The 7 Habits for Running Highly Effective Lean Startup Experiments

The question isn’t whether you run experiments or not. You do this all the time. Every time you release a new feature, run a marketing campaign, or try a new sales method, you are testing a new strategy using some…

How to Achieve Breakthrough by Embracing Constraints

The LEAN Sprint

Experiments power breakthrough discovery in both the Scientific Method and our adaptation of it for entrepreneurship:

The Science of How Customers Buy Anything

A basic tenet of running lean is validating a product or feature ideally without having…

Bootstrapping + Lean Startup = Low-burn Startup

While not the same thing, Bootstrapping and Lean Startups are quite complementary. Both cover techniques for building low-burn startups by eliminating waste through the maximization of existing resources first before expending effort on the…

Business Models vs Business Plans

Have you ever written a business plan? Did you enjoy the process? Or maybe you’re one of the lucky…

The Power of a Good Strategy

When Mark Zuckerburg started Facebook in 2004, he wasn’t the first building a social networking platform. There were dozens of other social networking platforms before his — many with millions of dollars in funding and millions of users. Yet, he still managed to build the…

No Problems in Your Business Model is a Problem

A manager at Toyota is delivering a quarterly update to an executive. He’s enthusiastic because all the metrics are trending up and to the right. They shipped on time — sales, and customer satisfaction numbers are up too. The executive patiently…

The Simple Shapes of Startups

Inspired by this short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on “the simple shapes of stories”, I thought it would be fun to sketch a few shapes of what starting up looks like:

How to Avoid the Innovator’s Bias for the Solution

I’ve previously described the importance of uncovering problems worth solving early in your business modeling, but how do you avoid the innovator’s bias for the solution?