The short answer? Yes, writes The Lean Startup author Eric Ries.  

1: Asking potential customers what they want doesn’t work because many times, customers don’t know what they want.

A much better strategy, Eric suggests, is to build a simple product, a “minimum viable product” or MVP, and then watch what actual customers actually do. “The minimum viable product lacks many features that may prove essential later on,” Eric … continue reading

1: It was the summer of 2004. Three college sophomores traveled to Silicon Valley having recently started their fledgling college social network.

“It was live on a handful of college campuses. It was not the market-leading social network or even the first college social network; other companies had launched sooner and with more features, writes Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. “With 150,000 registered users, it made very little … continue reading

1: Before becoming Zappos‘s founder, Nick Swinmurn was frustrated. He couldn’t find an online site with a terrific selection of shoes.

So, “he envisioned a new and superior retail experience,” writes Eric Ries in The Lean Startup.

One option would be to raise money to build “his complete vision with warehouses, distribution partners, and the promise of significant sales.”

Instead, he ran an experiment.  

He asked “local shoe … continue reading

1: We know what to do when someone says, “Drive to the grocery store.” Our “hands seem to steer us there on our own accord,” writes Eric Ries in The Lean Startup.

We use constant feedback to turn the steering wheel. “This feedback is so immediate and automatic that we often don’t think about it, but it is steering that differentiates driving from most other forms of transportation.”

Launching … continue reading

1: The year was 1878. Thomas Edison was a man on a mission.  

Day and night, he experimented with more than six thousand different filaments in his quest to discover the incandescent light bulb.  

After spending a year in Thomas’ lab, Nikola Tesla commented: “If Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would ‘proceed at once’ to simply ‘examine straw after straw until he found the object … continue reading

1: The technology team at IMVU agreed to a hard deadline: Six months—180 days—to launch the startup’s product and attract its first paying customers.

“It was a grueling schedule, but we were determined to launch on time,” writes Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. As the company’s Chief Technology Officer, he was responsible for meeting the deadline and delivering the app, which would allow users to create … continue reading

The year is 2004. A seventeen-year-old girl is sitting in the office in front of a computer. A group of anxious entrepreneurs is standing behind her. They work for IMVU, a start-up technology company that allows people to create avatars when Instant Messaging.

The girl chooses her avatar and customizes it, deciding how she will look. She says, “Oh, this is really fun,” IMVU’s Chief Technology Officer Eric Ries… continue reading

1: Imagine.  We are starting a new company.  What are the key ingredients to ensure success?  Thorough market research?  A good plan?  A solid strategy?  

“In earlier eras, these things were indicators of likely success,” writes Eric Ries in The Lean Startup.  “The overwhelming temptation is to apply them to startups too, but this doesn’t work, because startups operate with too much uncertainty.”

Startups live in a VUCA world: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

“Startups … continue reading