The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [22]
None of these takeaways is especially useful. The Lean Startup is not a collection of individual tactics. It is a principled approach to new product development. The only way to make sense of its recommendations is to understand the underlying principles that make them work. As we’ll see in later chapters, the Lean Startup model has been applied to a wide variety of businesses and industries: manufacturing, clean tech, restaurants, and even laundry. The tactics from the IMVU story may or may not make sense in your particular business.
Instead, the way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment. The question is not “Can this product be built?” In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically.
In other words, we need the scientific method. In the Lean Startup model, every product, every feature, every marketing campaign—everything a startup does—is understood to be an experiment designed to achieve validated learning. This experimental approach works across industries and sectors, as we’ll see in Chapter 4.
4
EXPERIMENT
I come across many startups that are struggling to answer the following questions: Which customer opinions should we listen to, if any? How should we prioritize across the many features we could build? Which features are essential to the product’s success and which are ancillary? What can be changed safely, and what might anger customers? What might please today’s customers at the expense of tomorrow’s? What should we work on next?
These are some of the questions teams struggle to answer if they have followed the “let’s just ship a product and see what happens” plan. I call this the “just do it” school of entrepreneurship after Nike’s famous slogan.1 Unfortunately, if the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed—at seeing what happens—but won’t necessarily gain validated learning. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
FROM ALCHEMY TO SCIENCE
The Lean Startup methodology reconceives a startup’s efforts as experiments that test its strategy to see which parts are brilliant and which are crazy. A true experiment follows the scientific method. It begins with a clear hypothesis that makes predictions about what is supposed to happen. It then tests those predictions empirically. Just as scientific experimentation is informed by theory, startup experimentation is guided by the startup’s vision. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
Think Big, Start Small
Zappos is the world’s largest online shoe store, with annual gross sales in excess of $1 billion. It is known as one of the most successful, customer-friendly e-commerce businesses in the world, but it did not start that way.
Founder Nick Swinmurn was frustrated because there was no central online site with a great selection of shoes. He envisioned a new and superior retail experience. Swinmurn could have waited a long time, insisting on testing his complete vision complete with warehouses, distribution partners, and the promise of significant sales. Many early e-commerce pioneers did just that, including infamous dot-com failures such as Webvan and Pets.com.
Instead, he started by running an experiment. His hypothesis was that customers were ready and willing to buy shoes online. To test it, he began