The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

by Eric Ries

Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

The real issue is with the leaders and the middle managers. There are many business leaders who have been successful because of analysis. They think they’re analysts, and their job is to do great planning and analyzing and have a plan.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects.

Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants.

The value hypothesis tests whether a product or service really delivers value to customers once they are using it.

“Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”