Here’s the thing about my work these days that nobody believes: Whether I’m talking to a hundred-year-old multinational company or one of today’s hottest startups, the conversation is about the same things.
My work on entrepreneurship, growth, and innovation has taken me inside a lot of companies that, on the surface, have very little in common. Since I began my career as a programmer and CTO I have watched countless apps being developed, but lately I’ve witnessed microwaves being assembled, worked on breakthrough medical devices, spent time inside local and federal governments, and gotten a glimpse at how electric cars, airplanes, and drilling equipment are built.
Despite these organizations’ differences in terms of size, market challenges, and production costs, the difficulties they face when trying to build something new are remarkably similar. So is my first piece of advice to them:
Test your ideas before you spend a lot of time and money going down any one road.
Scientific experimentation is at the core of the methodology I wrote about in The Lean Startup, a book in which I described how to apply the ideas of lean manufacturing to the innovation process. I make this recommendation to people because it really works.
Four years after publishing The Lean Startup, I am starting to work on its successor. But I know that I can’t just lock myself in a cave for two years and expect to produce a book that will serve the needs of my readers. After all, my interest is not just to have people buy my books; I want to know that the ideas I’m sharing really work.
So I’ve decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to launch a test of my own.
The campaign is a chance for me to further test the ideas that I’ve been exploring with my startup and corporate clients for years. I’ve seen firsthand how the tools and curriculum I’ve been developing have worked for organizations both large and small, but the campaign is an experiment to see how these ideas work when I’m not standing right there.
The Kickstarter is called The Leader’s Guide and contains the curriculum, tools, and stories I use in my own work. I believe they will be valuable to anyone interested in bringing Lean Startup practices to his or her organization.
The reason I’m launching on Kickstarter is that it offers me a way to engage with backers directly so that I can put my own assumptions to the test. I am also developing a private community so that campaign backers can continue to share their stories and feedback with me and engage with each other long after they’ve read the book and begun putting the ideas into practice.
To me, this book is not just a product but also an important step in my experimentation process. In Lean Startup terminology, The Leader’s Guide is an “MVP” — minimum viable product, or an offering that starts the process of learning from customers. Think of it as an early experiment or in-market test of ideas. An MVP can be as simple as marketing materials or a brochure, or, like The Leader’s Guide, it can be an actual early product.
It might sound like market research, but an MVP differs in several important ways:
- It always provides some utility to the customer. (In this case, The Leader’s Guide is an honest-to-god book based on four years of interviews and research.)
- It doesn’t ask customers what they want. It is an experiment designed to measure behavior, not opinion.
- It’s designed to foster an “exchange of value” with potential customers. We trade something of importance that need not be monetary — such as time, space, or other scarce resources.
Visionaries often say that “customers don’t know what they want” — and they’re right! Focus groups and old-school market research can’t tell you how customers will behave in the future. But that’s why experimentation is so critical. By measuring how customers behave in the real world, we can test our vision against reality and learn what works. Kickstarter is an excellent platform for this kind of experimentation.
A funded project is validation that your ideas are on the right track.
And an unfunded project is not a failure — it’s simply evidence that you need to tweak your product or marketing strategy.
If you’re an entrepreneur or a creator of any stripe, ask yourself how you might use platforms like Kickstarter not only to get funding for individual projects, but as the first step towards creating a viable business with your vision at the center. Chances are, the project you’re working on now is just the first of many you’ll work on in your career. How might you use crowdfunding to start engaging a community that will be with you for your next big idea — and the one after that?
I’m very excited to be launching this campaign: It will be an entirely new kind of publishing process for me, one that I hope delivers a great deal of learning about how to publish a book successfully in the 21st century.
And I’m very hopeful about the incredible potential of platforms like Kickstarter, which give creators a chance to test our ideas while also helping us build communities around our ideas and involve people in every stage of the production process. These insights are invaluable, but even better, they come quickly and at a low cost.
I’ll take my lessons that way any day.
