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

by Eric Ries

Entrepreneurs are different in many ways, whether starting their own small company or inventing new products and businesses within a company like GE. But they also share certain traits. They are fast. They embrace new thinking. They are geared for disruption and innovation through uncertainty.

One of the things I admire about Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup is its ability to teach anyone how to do this using a scientific approach.

For GE, these concepts accelerate impact, learning, improvement, and validation. GE’s founder, Thomas Edison, said he “readily absorbed ideas from every source,” and we’re continuing this tradition.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Brilliant college kids sitting in a dorm are inventing the future. Heedless of boundaries, possessed of new technology and youthful enthusiasm, they build a new company from scratch.

Ten years and several startups ago, that was me, building my first company. I particularly remember a moment from back then: the moment I realized my company was going to fail.

It remains a painful memory. The company limped along for months afterward, but our situation was hopeless. At the time, it had seemed we were doing everything right: we had a great product, a brilliant team, amazing technology, and the right idea at the right time.

But despite a promising idea, we were nonetheless doomed from day one, because we did not know the process we would need to use to turn our product insights into a great company.

If you’ve never experienced a failure like this, it is hard to describe the feeling. It’s as if the world were falling out from under you. You realize you’ve been duped.

we hear the mantra of the successful entrepreneurs: through determination, brilliance, great timing, and—above all—a great product, you too can achieve fame and fortune. There is a mythmaking industry hard at work to sell us that story, but I have come to believe that the story is false, the product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalization.

The grim reality is that most startups fail.

Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential.

I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most.

Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management.

We have wildly divergent associations with these two words, entreprene...

Lately, it seems that one is cool, innovative, and exciting and the other is dull, serious, and bland. It is time t...

At this point in our careers, my cofounders and I are determined to make new mistakes. We do everything wrong:

instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems.

Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly—much too fast by traditional standards—shipping new ve...

We really did have customers in those early days—true visionary early adopters—and we often talked to them and asked for their feedback. But we...

We viewed their input as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our cus...

Traditional business thinking says that this approach shouldn’...

As you’ll see throughout this book, the approach we pioneered at IMVU has become the basis for a new movement of...

It builds on many previous management and product development ideas, including lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile development. It represents a new approach to creatin...

By the time I became a cofounder of IMVU, I was hungry for new ideas about how to build a company.

Back in 2004, Steve had just begun preaching a new idea: the business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development

I began to search outside entrepreneurship for ideas that could help me make sense of my experience. I began to study other industries, especially manufacturing, from which most modern theories of management derive.

I found that by applying ideas from lean manufacturing to my own entrepreneurial challenges—with a few tweaks and changes—I had the beginnings of a framework for making sense of them.

This line of thought evolved into the Lean Startup: the application of lean thinking to the process of innovation.

When I would describe my experiences at IMVU, I was often met with blank stares or extreme skepticism. The most common reply was “That could never work!”

My experience so flew in the face of conventional thinking that most people, even in the innovation hub of Silicon Valley, could not wrap their minds around it.

My hope all along was to find ways to eliminate the tremendous waste I saw all around me: startups that built products nobody wanted, new products pulled from the shelves, countless dreams unrealized.

My mission: to improve the success rate of new innovative products worldwide. The result is the book you are reading.

This is a book for entrepreneurs and the people who hold them accountable.

The five principles of the Lean Startup, which inform all three parts of this book, are as follows: 1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere.

The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme u...

the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, ...

Entrepreneurship is m...

A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to i...

Validated learning.

Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.

This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to tes...

Build-Measure...

The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then lea...

All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate...

Innovation acc...

To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up...

The first problem is the allure of a good plan, a solid strategy, and thorough market research.

The overwhelming temptation is to apply them to startups too, but this doesn’t work, because startups operate with too much uncertainty.

The second problem is that after seeing traditional management fail to solve this problem, some entrepreneurs and investors have thrown up their hands and adopted the “Just Do It” school of startups.