Scaling Lean

Part 1 makes the case for using traction as the universal measure of progress (the Goal). It starts by defining traction and shows you how to turn fuzzy business model goals into a more tangible metric that you can use to ballpark the viability of any business model. Next you’ll learn how to break this ballpark goal into more actionable milestones

By purposely limiting your customer throughput batch size at the earlier stages, you can focus on finding the best early adopters for your product and on delivering the best possible high-touch experience to validate your value creation hypotheses. Your perspective on what you need to build (your solution) also changes. For instance: ■ If you are b

How big is the market opportunity? They don’t care who your customers are, but how many—your market size.

2. Convert Your Minimum Success Criteria to Customer Throughput In order to calculate the customer throughput needed, the first critical input we need is a pricing model. I review lots of Lean Canvases where this isn’t specified. Even at the early ideation stage, you need to get specific on pricing. The biggest objection I often hear is: “How can I pr

People usually have no problem calculating the number of active customers needed for $10M/year revenue, which we previously calculated as 16,000-plus active customers. But the 8,000-plus new customers/year isn’t the number of active customers, but rather the number of new customers you need to make every year after you hit your minimum success crit

Building out any customer factory is no different. The first stage (Problem/Solution Fit) is where you test for sufficient customer pull to get the factory started. The other two stages (Product/Market Fit and Scale) are simply stepped-up versions of the first stage. It’s important to highlight that the goal of each stage isn’t simply to create som

Goldratt describes as the goal: The universal goal of every business is to increase throughput while minimizing inventory and operating expenses provided doing that doesn’t degrade throughput.

By embracing a smaller initial batch size of customers, you leave yourself no excuse not to succeed. This is what I call going for the easy button. The corollary is also true. If you can’t deliver value to this small subset of your best possible customers, what makes you think you can deliver value to your hundreds or thousands of future mainstream

2. A Demo Your demo isn’t intended to be just a collection of pretty screenshots or a working prototype, but rather a carefully scripted narrative that helps your prospects visualize your unique value proposition. It should walk them from their current reality (riddled with existing problems) to your envisioned future reality for them (one where these