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

by Eric Ries

A comprehensive theory of entrepreneurship should address all the functions of an early-stage venture: vision and concept, product development, marketing and sales, scaling up, partnerships and distribution, and structure and organizational design.

Every setback is an opportunity for learning how to get where they want to go (see the chart below).

Triangle of a startup

disruptive innovation—that can create new sustainable sources of growth.

Sustainable and disruptive innovation

Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning.

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

Lean thinking

exhibited product behaviors such as downloading and buying our product. Each day, roughly the same number of customers would buy the product, and that number was pretty close to zero despite the many improvements.

“Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically.

The Lean Startup model offers a way to test these hypotheses rigorously, immediately, and thoroughly. Strategic planning takes months to complete; these experiments could begin immediately. By starting small, Caroline could prevent a tremendous amount of waste down the road without compromising her overall vision. Here’s what it might look like if Caroline were to treat her project as an experiment.

concierge minimum viable product (described

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?”

Product manager

The team assumed that customers would want to create the albums in the first place. It assumed that event participants would upload photos to event albums created by friends or colleagues.

Assumptions

“Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”4

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.

Differences