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

A pivot is better understood as a new strategic hypothesis that will require a new minimum viable product to test.

Each iteration of their minimum viable product allowed them to save a little more time and serve a few more customers:

The extrapolation would not be perfect, but it would establish a baseline behavior that would be far more accurate than market research.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want

I had committed the biggest waste of all: building a product that our customers refused to use. That was really depressing.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.

Cohorts and Split-tests Grockit changed the metrics they used to evaluate success in two ways. Instead of looking at gross metrics, Grockit switched to cohort-based metrics, and instead of looking for cause-and-effect relationships after the fact, Grockit would launch each new feature as a true split-test experiment.

By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers. It will have solved real problems and offer detailed specifications for what needs to be built.

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