We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We're building more products than ever before, but most of them fail--not because we can't complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.
What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That's the promise of
Running Lean.
In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.
Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who's interested in starting a business project.
- Find a problem worth solving, then define a solution
- Engage your customers throughout the development cycle
- Continually test your product with smaller, faster iterations
- Build a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the idea
- Know when to "pivot" by changing your plan's course
- Maximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focus
- Learn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of funding
"If you are starting a company, or want to adopt the Lean Startup approach, Running Lean is a must read."- Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundary GroupExclusive Interview with Ash Maurya, Author of Running Lean
Q. Why is your book "Running Lean" especially important now?
We live at a time where we have so much power at our fingertips, where we are building more products than ever before. But the odds of building successful products haven't gone up. We're simply building more stuff nobody wants. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting and building successful products. That is the promise of "Running Lean."
Q. What is the top reason startups fail?
Most startups fail, not because they fail to build the product they want to build, but they fail to find a market for their product before running out of resources.
Q. What reason do you attribute for this failure?
Entrepreneurs are typically most passionate about their solution and often spend a disproportionate amount of time perfecting their solution only to find they were optimizing something nobody wanted.
Q. What do founders need to start doing now in order to achieve success?
The first step is shifting their mindset. The "true product" of a startup is not the solution, but the business model. Once founders start thinking of the business model as "the product," they start prioritizing risks differently. The key to building a successful product is maximizing learning about what's riskiest per unit time. Sometimes that's the underlying solution, but often times it's not.
Q. Describe the top tactical technique for systematically building a startup in today's economy?
A core part of the process is identifying what's riskiest and then doing the smallest thing possible to test that risk. From this principle you can derive specific tactics to fit your particular product. For instance, in the book I argue that you can initially test a lot of what's risky without building the product first using proxies like customer interviews, mockups, and videos.
