The Best Highlights from The Lean Startup
What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.
As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
We adopted the view that our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept; it wasn’t to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they ought to want.
A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.
A startup’s job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.
Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.
Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects.
The value hypothesis tests whether a product or service really delivers value to customers once they are using it.
If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
Don’t just read – absorb and apply! The key to learning is doing. But first, you need to remember the lesson.
Highlight and take notes, and have them sent back to you, automatically!
Highlighting is a snap with any digital media, especially Kindle and ebooks. The Readwise app automatically captures your highlights and notes as you create them, and sends them back to you via a daily email – so these “gems” are never lost.
It’s like sending reminders to your future self, on a regular, automated basis.
Set up Readwise in less than 60 seconds. Really. Learn more.
