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

4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.

The true measure of runway is how many pivots a startup has left: the number of opportunities it has to make a fundamental change to its business strategy. Measuring runway through the lens of pivots rather than that of time suggests another way to extend that runway: get to each pivot faster. In other words, the startup has to find ways to achieve

Once our efforts were aligned with what customers really wanted, our experiments were much more likely to change their behavior for the better.

KANBAN DIAGRAM OF WORK AS IT PROGRESSES FROM STAGE TO STAGE (No bucket can contain more than three projects at a time.) Work on A begins. D and E are in development. F awaits validation. F is validated. D and E await validation. G, H, I are new tasks to be undertaken. B and C are being built. A completes development.

The MVP is just the first step on a journey of learning. Down that road—after many iterations—you may learn that some element of your product or strategy is flawed and decide it is time to make a change, which I call a pivot, to a different method for achieving your vision.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Minimum viable products range in complexity from extremely simple smoke tests (little more than an advertisement) to actual early prototypes complete with problems and missing features.

The first step in understanding a new product or service is to figure out if it is fundamentally value-creating or value-destroying.

for startups, I believe in the following quality principle: If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

David did what I call a customer segment pivot, keeping the functionality of the product the same but changing the audience focus. He focused on who pays: from consumers to businesses and nonprofit organizations. In other words, David went from being a business-to-consumer (B2C) company to being a business-to-business (B2B) company. In the process