The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a book by Eric Ries describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies.Ries developed the idea for the lean startup from his experiences as a startup advisor, employee, and founder. Ries attributes the failure of his first startup, Catalyst Recruiting, to not understanding the wants of their target customers and focusing too much time and energy on the initial product launch.After Catalyst, Ries was a senior software engineer with There, Inc., which had a failed expensive product launch. Ries sees the error in both cases as "working forward from the technology instead of working backward from the business results you're trying to achieve."Instead, Ries argues that to build a great company, one must begin with the customers in the form of interviews and research discovery. Building an MVP (Minimum viable product) and then testing …
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a book by Eric Ries describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies.Ries developed the idea for the lean startup from his experiences as a startup advisor, employee, and founder. Ries attributes the failure of his first startup, Catalyst Recruiting, to not understanding the wants of their target customers and focusing too much time and energy on the initial product launch.After Catalyst, Ries was a senior software engineer with There, Inc., which had a failed expensive product launch. Ries sees the error in both cases as "working forward from the technology instead of working backward from the business results you're trying to achieve."Instead, Ries argues that to build a great company, one must begin with the customers in the form of interviews and research discovery. Building an MVP (Minimum viable product) and then testing and iterating quickly results in less waste and a better product market fit. Ries also recommends using a process called the Five Whys, a technique designed to reach the core of an issue.
Companies cited in the book as practising Ries's ideas include Alphabet Energy of California.
Later more organizations have adopted the processes, including Dropbox, Wealthfront, and General Electric.
Five star book on the first read, three star book on the second
3 stars
That's what you get when you try to build an activity philosophy on unsubstantiated analogies from unrelated fields. Less dumb than the whole agile nonsense, but non-representative and privileged at its core.
Read it so you know what everyone else is talking about
4 stars
To my surprise, this book is by the founder of IMVU, a virtual world company that is still around from that last virtual world craze back around 2010 (including a company I worked for that didn't make it more than a few years), so it's interesting to read about the progression of that company and does give this methodology some cred. Although the anecdotes are interesting, they are varnished with that rah rah Silicon Valley sheen (the glowing treatment of companies like Facebook seem dated now), and it's easy to poke holes, e.g. lots of pro-pivot talk here, but personally I've been in a lot of places that just pivoted as a symptom of attention deficit and chasing the shiny new toy. But plenty makes sense, like deplying Minimum Viable Products, which as with with many other methodologies is typically distorted into whatever people want to release. Which is why …
To my surprise, this book is by the founder of IMVU, a virtual world company that is still around from that last virtual world craze back around 2010 (including a company I worked for that didn't make it more than a few years), so it's interesting to read about the progression of that company and does give this methodology some cred. Although the anecdotes are interesting, they are varnished with that rah rah Silicon Valley sheen (the glowing treatment of companies like Facebook seem dated now), and it's easy to poke holes, e.g. lots of pro-pivot talk here, but personally I've been in a lot of places that just pivoted as a symptom of attention deficit and chasing the shiny new toy. But plenty makes sense, like deplying Minimum Viable Products, which as with with many other methodologies is typically distorted into whatever people want to release. Which is why I realize now people going on about MVPs probably didn't read this book, and why you should.