“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup:
How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to
Create Radically Successful Businesses
Every business owner has a CEO they aspire to be, dreaming of being as successful as them. Hence, founders follow their inspiring CEO's footsteps in hopes of being one of the legendary CEOs the world has ever known. However, even if they carefully followed each step, their startup keeps falling short, and they wonder why. What works for others often won't work for them as well.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries states that applying large corporation frameworks and processes to new ventures may prove detrimental. Unlike occupants geared towards excelling at execution, startups aim at discovering a sustainable business model. Eric Ries shows how applying the scientific method to innovation helps test whether it has a large market and if consumers will buy a product.
The book teaches startups how to successfully develop new products or services under conditions of great uncertainty, reducing wastage, and building an adaptive organization that can thrive in a rapidly changing world. Eric Ries shows founders how to mitigate innovation risks, especially those on “the no market” risks ― heavily inspired by Steve Blank. However, the book does not address other startups’ threats, including talent retention, lack of cash, team building, or competition.
The Lean Startup approach fosters more capital-efficient companies and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as several counter-intuitive practices that reduce product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans little by little with ease. Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order, not chaos, by providing tools to test a vision continuously. Lean isn’t simply about spending less money or failing fast and failing cheap. It is about putting a process, a methodology, around the development of a product. The Lean Startup methodology aims to fill the gap by introducing tools like customer development, minimal viable product, and innovation accounting.
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which has sold over one million copies and translated into more than thirty languages. He created the Lean Startup methodology, which became a global movement in business, practiced by individuals and companies worldwide. This methodology inspired his founding of the LTSE and his books The Leader's Guide and The Startup Way. He founded several startups, including IMVU, where he served as CTO. He taught business and product strategy for startups, venture capital firms, and large companies, including GE, with whom he partnered to create the FastWorks program. Eric served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School, IDEO, and Pivotal, and he is the founder and CEO of the Long-Term Stock Exchange.
Jason Abromaitis is the Chief Executive Officer at Corus. Jason is a competitive and persistent person. Once a fat kid turned into a college basketball player, then a consultant at Accenture, and now an entrepreneur. In college, he ran a refrigerator rental business. Abromaitis employed his basketball teammates as delivery men putting mini-fridges in most dorm rooms. In 2011, Jason built a self-service ordering kiosk for restaurants and enabled them to install at a convention center in Connecticut with no money raised. Three years later, he started Corus and grew it to over $1M in profitable annual revenue, entirely bootstrapped. Jason admired The Lean Startup overcoming skepticism in business books; thus, creating a market-dominating product.
― Jason Abromaitis, Chief Executive Officer at Corus
Corus is a market research platform allowing direct communication between businesses and customers. Through an integrated survey platform, app, and collaborative tools, Corus captures customer feedback in a matter of hours. The platform provides a free user license for up to one million users per organization, with an integrated machine and human language translation, along with access to global panelists, available on demand. Projects can be turned around in hours, as opposed to weeks.
Corus software has processed over 7 million completed questions informing hundreds of research projects to date while building to a public release.
The Lean Startup is rich in quintessential concepts, suitably best for software businesses. The book is applicable for companies of all sizes ― to help startups find a product-market fit with less waste and transition large companies to adjust and adapt their old ways. Thus, an essential read for any entrepreneur or company creator to develop an original business model.
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