The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

This pattern would repeat time and again, from the days when we were making less than a thousand dollars in revenue per month all the way up to the time we were making millions.

Teams that work this way are more productive as long as productivity is measured by their ability to create customer value and not just stay busy.

The first step would be to break down the grand vision into its component parts. The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are what I call the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

vanity metrics

Thus, it is not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions. Any other work is waste.

Most of the volunteering has been of the low-impact variety, involving manual labor, even when the volunteers were highly trained experts.

validated learning

The sandbox also promotes rapid iteration. When people have a chance to see a project through from end to end and the work is done in small batches and delivers a clear verdict quickly, they benefit from the power of feedback.

In the Lean Startup model, an experiment is more than just a theoretical inquiry; it is also a first product.