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

by Eric Ries

agile

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

debate

interoperability

flawed

undermined

validated learning

empirical

hindsight,

squandered

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.

pivoted

Aligned

deluding

It is also the right way to think about productivity in a startup: not in terms of how much stuff we are building but in terms of how much validated learning we’re getting for our efforts.4

ditching

intuitively

grasped

hypothesis,

AUDACITY

incentive:

incentive

quaint

hovering

stealth mode.

pivoted

mitigate

demonstrate

vanity

gimmicks,

flamboyant

squandered

theatrics

Every time I teach the IMVU story, students have an overwhelming temptation to focus on the tactics it illustrates: launching a low-quality early prototype, charging customers from day one, and using low-volume revenue targets as a way to drive accountability. These are useful techniques, but they are not the moral of the story.

skeptical,

grand

pertinent

empirically.

I come across many startups that are struggling to answer the following questions: Which customer opinions should we listen to, if any? How should we prioritize across the many features we could build? Which features are essential to the product’s success and which are ancillary? What can be changed safely, and what might anger customers? What might please today’s customers at the expense of tomorrow’s? What should we work on next?

Qustions that we need to ask our self

if they have followed the “let’s just ship a product and see what happens” plan. I call this the “just do it” school of entrepreneurship after Nike’s famous slogan.

if the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed—at seeing what happens—but won’t necessarily gain validated learning. This is one of the most important lessons of the scie...

FROM ALCHEMY TO...

hypothesis

The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

Think Big, Start Small

envisioned

Webvan and Pets.com.

hypothesis

decidedly

albeit