Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works

Waste is any human activity which absorbs resources but creates no value. — James P. Womak and Daniel T. Jones,

Your customers’ customers are your customers.

Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate enough times before running out of resources.

Customers don’t care about your solution. They care about their problems. —Dave McClure, 500 Startups

All men dream: but not equally. Those that dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. — T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia

So the question we are called on to answer is no longer primarily, “can it be built?”, but rather, “should it be built?

The key is to build a continuous learning culture of experimenters versus specialists, where it's everyone's job to be accountable toward creating and capturing customer value.

At every stage of the startup, there are a set of actions that are “right” for the startup, in that they maximize return on time, money, and effort. A lean/bootstrapped entrepreneur ignores all else.

When people need to get a job done, they hire a product or service to do it for them. The marketer’s task is to understand what jobs periodically arise in customers’ lives for which they might hire products the company could make. — Clayton M. Christensen

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

How to craft a unique value proposition

In a Lean Startup, traditional department labels like “Engineering,” “QA,” “Marketing,” and so forth can get in the way and create needless friction. Eric Ries instead recommends organizing around two teams, the Problem team and the Solution team.

Your job isn’t just building the best solution, but owning the entire business model and making all the pieces fit.

If you can’t convert a warm prospect in a 20-minute face-to-face interview, it will be much harder to convert a visitor in less than eight seconds on your landing page.

Will customers want the product we’re building? Will they pay for it? Can we provide a service profitably? And

While passion and determination are attributes that are essential in order to drive a vision to its full potential, if they are left unchecked, they can also turn the journey into a faith-based one driven by dogma.

The structure of this interview largely follows a usability testing format described by Steve Krug in his book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy (New Riders Press). I