Lean Startup

What is this revolutionary approach? What is a lean startup?

“The lean startup is an organized, data driven and economic approach to iterate customer and product development in order to satisfy needs and build only what customers have already expressed definite interest in.”

The lean startup movement has now a decade long history. If you are new to the subject you can read a good paper written by a prominent author (Steve Blank), titled: Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything.

There are a lot of good books available on the subject. If you want to save time for yourself, you can download our 70+ page booklet titled In Search of the Lean Startup – A Step by Step Guide to a Successful Web-based Business summarizing the approach and tools with some unique insights by the author. You can even try a number of preparatory tools by downloading the accompanying excel file.

Key aspects of lean startups approach:

• The business model is summarized and regularly updated in a tool called the lean canvas.
• Together with traction planning the lean canvas replaces traditional business planning for lean startups.
• Product development and customer development is done parallel, rather than sequentially (you don’t sell what you built, but build what customers want).
• The product is developed gradually. First make a simplified minimum viable product (MVP) to probe the market.
• Next a minimum viable business product (MVBP) is built and offered to customers having the biggest pain. That contains the most important features of the real product.
• The whole lean startup process is about validation and learning.
• First the solution for the selected problem (or the need to be satisfied) is validated using the simplified MVP (problem / solution fit).
• Next the product / market fit is validated using the MVBP.
• Finally the whole product solution (WPS) is developed for the majority of the market segment you selected.
• In each step several validating experiments are run. As the result of the experiment you may have to make serious changes to the product and/or the business model. We call these changes pivots.
• After the lean startup development process properly has been done you can scale up sales and may experience exponential growth (often referred to by the term hockey-stick curve).

Startups have a low survival rate. By using the lean startup approach one has a much better chance to become successful. The risks of a misaligned product not satisfying real customer needs or solving serious problems is greatly reduced. The same refers to running out of cash before sales ramp up.

Want to start a lean startup? Read some of our thoughts and suggestions here.

Struggling with a startup and looking for ways to revitalize it? Go here.