Lean Startup: all you need (is love) to know — Issue #3
Let us introduce a new character in our story, he’s the founder of Customer Development, the base of the Lean Startup methodology.
I’m talking about Steve Blank, US author and entrepreneur.
According to Blank, the most risky thing in innovation processes is not the product or service offered but the customers who will have to buy it.
Making a startup doesn’t just mean creating a new product or service, it above all means to develop a market for the new solution identified and find customers starting from those who, due to inclination, are brought to experience novelties first, the so-called Early Adopters.
What is the smallest or least complicated problem the customer will pay us to solve? — steve blank
Customer Development is the process that helps us, the entrepreneurs, to orient ourselves during the journey, along which we discover and learn to know the customers of our future company, and consequently, the market in which we move.
This process is defined as an iterative cycle, based on the customer feedback, through which we test and re-test the hypotheses that was formulated, relating to the product or service that we intend to develop and to the business model itself, in order to achieve a valued solution for customers, that’s a solution that they actually purchase.
The Lean Startup methodology has become famous first in Silicon Valley and then all over the world thanks to Eric Ries.
In 2004 he co-founded IMVU, a virtual 3D social network.
Through IMVU, Ries had the opportunity to meet Steve Blank, then a pioneer of the Startup method, emphatizing on the Customer Development as a methodology to showcase the features of the products offered to his customers and analyze their feedbacks to undertake a process of improvement and optimization.
Thanks to this workflow, perfectly adopted by Ries, the Lean Startup book was published in 2011, presenting to the public the useful bits of it.
Eric Ries’s fundamental question to his readers is: why should people buy your product once it’s on the market?
Ries points out that the really important question to ask is if we are actually going to solve a problem that people have or not.
The Lean Startup, in fact, starts from the problem, it says “you must find the right problem, not the right solution” because the right solution is simply the answer to the problem identified.
How do we understand the problems of our future customers?
We can’t know it, we have to do many tests, our startup is an experiment and the Lean Startup is a scientific method, based on continuous tests.
Once we are on the market, we will make continuous tests which will allow us to understand what features of our product work, solve the problems found, and which ones are those secondary characteristics to be dealt with.
Back to the Lean Production, we need to understand which features are valuable and which are wasteful.
Again: it’s important to consider every development of our startup as a new experiment, because initially we cannot know what is important and what not; it has to be understood slowly, step by step.
“How?”, one would ask.
By assuming that all the strategies we’re going to implement will be experiments with precise goals, so we can understand if we are on the right way or not — once the product is launched, that is.
Briefly, it’s necessary to start from the problem and not from the solution.
We should fall in love with our problem, to understand it deeper, to be able to find out the right solution; the one that meets the tastes and the preferences of our customers.
We must be always aware that we are developing a business that is uncertain, so the strategy we adopt on day one may require change on day ten and it may even change on day hundred.
All these changes will be implemented based on the feedback that our customers will give us, according to our experiments.
Our experiments will allow us to better understand what the problem is, how to solve it, what is the right market and ultimately how to create a successful business.
Our product or service will change many times during its life: it starts with a basic product, called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), that simply solve the major problems and it goes by adding new features or improving existing ones.
Next article will deal about the Lean Startup’s specific terms.
Stay tuned :)
Photos by Hans Vivek, Steve Harvey, Blake Connally, Patrick Fore.
