The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success

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.

Unfortunately, “learning” is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution.

“I’ve never heard of that, my friends have never heard of that, why do you want me to do that?”

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

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.

Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? If there was a solution, would they buy it? Would they buy it from us? Can we build a solution for that problem?”

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

we must focus our energies exclusively on producing outcomes that the customer perceives as valuable.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

Innovation accounting works in three steps: first, use a minimum viable product to establish real data on where the company is right now. Without a clear-eyed picture of your current status—no matter how far from the goal you may be—you cannot begin to track your progress.

Second, startups must attempt to tune the engine from the baseline toward the ideal. This may take many attempts. After the startup has made all the micro changes and product optimizations it can to move its baseline toward the ideal, the company reaches a decision point. That is the third step: pivot or persevere.

What products do customers really want? How will our business grow? Who is our customer? Which customers should we listen to and which should we ignore?

The faster the loop turns, the faster the company will grow.

cost per acquisition (CPA)

“In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first.”

We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient … are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated. We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little.

Reading is good, action is better.

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