The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success

A comprehensive theory of entrepreneurship should address all the functions of an early-stage venture: vision and concept, product development, marketing and sales, scaling up, partnerships and distribution, and structure and organizational design. It has to provide a method for measuring progress in the context of extreme uncertainty. It can give

Every product development, marketing, or other initiative that a startup undertakes should be targeted at improving one of the drivers of its growth model.

When students could help each other, they benefited in two ways. First, they could get customized instruction from a peer who was much less intimidating than a teacher. Second, they could reinforce their learning by teaching it to others.

The importance of basing strategic decisions on firsthand understanding of customers is one of the core principles that underlies the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, this goes by the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, which is one of the most important phrases in the lean manufacturing vocabulary. In English, it is usually translated as a directiv

All successful sales models depend on breaking down the monolithic view of organizations into the disparate people that make them up.

The first company sets out with a clear baseline metric, a hypothesis about what will improve that metric, and a set of experiments designed to test that hypothesis.

Votizen’s story exhibits some common patterns. One of the most important to note is the acceleration of MVPs. The first MVP took eight months, the next four months, then three, then one. Each time David was able to validate or refute his next hypothesis faster than before.

we must focus our energies exclusively on producing outcomes that the customer perceives as valuable.

Innovation accounting works in three steps: first, use a minimum viable product to establish real data on where the company is right now. Without a clear-eyed picture of your current status—no matter how far from the goal you may be—you cannot begin to track your progress.