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If I was reviewing the idea in this book, it would get 5 stars.As a book, there are few problems. First, just stylistically, I feel like I'm being lectured by a precocious toddler about how to do things. The tone is professorial, to put it charitably. Second, there is a bit of incongruity between a system explaining that you need to engage in scientific testing in almost Popperian fashion on the one hand and a series of case studies on the other. Case studies are, of course, the currency of busi...
LearningThe Lean Startup is an important and highly acclaimed book for new startup ventures.It is one of the core business books that revolutionised the business startup environment over this last decade. Eric Ries stripped everything down to the core basic principles of being lean and agile in response to customer feedback. This is not new but is collated and distilled in a dynamic yet clear structure. Of note is that the Lean Startup is heavily biased towards the software industry. While also
I started reading Eric Ries's blog, "Startup Lessons Learned," back in October 2008. I was quickly impressed by his technical acumen and the simplicity of his writing. I also enjoyed the breadth of topics covered and how engaging they were.Needless to say, I was glad to hear that he was going to distill all his knowledge into a book, and now that I read the book, I'm glad to say that he didn't disappoint.The book defines a startup as a 1) a human institution designed to 2) create a new product/s...
As I read chapter after chapter I found myself thinking 'Great introduction to the topic, now let's hope the next one contains some real meat'. Unfortunately that feeling accompanied me until the end of the book.Don't get me wrong, this book contains a lot of useful ideas if you are into entepreneurship: the build-measure-lean cycle driven by the knowledge you want to acquire, validated learning, treating everything as en experiment with its corresponding actionable metrics... but maybe I expect...
Assigned reading from my job, last minute, in preparation for a meeting. I managed it, and while I thought it made a lot of sense in terms of concepts and ideas, and parts of it were very interesting, the writing sucked all of the joy out of it. The first third of the book repetitively repeated stuff by saying it many times, often mirroring previously said things but slightly differently, but... oddly without saying anything of actual information value at all. The last two-thirds were better, mo...
Ries is convinced that start-ups tend to be much higher-risk endeavors than they need to be. This due to all the myth-building that happens around successful founders. Entrepreneurs are bound to make mistakes, yet most startups try to operate in a way that avoids mistakes. Build a process that accommodates mistakes instead. Place your bets after the race more often.He has a deceptively simple method to make this happen: Iteration. Don't go for the Grand Strategy - iterate your way to success. Th...
As a software developer, I am familiar with the basic ideas on which Eric Ries bases his methodology for startups. They come from lean manufacturing and agile development methodologies, applied to the innovation cycle. The biggest issue startups face is validating if the idea fits with what customers want. He argues that applying the ideas of minimum viable product, split testing and small batch sizes will enable the company to quickly learn what the customers want, and how to change the product...
"The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built?"I wasn't too surprised to find that Eric Ries is a great writer: clear, intellectually honest, articulate, and good-humored. As Ries readily admits in the Epilogue, the theories and frameworks promoted in this book have the danger of being used retroactively to justify what you did in the past, or what you've already decided that you want to do, no matter your industry. Its success no doubt has to do with its take cont...
After initially giving this 3 stars I had to go back and give this 4 Stars. This book is amazing for those starting a company, those who already own a company and those thinking about making that move. Beware, this book is better in practice than in theory. If you consider yourself an entrepreneur and are willing to put the principles into practice, then it's worth reading.
This is a massively important book that turned out to be much harder to read than I expected, and left me still pretty confused about how to implement much of the advice in the book. But I like what it did to my thinking, even though I was familiar with many of the concepts in the book already. But boy, I sure do like Five Whys. I am so ready to have kids. There are some really wonderful simple quotes too:"management is human systems engineering.""Our productive capacity greatly exceeds our abil...
Building block for entrepreneurs. Simple concepts with high applicability.
This book applies science to entrepreneurship. It tells businesses, and especially startups, how to start small and simple, then grow through learning, testing, measuring, and rapidly innovating. It advocates “just-in-time scalability”: conducting product experiments without massive up-front investments in planning and design. It shows the value of actionable metrics for decision-making, and the importance of pivoting (changing course) when necessary.I found the book interesting, but not as eye-...
After reading Clayton Christensen, Geoffrey Moore and Steve Blank, I was expecting a lot from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I was disappointed. It could be that I did not read it well or too fast, but I was expecting much more. But instead of saying what I did not like, let me begin with the good points. Just like the previous three authors, Ries shows that innovation may be totally counterintuitive: "My cofounders and I are determined to make new mistakes. We do everything wrong. We build a mi...
It's pretty rare for me, after finishing a book, to not be able to imagine my life not having read it. The Lean Startup is one of those books.Maybe my understanding of business is unimpressive, but I am very interested in the subject and read a good bit about it. Still, I found this book to be enlightening. In business -- and in life -- we always have simple goals, like: I want to make more money.It's easy to focus our motivation on making more money. After all, it is what we want. But what we r...
This was a nice book that talks as much about Silcon Valley style culture as anything else. A ton of my peers are in mid-career finance/law/govenrment jobs. The only way they stay for years is if there is some sort of inefficiency that keeps them there. The utility of the tasks they perform isn't much - at all. I loved the ethos that Eric shares...When a new employee makes a mistake: "SHame on us for making it easy for you to fail." That type of accountability doesn't exist, we have a "punish th...
I'm currently starting a new church as well as helping my wife run a bow tie business. This book is about entrepreneurship, and its examples mostly come from the software development industry. Nevertheless, there was much food for thought here. Takeaways:1. Put out a 'MVP'. As fast as possible, put out a 'minimum viable product' and see if anyone is willing to buy it. If you spend forever making the product the best it could possibly be, you may end up with a cool product that no one actually wa...
While I'm giving this a 4 star, I really want it to be a 3 and a half. 4 because it's very motivating and there's a lot of valuable techniques in there, especially around metrics, different businesses' engines of growth, and running effective retrospective/5 whys meetings.3 because it suffers from a lot of the "business bedside story" effect (see the halo effect for what that means) and there's a pretty nasty survivor bias, a lot of not quite scientific papers are quoted, and some of the "succes...
I think this book could have been effectively distilled into one of about a fifth the length -- and provided me with a much faster feedback loop on the ideas it contained. So consider that an example of the author not abiding by his own principles.Another example of the book not abiding by its own counsel: in recounting case studies, he assures us that the case studies are "successful" by telling us about venture funding and acquisition offers, which seem to me to be examples of the ultimate "va...
Best book for start-ups. This book does not contain many fancy you-have-a-passion-just-do-it examples like other start-up books do. I appreciate the applicability of this book and recommend it to everyone.Takeaways:1. Start-ups should focus on management, process, and discipline, which is counterintuitive to the conventional idea that start-ups should have a 'just-do-it' attitude.2. Start-ups should develop Build-Measure-Feedback loop. Companies should develop a MVP to test market hypotheses. A
Much better book than I expected. Eric explains his mindset and his approach to product development and how to run a start-up, and he makes TOTAL sense. I thought I knew concepts like validated learning & continuous deployment, but reading through this book really solidifies these ideas in my head. These insights are really impressive and I'm hoping I can apply some of the ideas in my next startup.