is needed. The order to read is not important if you have some ideas but always is a good idea to re-read something just to remember in case you forgot something important detail.
The end of this book is to help people to create successful businesses
Also, there are lots of recommendations from many other authors, entrepreneurs and CEO’s, so you won´t regret to buy and read it.
Other interesting books I read
Creativity Inc. I left my review link https://medium.com/the-innovation/creativity-inc-review-book-709368ec03e
UX for Lean Startups by Laura Klein
Links
