Nonfiction I’ve read this year and enjoyed greatly:
- How to change your mind by Michael Pollan
- The Lean Startup
- Company of One
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Essays (any) - Paul Graham
I personally enjoyed "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edwards as well.
I suggest you to read this book:
The Lean Startup. It explain how to drive your startup using tests and how to validate your strategy or change it. They are many examples of successful business who has changed their strategy many times before getting successful.
http://theleanstartup.com/
^^ Great books. Also checkout the books about
the lean startup by Eric Ries (there's like 3-4 of them now).
I would also recommend the ultimate sales machine. Even though I've only read 20 pages since I started reading it one month ago (yes, I run a startup), it's really interesting and helpful.
Inspirational. Just read The Lean Startup.
I really enjoyed this article, I feel like a great book that dives deeper into the true fan methodology is The Four Steps to the Epiphany, as well as The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Early adopters are by definition true fans.
Outliers, definitely the freakenomics books, I enjoyed Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Lean Startup, Power of Habit, Defining Decade (if your in your 20's, fantastic book), The Happiness Advantage, Great by Choice from Jim collins...
The Lean Startup, the work of Christopher Alexander, this article, all examples of natural progressive refinement.
Great story.
The Lean Startup is good but I found Running Lean to be much more tactical. Plus the guy who wrote it, Ash seems to be very active in providing content beyond the book in his newsletters, blog posts, and his Lean Canvas.
I've just finished The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. I'm now onto 'Zero to One' by Peter Thiel. Also read Business Adventures by John Brooks recently. Oh! And 'Tales of Mystery & Imagination' by Edgar Allen Poe I've got for bath-time reading :)
Books that are mentioned multiple times in this thread:
The master switch; Sapiens/Homo Deus; How to Win Friends and Influence People; The animal farm;
The lean startup; The Bible.
Ctrl+F these names in this page for rationale.
Is there an "awesome books" repo on Github? I wonder.
I've just finished reading The Lean Startup. There is so much in there that is relevant to this if you haven't already read it I highly recommend you check it out. Especially the sections on engines of growth and metrics.
Both of Steven Blank's books come pretty close. (Four Steps to the Epiphany or The Startup Owners Manual)
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is also a great place to start.
I recommend reading The Lean Startup. I found it full of good ideas. One example: cohort analysis. You might already be familiar with all the concepts and ideas in the book, but even then I think the various examples of real companies doing some of these things will be inspiring.
What do you think has changed the most for startups today since when you wrote "The Lean Startup"?
The Lean Startup was a real eye-opener for me, even though I thought I understood all the key concepts (I didn't). For some reason I always assume everyone on HN has already read it!
Made to Stick looks great. Added to my wishlist, thanks.
I'd be curious to hear others' recommendations, but I've gotten a lot out of Good to Great, The Innovator's Dilemma, and Natural Capitalism.
If you're starting a startup, I'd recommend The Lean Startup over all of those, though.
I also feel like
The Lean Startup really isn't anything new. Its just articulated and repackaged in a different way that's more sexy, or tech-y.
God forbid any of my peers start reading Drucker...
The Lean Startup.
It is maybe overhyped and the cause of Sect-like movement. But definitely one of the most important books for me this year. Thanks Eric!
The Leader's Guide is only available on Kickstarter and only for a few more hours. It can't be sold in stores or at retail, so this is the only way to get it.
The next book - the sequel to The Lean Startup - will come out in 2016 or 2017 and will be traditionally published.
I found that
The Lean Startup was three or four short essays struggling -- and mostly failing -- to escape a Praetorian guard composed of hundreds of pages of undergraduate padding.
When you learn that it's a book deal spun out of a blog, the frustrating reading experience makes much more sense.
Pfft, no love for "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries yet? Love that book.
I can't say I agree with your assessment of that book. It read as though the author was utterly enraptured by The Lean Startup (itself a frustrating exercise in padding out a handful of insightful blog posts) and was determined to hang every. single. thing. on that one lamp post.
Read "The Lean Startup" by Eric Reis. It's entire premise is dealing with uncertainty.
I found
the Lean Startup by Eric Ries to be useful in helping me focus my efforts.
Also, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. This helped create more effective and compelling content. It's very high-level though.
You're confused on the definition of startup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_companyGenerally newly created, but not necessarily. In 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries one of the primary examples is based around Intuit, which is a large publicly traded company.
I agree. If you look at the book The Lean Startup, it’s pretty hilarious how hacks like skipping player movement animations led to a “teleport” effect for the imvu product that users loved. That’s a great example of mvp working - they didn’t know what the customer wanted, and the customer actually preferred the hacky shortcut.
One of the best article I've read on TechCrunch since it got sold and everyone jumped ship.
This is in line with "The Lean Startup" from Eric Ries. It's Lean Startup for people who succeed in raising money
Meh,
The Lean Startup is a bunch of "our VC funded company did a lot of bla bla bla" with very little detail or actionable information. It could have been a blog post or two.
I'd love some book recommendations with actionable info and with actual details on how to execute.
The Goal is one my favorite books to recommend to anyone joining a startup, but also for product management types. I first read it around the same time I read The Lean Startup, and I found the two to be very complementary.
It's fair to say this is line of conversation is tangential to the original post, but respecting the passion of your reply, do you think ideas like those represented in
The Lean Startup perhaps over-rationalise the creative process?
