The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
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Rating 4.5/5
Book Summary – The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
Date Consumed: April 2022
You Should Read If: you are starting a business, thinking about starting a business, or launching a new product.
ISBN: 978-0307887894
The Book in 3 Thoughts
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Even though so many small businesses fail, their reason for failure is reoccurring and is often predictable and preventable. They go for the hail mary, and the business turns into chaos, trying to chase every opportunity instead of strategically picking one to focus on and continuously iterate upon.
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The biggest mistake a business can make is assuming it knows what the customer wants and what they will pay for.
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The key to business is to provide value to customers. As a business, it is your job to find out what that is and deliver as much value as fast as possible.
My Top Takeaways
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We spend a massive percentage of our life working on what we assume the customer wants. Without actually testing to see what the customer is willing to pay for. We waste tons of potential on our own reinforcing narrative of assuming we know what the customer should want.
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The job of a startup is to provide value to a customer that otherwise does not exist. To be successful, startups must dedicate their resources to testing what the customer wants and how they can best deliver it. They need to build a Minimum Viable Production (MVP), test it, and learn from it.
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It is essential to measure the correct variables. If a business is testing between two alternatives and one gets 10,000 interactions and the other only 1000, the one with more interactions does not automatically mean it did better. The 10,000 interactions may not be 10,000 qualified leads that are all going to buy the product.
What I am going to implement immediately
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Testing more variables and assumptions to determine what the customer values.
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Launch before I feel it is ready. Instead of waiting for a product to be perfect in my mind, I need to ship my MVP and see if it is something that anyone cares about. By testing the MVP, I can get feedback to help iterate and improve my product and ultimately better serve my community.
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Stay lean to be able to adapt and adjust course quickly. By staying lean and not assuming I know what the customer should want I am better able to continuously improve with the build-measure-learn method and not get stuck with overly rigid processes and products that do not work.
Top 3 Excerpts
Excerpt 1
You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.
Excerpt 2
We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Excerpt 3
The lesson of the [Minimum Viable Product] is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.
