What the hell is a startup, again ? — Issue #1
Today I lay the first step to the road that will lead us toward Eleanor, a publication that sets the goal to study Lean Startup methodology, whose useful informations can allow us a first approach when we’re starting our very own business and studying the entrepreneur’s figure in its total utterness.
Let’s go straight to the point and let us answer to the first inquire: what is a startup?
The term “startup” indicates one or more people committed at creating a new product or a new service under extreme uncertainty.
There are two fundamental points within this definition: the first is that we move in a state of extreme uncertainty — in fact, we have few resources and we do not know how our future will be, because, basically, we’re still bereaved of a set past.
Ours is a new company, with a new product or service.
We do not have a past from which to learn; we do not have a sales history; we don’t know which distribution channels will work and which doesn’t.
We are doing something new, something we do not know about the result of and for understanding it the most advisable way is to test and measure achieved results.
The second fundamental point is the innovative concept: we are not creating just a product, we are creating a new product or a new service.
The concept of innovation, in this case, is not to create something that has never existed before and that will revolutionize the world from day one; this is due to the fact that the problems that existing products or services solve over the course of time change.
Another instance is due to the solution to problems, already existing, being feasible for improvements and optimizations.
Let us now proceed with a second very important question: who is the entrepreneur?
An entrepreneur is a person who wants to create something new autonomously or together with other people; someone that want to achieve innovation and in doing he has to be a prying and questioning mind, pondering on tangents such as: who are going to be the clients the products are going to hold out; what problems and needs the customers have; which solution, product or service they want to satisfy themselves with; what is the best way to one sustainable business.
It can be positively inferred that the work of the new entrepreneur is indeed be dubbed “startup”.
Case in point, the entrepreneur himself has a thesis, an idea, a plan, a hope to handle, and he must do it by following fanciless and logical principles.
WE must do it by following scientific principles.
Such is the Lean Startup methodology.
Photos by Andre Hunter and RawPixel.
