Seth Shoultes Eventespresso Founder’s Favorite Book: THE LEAN STARTUP by Eric Ries

“Every startup has a chance to change the world by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup:
How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to
Create Radically Successful Businesses

There is a famous line, "If you build it, they will come for it," from the film Field of Dreams. The phrase is commonly used by business professionals and entrepreneurs everywhere, implying that if one has a business idea and puts the effort to create it, people will come to it. If it only works that easily, most people have businesses of all sorts, from innovative to useless. It's too good to be true. The idea of "Build It, They Will Come" dissipates as a theory in the statistics behind startup success.

Although different studies have different answers to this question, the consensus is that most startups fail. There have been studies that show that as high as 90% of startups fail. According to CB Insights’ research, the number one reason startups fail is no market need. Companies that address captivating problems rather than serving a market need lead to the no. 1 cause of startup failure.

However, multiple competitors address the exact market need; most of them became lead, but others didn’t collapse. Some did fail, but it wasn’t because they didn’t serve the market need; it’s that the supply and demand metrics are not in their favor. To reduce the startup failure rate, founders need to find a niche with very little supply and high demand.

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.

Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

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 to target a high-demand market niche 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.

The Lean Startup model boasts a unique concept that Ries refers to as “validated learning.” This approach to learning is more accurate, concise, and quicker than traditional modes of market forecasting or corporate planning. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on rapid scientific experimentation, 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 developing a product.

To become one of the 10% successful startups, here are some of Eric’s lean principles:

Eliminate waste and produce real value through validated learning:

Validated learning is a process to measure the value and quality of the product from the customers' perspectives.

A minimum viable product begins the learning process:

Launch a basic version of the product to the public, even when it's not ready. A minimum viable product will allow founders to start learning from their customer's feedback and metrics. It is a piece of essential information to help build the kind of product people want to use.

Pivot to a new business strategy when your actionable metrics stop improving:

Pivoting means keeping the same team and product but trying a different business strategy.

A Founder's Favorite

Seth Shoultes is a full-time PHP programmer/web developer based in Saint George, Utah. He has worked in the web design and development industry since 2001. In 2005, Seth opened his web design studio, Smart Website Solutions, where he designed and developed websites for small and large businesses throughout Utah, Nevada, and Arizona.

In April of 2009, Seth finished the development of his first WordPress plugin called “Events Registration with PayPal IPN,” later renamed to “Advanced Events Registration,” finally, in the early part of 2010, they renamed it “Event Espresso.”

Over time, he became busy with the development and support of Event Espresso that he quit his full-time job to focus all of his time and energy on building a company around the Event Espresso plugin for WordPress.

― Seth Shoultes, Chief Executive Officer at Event Espresso

Event Espresso is a WordPress event manager, an entirely bootstrapped SaaS company. It makes it easy to sell tickets for events, workshops, training, conferences, or concerts, register attendees for classes, all from the WordPress website. Quickly create events from within the WordPress admin area using the Event Espresso engine.

Customers can create signup forms to collect information about attendees, accept payments, and create reports. The decaf version of the plugin provides the tools needed to sell tickets, collect remittances, and manage events from within the WordPress dashboard. Shoultes built a long-lasting startup because he applied some of the main principles of Eric’s Lean Startup.

Before launching Event Espresso, Seth initially started the project for his wife's book scrapping events. Later on, Shoultes saw great potential and then added it to the WordPress plugin. Like one of the most well-known CEOs in history that started in a small niche market, Seth produced Event Espresso with real value that served a small-scale need, his wife. With a genuine foundation, Event Espresso grew to be the 4th competitor next to Eventbrite and hit $1M in ARR.

Like any startup, Seth went through trials and tribulations to achieve Event Espresso's full potential. He then resigned from his full-time job to focus on building the company. The company's learning process contributed to continuously improving the plugin versions. At Event Espresso's website, they have an Add-Ons category, whereas customers can further customize their events.

After discovering the project's potential, Seth switched to a new business strategy and changed his medium. With the power of WordPress, Event Espresso was able to support 20,000 paying customers and continue to grow more.

The Lean Startup focuses on helping founders create a long-lasting startup in the market. The book is a must-read for entrepreneurs, founders, product managers, and current CEOs. Eric Ries’ wisdom not only applies to tech startups but also to startups in any industry.

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