GrowthStrategy
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
2011
Summary
Eric Ries argues that startups fail not from lack of engineering talent or ambition, but from building the wrong thing. The Lean Startup method applies lean manufacturing thinking to new ventures: build the smallest possible version of a product (MVP), measure how customers respond, and learn whether to pivot or persevere. The goal is to shorten product development cycles and discover what customers actually want before running out of money.
Key Takeaways
- 1Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test assumptions as cheaply as possible
- 2Use Build-Measure-Learn feedback loops to guide every decision
- 3Validated learning — not revenue, features, or lines of code — is the true measure of startup progress
- 4Distinguish between vanity metrics (pageviews, downloads) and actionable metrics that drive decisions
- 5A pivot is a structured course correction to test a new hypothesis, not a failure
- 6Innovation accounting: set a baseline, tune the engine, then decide to pivot or persevere