Instead, they revealed the truth through their action or inaction as we struggled to make the product better.

If you did, it would read something like this:

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

The essential lesson is not that everyone should be shipping fifty times per day but that by reducing batch size, we can get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop more quickly than our competitors can. The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.

Babak Nivi writes the excellent blog Venture Hacks and was an early Lean Startup evangelist: http://venturehacks.com/. He’s since gone on to create Angel List, which matches startups and investors around the world: http://angel.co/

Like its traditional counterpart, innovation accounting requires that a startup have and maintain a quantitative financial model that can be used to evaluate progress rigorously. However, in a startup’s earliest days, there is not enough data to make an informed guess about what this model might look like. A startup’s earliest strategic plans are l

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

Customer Need Pivot As a result of getting to know customers extremely well, it sometimes becomes clear that the problem we’re trying to solve for them is not very important. However, because of this customer intimacy, we often discover other related problems that are important and can be solved by our team. In many cases, these related problems ma

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.