

Book review: The Lean Startup - dolphenstein
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/8a022f32-de33-11e0-9fb7-00144feabdc0.html

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9oliYQjP
I already have a copy and actually have it right by my laptop as I type this
into the wee morning. The book is fantastic so far and I haven't been able to
put it down. I'm not reading it in a linear fashion but treating it like a
reference book. It's literally a tool I've been able to put into action
immediately. The book has a level of rigour to it that I really appreciate.

For instance, we're all familiar with the concept of runway on Hacker News
right? How many of us think it's the amount of time that we have left or money
left in the bank? Ries writes this on the subject:

"The true measure of runway is how many pivots a startup has left: the number
of opportunities it has to make a fundamental change to its business strategy.
Measuring runway through the lens of pivots rather than that of time suggests
another way to extend that runway: get to each pivot faster."

How many entrepreneurs feel like they're barrelling down the runway and just
crossing their fingers that something's going to change? "Apple will feature
my iPhone app and I'll get a thousand users, I can just feel it!" Or, "I'm
sure we can just get some angel funding, it's a hot market right now."

With Ries' view of the runway, you can literally rely on Pivotal Tracker to
show you whether you're extending your runway or shortening it, and that's
damn more effective than praying/crossing fingers/refreshing Google Analytics
every half hour to see if your product has gone viral, etc.

EDIT: The book of course goes into when you should/shouldn't cut costs to
extend runway and when you should pivot faster. It also explains what it means
to pivot faster (e.g., validate your assumptions more quickly, not necessarily
code features faster). I just wanted to clarify that given my PT remark above.

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davidw
What I'm curious is how much practical counsel it has. I'm a huge fan of Rob
Walling's "Start Small, Stay Small" because it is just overflowing with
actual, concrete advice. One example is that he comes out and gives you some
actual numbers for product prices.

A lot of "great business books", like Crossing the Chasm, on the other hand,
can be fairly easily summed up in a few pages, even if the ideas are certainly
good ones.

I'll probably get it anyway because I'm a sucker for business books, but
honestly with many of them you're not missing anything if you read the
summary.

~~~
ajju
There are a lot of real-world examples which makes the whole thing worth
reading and not just the summary. I took my own notes, but it would have been
nice to have a summary of key points at the end of each chapter.

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cdjarrell
The Lean Startup model works because it's rooted in evolution. Mutations are
made and tested and the weaker one dies off. Biology has been testing it for
much longer than we have been creating businesses.

We're starting to realize that you can't guess and strategize for future
occurances, you just have to try them out and react accordingly. You have to
get a little bit better one day at a time and not just think about how you
great you want it to be.

That's the biggest hurdle with trying to change the world, we spend too much
time thinking and arguing over what's better while key opportunities are
passing us by every day.

~~~
9oliYQjP
The jury is still out on whether Lean is a model that "works", that term being
defined by most entrepreneurs as letting _them_ succeed. I have absolutely no
doubt that Lean works as a model for revealing "truth" as Eric Ries claims.

Here's the alarming thing that the book suggests: that we are all scientists
trying to reveal market insights. Some of us manage to find out that our
hypothesis was true and we are rewarded. Some of us disprove a hypothesis,
which is a perfectly scientifically admirable thing to do, but we are
penalized for it. 100 years from now, will people laugh at how our society was
naive enough to let entrepreneurs who fail go personally bankrupt in some
cases? Will they even consider revealing market truths to be failure? I'm
guessing that 100 years from now we'll have reached a point where these things
are true:

1\. We won't see so many half-baked products get to market (e.g., Blackberry
Playbook) because conventional wisdom by then will have prevented those kinds
of products from getting as far along in the product development stage as they
do now without having fundamental assumptions about them get validated earlier
on.

2\. There will be a market that rewards entrepreneurs for revealing insight
into their "failures" because these failures provide truths about the market
and are just as equally applicable as truths about the market that validate
assumptions.

~~~
jmathes
Most. Startups. Fail.

If your startup operates on the assumption that your vision is flawless,
you're not causing your vision to be less uncertain by refusing to notice the
risk.

You're shooting the messenger. You've conflated trying to measure whether a
strategy is flawed with causing it to be flawed. Pull your head out of the
sand. It is not the fault of the book that people who have flawed ideas won't
get rich without fixing their ideas.

