The Secrets of Successful Startups
Feedback based on a workshop given at Lean Startup Day 2017

This piece originally appeared in French on Parlons Data.
You will never know enough about your customers. It’s difficult and takes time to admit, but it’s a fact. For me, it clicked when Sacem — the French performance rights organization — refused to pay for our “brilliant solution” for automated royalty management. “Building the Shazam of royalties”, sounds great, no? All our discussions with them had been very optimistic, even cheerful: “wow guys, we need this!”. And when it was necessary to make tests and then pay, there was nobody left.
Yet it was our fault! We built something far too big, a monster. How could SACEM or other performance rights organizations have integrated our complex solution into their heavy, existing processes? We belong to the 90% of startups that have built a solution that nobody wants.
You will never know enough about your customers.
The Lean Canvas as a framework
There are different methodologies to get you closer to your customers: Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and others. I personally take a close interest in the Lean Startup because it is a Lean method that is practiced every day at Sicara.
The Lean Canvas is the primary tool of Lean Startup. It allows to quickly describe your business model as of today. It does not replace the business plan, which goes into the details of a business that has already been proven viable. I’ve seen many entrepreneurs (and I’ve been part of them) spending months practicing divination to produce a five-year business plan. They had yet to sell anything, and they already were trying to guess the future. The Lean Canvas is a simple, primary tool you can use to reduce uncertainty in your business model. It is not the only one, but it is the one we will use in this article to address the secrets of startups that succeed better than others. Note that the philosophy behind the Lean Canvas can be applied much more widely, as described in Running Lean.
You can download a Lean Canvas template in PDF or in Powerpoint for print, or go to Ash Maurya’s website to fill one online. Every time you write a lean canvas, the goal is to do it under 20 minutes.
We will rely on Thezam’s fictitious business model. Thezam solves the problem of recognizing plants to make your own tea. It is based on an existing application that is experiencing quite a bit of success and has had many press releases. I wrote a business model for it.

Here are 5 secrets of entrepreneurs who build successful startups.
Secret 1 — They allow themselves to make mistakes
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty
—
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
Your Lean Canvas is the mirror image of your business: uncertain. The first step is to accept this inherent uncertainty. During the workshop I gave at the Lean Startup Day, I felt frustration in filling the various boxes of the Lean Canvas quickly. For boxes where you are not sure, write very simple ideas and rely on your intuition, but write something, even if it seems dubious. Why? Lean Startup relies on the scientific method: one makes a hypothesis, sets up an experiment, and then the hypothesis is validated or invalidated. For those who like psychology, a constant and repeated practice of this method strengthens your intuition (see the books Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). For example, when you learned what a bike was, you had to make multiple mistakes corrected by your parents. If nobody had ever contradicted you, you might have always thought that a bike was a bike (sorry for those who just discovered it). The scientific method allows you to make incorrect hypotheses and triggers a feedback loop allowing you to learn. Lean Startup names this process the Build / Measure / Learn loop.

