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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Ries
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.
The value hypothesis tests whether a product or service really delivers value to customers once they are using it.
growth hypothesis, which tests how new customers will discover a product or service,
push my team to first answer four questions: 1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? 2. If there was a solution, would they buy it? 3. Would they buy it from us? 4. Can we build a solution for that problem?”
The common tendency of product development is to skip straight to the fourth question and build a solution before confirming that customers have the problem.
“Until we could figure out how to sell and make the product, it wasn’t worth spending any engineering time on.”
led the group through a process of identifying risks and assumptions before building anything and then testing those assumptions experimentally.
There were two main hypotheses underlying the proposed event album:
The team assumed that customers would want to create the albums...
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It assumed that event participants would upload photos to event albums created b...
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The Kodak Gallery team built a simple prototype of the event album. It l...
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even at that early stage, allowing customers to use the prototype helped the team...
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even though the product was missing features, the project was not a failure. The initial product—flaws and all—confirmed that users did have the desire to create event albums, which was extremely valuable information.
Where customers complained about missing features, this suggested that the team was on the right track.
What about features that were on the road map but that customers didn’t complain about? Maybe those features weren’t as i...
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“Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”
A minimum viable product (MVP) helps entrepreneurs start the process of learning as quickly as possible.3 It is not necessarily the smallest product imaginable, though; it is simply the fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop with the minimum amount of effort.
Think product = value...minimum viable value (test value hypothesis)
Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.
Before new products can be sold successfully to the mass market, they have to be sold to early adopters.
you don’t need a perfect solution to capture their interest.
Early adopters use their imagination to fill in what a product is missing.
Or their own time, energy, and resources to opt-in to building the rest of the product in exchange for early access
what they care about above all is being the first to use or adopt a new product or technology.
often about gaining a competitive advantage by taking a risk with something new that competitors don’t have yet.
too polished: if it’s ready for everyone to adopt, how much advantage can one get by being early?
Minimum viable products range in complexity from extremely simple smoke tests (little more than an advertisement) to actual early prototypes complete with problems and missing features.
When in doubt, simplify.
Design a platform prototype, keep it modular,and adjust to the market segment under investigation
The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste,
through the lens of the Lean Startup, they were making monumental progress. Each week they were learning more and more about what was required to make their product a success.
Designing and learning about the customer experience of their product to test its features in a curated way before investing in launching the service and growing. Next would be to test the growth hypothesis
Each customer they brought on made it easier to get the next one, because FotT could focus on the same grocery store, getting to know its products and the kinds of people who shopped there well.
Only at the point where the founders were too busy to bring on additional customers did Manuel and his team start to invest in automation in the form of product development.
a concierge MVP, this personalized service is not the product but a learning activity designed to test the leap-of-faith assumptions in the company’s growth model.
These discussions of quality presuppose that the company already knows what attributes of the product the customer will perceive as worthwhile. In a startup, this is a risky assumption to make.
If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
set aside our traditional professional standards to start the process of validated learning as soon as possible.
Take a chance on being wrong or embarrassed...learn what quality means to your customers by getting close to value quickly and iterating
Defects make it more difficult to evolve the product. They actually interfere with our ability to learn
We will consider methods for figuring out when to make investments in preventing these kinds of problems in Part Three
let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
Strip it down to mere utility to test the minimum value of your product and learn what is missing but also essential for your customer's best experience
For startups that rely on patent protection, there are special challenges with releasing an early product. In some jurisdictions, the window for filing a patent begins when the product is released to the general public, and depending on the way the MVP is structured, releasing it may start this clock. Even if your startup is not in one of those jurisdictions, you may want international patent protection and may wind up having to abide by these more stringent requirements.
In all cases, entrepreneurs should seek legal counsel to ensure that they understand the risks fully.
If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway.
The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
The solution to this dilemma is a commitment to iteration. You have to commit to a locked-in agreement—ahead of time—that no matter what comes of testing the MVP, you will not give up hope.
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.
I asked the team a simple question that I make a habit of asking startups whenever we meet: are you making your product better? They always say yes. Then I ask: how do you know?
hit a certain product milestone, maybe talk to a few customers, and see if the numbers go up. Unfortunately, this is not a good indicator of whether a startup is making progress.
How do we know that the changes we’ve made are related to the results we’re seeing?
how do we know that we are drawing the right lessons f...
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Innovation accounting works in three steps: first, use a minimum viable product to establish real data on where the company is right now.
Second, startups must attempt to tune the engine from the baseline toward the ideal. This may take many attempts.
the company reaches a decision point. That is the third step: pivot or persevere.
