LEAN START UP

The way things used to be …

• Write a business plan• Pitch your business to investors• Assemble a team• Introduce your product• Sell, sell, sell• BTW: 75% of start-ups fail

What’s different about lean start up?

• Experimentation vs elaborate planning• Customer feedback vs intuition• Iterative design over traditional “big

design up front” development

Fail Fast

Continually Learn

Minimum Viable Product

• Product with HIGHEST return on investment vs risk

• Includes only the core features that allow product to be deployed

• Deploy first to early adopters• Get feedback, revise• Strategy to avoid building a product

customers don’t want

Pivoting• Sudden shifts in strategy • Composting ideas … if your idea doesn’t

resonate w/ customers … take what you can from it and move on

• Know your customers … develop empathy, understand what’s important to them, how your product fits into their world

• Fail early, more cheaply, more often

Pivoting, con’t• Build a CUSTOMER focused culture – NOT a

product focused culture• Don’t settle for mediocre … pivot!• Groupon: platform for collective action …

became a coupon business• Pay Pal: a way to “beam” money from

phone to phone, palm pilots, pagers• Twitter: podcasting start up company

Existing companies execute a

business model, start-ups look for

one.

Lean Method’s 3 key principles

• Summarize your ideas … hypothesis … in a BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS

• GET OUT OF THE BUILDING … go and talk to potential customers • Stealth mode is OUT• Customer feedback matters more than

competitors stealing your ideas

• AGILE DEVELOPMENT– iterative and incremental development • minimum viable product• Pivoting