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