Sublime

The concept is pretty self-explanatory: Build the smallest thing you possibly can in order to get meaningful feedback on your idea.

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.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions. It lays out a strategy that takes those assumptions as a given and proceeds to show how to achieve the company’s vision. Because the assumptions haven’t been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup’s early efforts should be to

quickly highlight the key assumptions and major risks facing a startup or a significant new product in an existing business.

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. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

There’s a lot on the line. When a new product leverages a network effect to build an ecosystem around it, adjacent industries can be disrupted quickly.