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by
Ash Maurya
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June 5 - July 10, 2015
Running Lean is the first book in the new Lean Series. Following the publication of The Lean Startup last year, I have had the opportunity to meet thousands of entrepreneurs and managers around the world. I have enjoyed hearing their stories and grappling with their questions. Most of all, I have heard an overwhelming demand for practical guidance for how to put Lean Startup principles into practice. There is no better person to begin that mission than Ash Maurya.
es hora de aprender la metodologia Lean Startup :)
Lean?
gut,
Book
Given the right context, customers can clearly articulate their problems, but it’s your job to come up with the solution.
Running Lean tackles both product and market validation in parallel using short iterations.
Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate enough times before running out of resources. — Eric Ries
What Will This Book Teach You? In this book, you’ll learn: How to first find a problem worth solving, before defining a solution How to find early customers When is the ideal time to raise funding How to test pricing How to decide what goes into Release 1.0 How to build and measure what customers want How to maximize for speed, learning, and focus What is product/market fit How to iterate to product/market fit
Principles guide what you do. Tactics show you how.
All men dream: but not equally. Those that dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. — T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”
Dave McClure of 500 Startups has sat through hundreds of entrepreneur pitches and will probably sit through hundreds more. During these sessions, he has repeatedly called out entrepreneurs for spending a disproportionate amount of time talking about their solution and not enough time talking about the other components of the business model.
Customers buy from you when they trust you can solve their problems. Investors bet on you when they trust you can build a scalable business model.
The bigger risk for most startups is building something nobody wants.
While ideas are cheap, acting on them is quite expensive.
In a pivot experiment, you attempt to validate parts of the business model hypotheses in order to find a plan that works. In an optimization experiment, you attempt to refine parts of the business model hypotheses in order to accelerate a working plan. The goal of the first is a course correction (or a pivot). The goal of the second is efficiency (or scale).
Where Does Funding Fit into All This? It’s funny to note how the 37signals folks went from “Outside money is Plan B” to “Outside money is Plan Z” between their last two books: Getting Real and Rework (37signals.com). Once you’re profitable, it’s easy to make such a declaration, but some times are certainly better than others to consider external funding (see Figure 1-5). Figure 1-5. Ideal time to raise funding
I called these readers and asked them why they wanted me to write a book. Specifically, I asked what would be different about this book from what was already on my blog, or in other blogs and books that are already out there. In other words, I was trying to understand this book’s unique value proposition in relation to existing alternatives.
I’ve worked with startups that felt the problems they are solving are so universal, they apply to everyone. You can’t effectively build, design, and position a product for everyone.
“Selling” is a conversation, and I believe it’s too hard to do that with a single statement. More important, the first battle isn’t even selling; it’s getting a prospect’s attention.
First-time visitors spend eight seconds on average on a landing page. Your UVP is their first interaction with your product. Craft a good UVP and they might stay and view the rest of your site. Otherwise, they’ll simply leave.
Use it for define landing page of Parqero
Your product is not ready for mainstream customers yet. Your sole job should be to find and target early adopters, which requires bold, clear, and specific messaging.
A good formula for crafting an effective UVP (by way of Dane Maxwell) is: Instant Clarity Headline = End Result Customer Wants + Specific Period of Time + Address the Objections Note The second and third items in the preceding formula are great if you can use them, but they are not required. A classic example that fits this formula is Domino’s slogan: Hot fresh pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or it’s free.
Usar para crear el pitch de Parqero en el landing page
Answer: what, who, and why. A good UVP needs to clearly answer the first two questions — what is your product and who is your customer. The “why” is sometimes hard to fit in the same statement, and I’ll frequently use a subheading for that. Here are example UVPs I have used in products: Lean Canvas Spend More Time Building Versus Planning Your Business. The faster, more effective way to communicate your business model
Landing page: usarlo
Bind a solution to your problem as late as possible.
First sell manually, then automate.
Retention before referral Many startups are obsessed with building virality and referral/affiliate programs into their product from day one. While referral programs can be very effective in spreading the word about your product, you need to have a product worth spreading first. Build a remark-able product.
Price defines your customers.
Getting paid is the first form of validation. Getting a customer to give you money is one of the hardest actions you can ask them to take and is an early form of product validation.
Find the key number that tells you how your business is doing in real time, before you get the sales report.
A model I use heavily is Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics,[9] shown in Figure 3-7.
A real unfair advantage is something that cannot be easily copied or bought. — Jason Cohen, A Smart Bear blog
For example, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh believes strongly in creating happiness for his customers and employees. This manifested itself in many company policies that, on the surface, didn’t make much business sense, such as allowing customer service representatives to spend as much time as was needed to make a customer happy and offering a 365-day return policy with two-way paid shipping. But these policies served to differentiate the Zappos brand and build a large, passionate, and vocal customer base that played a large role in the company’s eventual $1.2 billion acquisition by Amazon in 2009. You
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ventaja real frente a la competencia
Risks in a startup can be divided into three general categories, listed here and depicted in Figure 4-1: Product risk Getting the product right Customer risk Building a path to customers Market risk Building a viable business
Riesgos para una startup. Donde comenzar en el canvas.
Your objective is to find a model with a big enough market you can reach with customers who need your product that you can build a business around.
a product is not just a collection of features but rather a collection of user flows.
You need people on your team that can deliver on the right experience that matches your customers’ worldview.
Marketing drives the external perception of your product, and you need people that can put themselves in the shoes of your customer. Good copywriting and communication skills are key here,
The one thing you should never outsource is learning about customers.
A startup can focus on only one metric. So you have to decide what that is and ignore everything else. — Noah Kagan
The best is often the enemy of the good. — Voltaire
A formula for crafting a falsifiable hypothesis is: Falsifiable Hypothesis = [Specific Repeatable Action] will [Expected Measurable Outcome]
If you have a lot of uncertainty now, you don’t need much data to reduce uncertainty significantly. When you have a lot of certainty already, then you need a lot of data to reduce uncertainty significantly. — Douglas Hubbard
A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what’s going on. — Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business (Currency/Doubleday)
The first significant milestone of a startup is achieving product/market fit, which isn’t just about building the “right” product but building a scalable business model that works.
Maximize learning (about what’s riskiest) per unit time. The starting point is a completed Lean Canvas that
Here is how you view them based on risks: Product risk: Getting the product right First make sure you have a problem worth solving. Then define the smallest possible solution (MVP). Build and validate your MVP at small scale (demonstrate UVP). Then verify it at large scale. Customer risk: Building a path to customers First identify who has the pain. Then narrow this down to early adopters who really want your product now. It’s OK to start with outbound channels. But gradually build/develop scalable inbound channels — the earlier the better. Market risk: Building a viable business Identify
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esto es oro puro #runninglean
Before you can pitch the “right” solution, you have to understand the “right” customer problem.
You don’t have to know all the answers, and every customer interaction (interview, tech support, feature request, etc.) turns into an opportunity for learning. Plus, people are generally willing to help if you set the right expectation of seeking their advice over trying to pitch to them.
When 10 out of 10 people say they don’t want your product, that’s pretty significant.