~~~
9oliYQjP
I suppose I wasn't very clear, but what I was trying to say is that a lot of
entrepreneurs are turning to Lean for a framework that will lead them to
success. That's about as big of a misunderstanding as thinking being able to
predict the weather will allow you to force a sunny day tomorrow. Eric Ries
has never claimed to be able to do the latter, and I was just pointing that
out. But right up there with misunderstanding #1 about Lean (i.e., "Lean means
bootstrapped cheap right?") has got to be this particular misunderstanding.

What I meant by jury is still out, is that we might find that the framework
suggested in The Lean Startup actually increases success rates amongst
startups in addition to being a model for revealing truth. Revealing truth
faster will allow startups to extend their runway and if we find that most
successful businesses only require X pivots on average before they start to
profitable, we very well might see startups be able to accomplish these X
pivots succeed where they may have followed a more traditional launch and pray
model and achieved fewer than X pivots, running out of runway.

If it sounds like I'm trying to be negative about the book, I'm not. It's
fantastic and I'm absolutely suggesting everybody buy a copy :P

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amirmc
> _a lot of entrepreneurs are turning to Lean for a framework that will lead
> them to success_ ... _But right up there with misunderstanding #1 about Lean
> ... has got to be this particular misunderstanding_

I agree with what you're saying but when the strap line of the book is "How
Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to _Create Radically
Successful Companies_ " [emphasis added] the misunderstanding is, well ...
understandable.

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9oliYQjP
You're right, it's on the cover. I have jumped right into the book but haven't
read anywhere in there claims that Lean will cause success. It's pretty modest
in the claims. I find it interesting that it's blatantly on the cover though.
I'm not convinced this would let me succeed but I am convinced it would help
me from driving off a cliff into a disaster of a situation where I have wasted
a lot of time and effort on a product that it turns out the market doesn't
want.

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MortenK
Next up: Get your certification as a Lean Startup pivoteer, Lean Startup
domain expert or Lean Startup MVP (yes, even you can be the product!).

Certification consists of a 4 hour workshop starting at only $4200.

Disclaimer: Lunch not included, though you can split-test dishes at the
Minimum Viable Café at competitive, pivoted, market-driven, customer-verified,
inflation-adjusted price models, with guaranteed* radical results to your
entreprenurial execution capabilities.

* not guaranteed.

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brackin
Can't wait to get this. Got to see the startups at Lean Startup Machine London
on Sunday and was interesting to see them follow the lean startup culture.

~~~
gordonguthrie
LSM was good - watching all the great ways people came up with to test their
ideas. The dog team and their little photocopied A4 sheet with tear-off
tinyURL's. The travel team producing printed brochures and trying to sell them
on open top buses.

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ajju
Got the book pre-launch thanks to Flashpoint[1] and read it cover to cover. It
crystallized a lot of "gut instincts" I had had into a complete, coherent set
of tools and answered many many questions we had spent hours pondering as a
team.

Got my pre-ordered copy the next day and gave it to our first hire and bought
3 more copies for the senior guys on my team.

Get it and read it, it's worth the time.

[1] <http://flashpoint.gatech.edu>

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jmitcheson
Is Lean the Agile of startups?

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wpietri
Sort of.

I haven't read the book yet, but from Eric's blog, he mentions three books as
big inspirations: Beck's "Extreme Programming Explained", Poppendieck's "Lean
Software Development", and Blank's "Customer Development".

The first two books were also important in the Agile community. (Although in
my view what now gets sold as "Agile" has watered both of those down almost to
the point of meaninglessness.) The third is new, and provides an approach to
business that complements Agile software development practices very well. So
you could look at the Lean Startup approach as Agile (or perhaps the best of
Agile) for startups.

So far, though, the Lean Startup movement still has substantial depth. I think
that's because startup people all know they're in a do-or-die situation, and
they are willing to work very hard for a competitive advantage. The real
question for me is whether the Lean Startup community can retain that depth as
it gets more popular.

Business is terribly faddish, and now all manner of large companies are going
to want to pretend they're lean startups. They will pay people lots of money
to help them pretend. Let's hope that money isn't enough to corrupt the
actually useful material in the Lean Startup approach.

