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Book review: The Lean Startup

39 points by dolphenstein 15y ago

brackin 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
9oliYQjP 15y ago
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.
cdjarrell 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
ajju 15y ago
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 http://flashpoint.gatech.edu
davidw 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
jmitcheson 15y ago
Is Lean the Agile of startups?
- wpietri 15y ago
  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.
MortenK 15y ago
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.

39 points by dolphenstein 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

9oliYQjP 15y ago

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.

cdjarrell 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

ajju 15y ago

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 http://flashpoint.gatech.edu

davidw 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

jmitcheson 15y ago

Is Lean the Agile of startups?

wpietri 15y ago
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.

MortenK 15y ago

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.