The Lean Startup
A startup is an organization designed to create new products and services under extreme uncertainty.
Startup = Experiment
- Running a startup is like being a scientists and running many different experiments but with the added time and money crunch.
- Have a value hypothesis which encapsulated your entire startup in line with the scientific method about what value your startup will provide.
- You can from your entire startup as a single make or break assumptions. Ex. for selling shoes online: are people willing to buy shoes online? From there, you can inquire, if so, what are the biggest hurdles and establish a hypothesis that tackles the problem assuming that your make-or-break assumption is true You can from your entire startup as a single make or break assumptions.
Stop writing code!
- This one hit home as I also find myself over engineering problems and try to add the next "killer feature" as that will bring in users
- The reality is launch day(s) after releasing a new product isn't as grand as Apple's keynote's, its much more subdued and will likely be a disappointment
- The point of creating product is to provide value to customers. New features may not be (and likely are not) value creating for the users and thus you aren't seeing growth
Its A Cycle
- Creating products doesn't work in the liner sense of idea -> make product -> launch -> success
- Instead, the process is more like. hypothesis -> MVP -> launch -> fail -> feedback -> understand the feedback -> implement feedback (this many mean pivoting) -> fail less hard -> ...
Ship small, ship fast
- Instead of having long timelines with large updates/batches, have smaller updates with much smaller timelines. Fail fast and get feedback! The point isn't to fully optimize your supply chain since you dont even know if customers want your product and why not!