Lean startup book notes

Marketing and user behavior

• Business and Marketing is as important as Engineering (or at least as important; 80% packaging, 20% core product).
• Experiment and analyse the behaviour of the early users.
  • An early adopter is a user which draws real benefit from your product and is prone to neglect some of the bugs and the lack of features.
  • This kind of clients have a big impact on the product.
  • In software products, implement a system for logging and analysing to learn how to bring more value.
  • Experimenting and collecting data can lead to better decisions for the next steps.
  • Experimenting gives insights on your own product in your own specific situation.
• Success is not delivering a feature, success is learning how to solve the customer's problem.

MVP

Minimum viable product

• There's the "school of just-do-it" with no analysis beforehand and there are entrepreneurs who spend too much time analysing which may lead to analysis paralysis. The middle way between the two is a MVP.
• The biggest risk in a startup is that nobody is going to use your product. This risk has to be mitigated first. You are building based on hypothesis.
• The MVP's role is to test a hypothesis. Every initial business planning is speculation and the MVP must test these assumptions and reduce the risk. Riskier assumptions must be dealt with first.
• Apply scientific approach, make a hypothesis and test it with a MVP

Metrics and when to pivot

• Use actionable metrics like Cohort statistics, not gross sales or total customers
• Every time when stuck or the metrics resulted from the experiments don’t validate the hypothesis a pivot is necessary. Pivot means change but a fundamental kind of change.
• Always ask yourself what creates value and what creates waste.
• You have to attract more customers than the ones who leave in order for the startup to grow. There are 3 types of growth engines:
  • sticky (repeated use of a customer)
  • viral (word of mouth)
  • paid (customers come from paid advertising)

What is LEAN?

Or why we deploy multiple times per day, use CI/CD, and have a triage process.

• Lean method is named like this because of the small stocks Toyota selling pipeline (3 min read) needed.
  • Every time a piece was sold in a service shop, a "pull" was propagated through the dealership to the factory.
  • The stock was named WIP (work in progress) stock.
  • In Software Manufacturing, every piece of code that hasn’t reached the customer yet is WIP. Customer needs should create a "pull".
  • The actual “pull” though is created by the business plan hypothesis which must be tested with experiments and user interviews.
• Adapt to the circumstances and adjust the speed accordingly. Don t ask if courses should be held to programmers but instead build an onboarding process such that employees become productive on day 1.