Inspiring talk by Eric Ries of lean startup fame. Quotes to take away:
So, the thing about startups is that they are human institutions designed to create something new, under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And it’s that uncertainty that really makes it difficult to transplant practices from other contexts into the startup domain.
And so because our goal as entrepreneurs is to create a company, an institution, that will outlive us, fundamentally, entrepreneurship is a management science, which I think is counter intuitive to that kind of heroic mythology we have about entrepreneurs.
Most founders have horrifically bad ideas at the start. What differentiates the successful startups from the unsuccessful startups is something we call the pivot. The idea is that, as we test those ideas against reality, we discover a surprising truth. That within every bad idea is a kernel of a good idea waiting to come out.
It’s just, if we can reduce the time it takes us to do those major iterations, those pivots then we can increase the odds of finding product market fit and being successful before we run out of money.
It’s because we were crippled by what I call “shadow beliefs”:
- we know what customers want
- we can accurately predict the future
- advancing the plan is progress
There are kind of three basic pillars of a Lean Startup that allow Lean Startups to go faster than their non-Lean competitors:
- the commodity technology stack
- customer development
- Agile or Lean product development kind of tuned for the startup condition
Let’s talk about three specific practices:
- continuous deployment
- minimum viable product
- five why’s
Minimal viable product:
We want to figure out what’s the minimum set of features necessary to engage with those early evangelists to start the learning feedback loop going.
So the easy formula for finding out what the minimum viable product is, is take what you think it is right now and cut it in half and do that two more times and ship it back.