Secret 2 — They allow themselves to change their minds
A Lean Canvas needs to live and evolve, it is insufficient by itself. It must be the impulsion to test your assumptions. I refer you again to the book Running Lean by Ash Maurya on the different uses of Lean Canvas.
If you are targeting several types of markets, draft several Lean Canvas as your value proposition is not the same for everyone. For example, if you are a platform like Uber, you are targeting both drivers and passengers. The problems/solutions are not the same. Optimize a Lean Canvas for a client typology.
“The hardest part of Lean Startup is to measure”, replied Ash Maurya when I asked him. The first Lean Canvas is the first step of a long staircase. By analogy, let’s say you wanted to lose weight. You weigh yourself once and then you indicate your weight on a chart at the current date. You do not weigh yourself or look at yourself in a mirror during your diet. After two months, you weigh yourself and you have not lost a single gram. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Yet this is exactly what most startups do and what sayings like “get out of the office” try to change. Measure, learn, and update your Lean Canvas. Commit to updating it weekly. Those who succeed regularly measure their success.
Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous.
—
Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Secret 3 — They don’t bother too much with details
A Lean Canvas is not a literary exercise, it should force you to go straight to the point. That’s why I invite you to do it on A3 paper sheets. Space constraints play a key role in the exercise. For example, the “Solution” box is half the size of the “Problem” box. The reason is that the solution interests you more than it interests your customer. To caricature, a customer only thinks of himself or his immediate environment and his only concerns are his own egoistic problems. Like other Lean methodologies, Lean Startup focuses on the customer’s point of view to avoid wasting time and energy. The Lean Canvas format reflects this point of view. The tool forces you to think like a customer, and therefore to the problems that it encounters.
During the workshop that I gave at the Lean Startup Day, some startupers wanted to write with lots of detail the problems they were trying to solve or the solutions they devised. They wrote long sentences instead of thinking in keywords and bullet points. They also failed to separate their different problems and their different solutions. For example, let’s take the problem box from the Lean Canvas at the beginning of the article. I wrote:
- Identifying unknown plants
- Knowing whether a plant can be used to make tea
- Knowing whether a plant is allergenic
Aim for efficiency in your writing. A good Lean Canvas should be understood in a few minutes.
Beware, though you shouldn’t go too much into the details, a good problem phrasing should still be narrowly focused. “Identifying anything” and “Identifying unknown plants” both are are succinct phrasings, and the second one is much more focused than the first one. To narrow down a problem, an innumerable number of methods exist. These methods have in common the question “why is this a problem?”.
Finally, be very careful not to “think solution” when you write your problems. I could have put in the problem part “an application to identify the plants”. Such a statement would have been redundant with the “solution” part and would have prevented me from being flexible on the format of the solution. Why an application? Why not offer a forest visit service? A paper guide? Do not optimize too early on a solution; The problem box should keep you from doing it.
Secret 4 — They first aim at people who have the most painful problem
The Customer box of Lean Canvas invites you to define your early adopters. I have found that when the product or service does not yet exist this notion is blurry. Once you have defined your clients, try to narrow them down even more (an ideal client group is a big niche according to Peter Thiel in Zero to One). Drastically restricting the following axes:
- Demographics (age, sex, city or country of origin)
- Situation (moment in time, particular place in which the early adopter would be located, a particular life event such as marriage or the first child)
- Interests
For example, I defined Thezam’s early adopters as people who love tea and frequent the forests of Paris. It is then easy to go and see them and talk to them. I also could have narrowed the age group down and focused on middle-aged people.
Another way that helps to define an early adopter is to ask: “If I go down the street to sell my product or my service, who will I best learn from?”
Secret 5 — They can summarize their business
The Unique Value Proposition (UVP) and the High-level Concept (HLC) are in the third box of the Lean Canvas. They are two different ways to describe your solution in a short and powerful way. They take the form of a single sentence. The UVP is factual and is directed at your customer or user. The HLC is intended to quickly give an idea of what you are doing to a decision maker or an investor. For example, “Your homemade teas without thinking” is a Unique Value Proposition; “Shazam for wild tea plants” is a High-level Concept.
To make a good UVP, pretend you directly talk to your customer. It is a promise to him of a better future. It must say, “You see, today you have this problem, well when you will not have it anymore, you will [insert UVP here]”. Since a promise is engaging, do not use empty marketing promises.
Several people pointed to me that HLCs were reductive and could give a false idea about the product or service. That is true. In a Lean Canvas, completing the HLC part can be optional on a product that has become more mature. The HLC will, however, help you pitch very quickly and efficiently to an investor who already has a good knowledge of the market and understands that it as a simplification.
The Solution box focuses on the key features of your product or service. Ideally, each aspect of the solution comes in line with one of the previously mentioned problems.

Throwing in lots of solutions, and therefore features for your product or service, is useless if they are not related to real customer issues. It sounds simple, but I regularly see messages from entrepreneurs who do not know where to stop growing new features. In Lean Startup there is the word “lean”, which also means “slim”.
An entrepreneur that knows how to summarize his business will succeed in focusing on and slimming his value proposition and his solution to the essential aspects.
Bonus — The Airbnb story
I recommend this video a lot. Listen to how he talks about his first clients and the current ones. Also, take note of how the Airbnb founders managed to quickly detect and solve their problems and thus iterate fast.
Your numerous Lean Canvas continuously snapshots key aspects of your business. Their content must be precise and focused. Lean Canvas must live and allow you to remember your decisions as you go along. Collectively, they help reduce the uncertainty inherent to your (lean) startup. The most up-to-date canvas will be a more and more solid foundation to your pitches, slide decks, business plans while holding onto an A3 sheet. It will help you to simplify the problem you want to solve and cut off the unnecessary. The Lean Canvas is only a tool, the rest will come from you.
You will never know enough about your customers, but you can learn from them. I wish you well in your adventures.
The 5 secrets of the founders of startups who succeed better than others
- Secret 1 — They allow themselves to make mistakes
- Secret 2 — They allow themselves to change their minds
- Secret 3 — They don’t bother too much with details
- Secret 4 — They first aim at people who have the most painful problem
- Secret 5 — They can summarize their business
Additional resources
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Thanks to Franck Debane, Guy Lévi-Bochi, Alexia van Schaardenburg, Kellosh, Nicolas Vérité, Nÿco, and Joëlle for giving me the opportunity to give this Lean Canvas workshop.
Thanks to the attendees of the workshop for their implication.

