The Lean Startup

Anything those customers experience from their interaction with a company should be considered part of that company’s product.

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.

Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.

there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.

All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning.

It is insufficient to exhort workers to try harder. Our current problems are caused by trying too hard—at the wrong things.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Reading is good, action is better.

if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

When in doubt, simplify.

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

The lesson of the MVP 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.

When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is at the core of the Lean Startup model.

Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”2

The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

In the Lean Startup model, an experiment is more than just a theoretical inquiry; it is also a first product.