Like, taking a rough guess, I wonder if there aren't as many successful startups, as there are successful writers. But no one takes those guides to writing a successful book quite as seriously as those guides to running or starting a successful business.
As a non technical founder I liked the article. Many of the ideas in the article are similar to things discussed in the book The Lean Startup by Eric Reiss . I think PG is a big fan of the way of thinking as well so the fact that the article was written by a YC alum isnt surprising.
I read HN daily and I found the Lean Startup a good book, much better than the "patchwork quilt" of advice you get online.
That's really cool, thanks for sharing!
I saw a site that highlighted the official audiobook/ebook of "The Lean Startup" on one page. I love this as a generic solution.
See if you guys can meet in the middle to test your ideas. Now would be a great time to read Eric Ries' The Lean Startup.
The book "The Lean Startup" defines what a startup is. No need for further explanations. Go and read the book if you have not. Save yourself time and money with it.
It is frustrating sometimes, but I think with the increasing popularity of books like The Lean Startup and an overall broader understanding of how startups actually work, people are more willing to try new engagement models.
A real entrepreneur wouldn't bother reading these books. They'd be too busy working on their idea and learning firsthand.
I've read two titles from this list (The Lean Startup and Trust Me, I’m Lying) and halfway through both realised I knew it already.
No book has all the answers. It's better to attack a business idea intelligently in your own unique way.
I had the same question, which was answered by reading the following book:
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
written by Eric Ries
Yes.. As little as possible. Read the Lean Startup for some examples of MVPs without even writing code.. As far as ballpark examples of cost, the standard can be expressed by this formula: Target Cost = how much you think you need/2; the corollary being Actual Cost = budget*4
If you subscribe to the Lean Startup learning where the author spent 2 years building out a product and then realized that nobody wanted to use it the heroku + mongoDB stack makes a lot of sense. It lets a startup to get a product out the door quick and figure out product market fit.
This is an incredibly broad question. There are tons of different ways to start.
I'd start be reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
I have bought the book and am reading along. I haven't really read enough to form an opinion.
One minor irritant so far - there are readings from two other books, which I'll probably buy, but not expect we're needed. The Lean Startup is one of them.
I was exactly like this, until one Christmas I was giving the book The Lean Startup and decided building web applications was more fun and practical.
The obvious ones:
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries,
Rework - Jason Fried & DHH,
Getting Real - Jason Fried
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It's a really good book for starting entrepreneurs.
It depends on the book, and subject matter. I might turn notes on The DevOps Handbook into more of a technical format but a book like The Lean Startup might have just Chapter titles with bullet points. I don’t think I’d use it to review books though.
Laex makes a valid point.
I would suggest you stop and take a day off before you get fully burnt out.
There is no sense in spending all this time and energy on a product you haven't even validated especially before you've launched.
You could spend years making the "perfect product" without ever knowing if the product is something someone will purchase. Or you could ship a minimum viable product and test whether your product is something someone will purchase.
Eric Ries talks about the minimum viable product in his book "The Lean Startup", which I would highly recommend. I think it would help you and your marketing partner get some much needed context to your situation.
Good luck!
> - The Four Steps to the EpiphanyGood (even great) book, but has some flaws and focuses mostly on enterprise costumers. The revised version The Startup Owner's Manual is more polished and covers a wider range of business models.
> - The Lean Startup
An excellent recommendation. The other books in the series (especially IMO Running Lean and Lean Analytics) are also worth a look:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/7509FE4F-9888-4384-ACBC-D...
The Four Steps to the EpiphanyThe Startup Owner's Manual (note: this and the entry above are sorta/kinda the same book, just different editions. But there's enough difference between the two that I recommend both)
The Art of the Start
The Lean Startup
The Mom Test
The first tool "Lean canvas" I looking for a long time.after reading the book"The Lean Startup" and “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”. recommend the books, recommend the tool
The Hobbit - Liked, classic.
How Ideas Spread - It was decent, I feel like it could be condensed into an infographic after the fact, and hold great value.
The Lean Startup - Excellent. Changed the way I do business.
A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1 - Great book, wonderful universe. Apparently Martin loves himself a good descriptions of clothes.
A Clash of Kings: A song of Ice and Fire, Book 2 - Great book.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Good book for a kid, pretty irritating kid though (the kid in the book, not mine).
The Andromeda Strain - Excellent!
Christ the Sum of All Spiritual Things - Great book! Very healthy view of a Christocentric theology.
Dracula - Sleeper hit of the year. This book was awesome.
Pippi Longstocking - Read this to my son, and we really enjoyed it.
The Secrets of Power Negotiating - Helped me out during the process of buying a house by understanding various negotiation gambits. Would recommend.
Scrum - Another book that changed the way I work. Would absolutely recommend it.
The Wizard of Oz - Much better than the movie.
The 4-Hour Workweek - .... It was "okay". I don't know. I'm still torn.
The Swiss Family Robinson - Awesome book, full of fun things to talk about with your kids.
The BFG - This was the start of the Roald Dahl stage for bedtime reading.. It's a great book, one of my favorite Dahl books.
Matilda - Reading this as an adult, it was not nearly as fun as when I was a kid, however my son loved it.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox - Fun and easy read for the kids.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Pretty decent book.
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator - Terrible. Absolutely terrible.
Just finished reading Tribal Leadership. Opened my eyes to things I had not realized before about life in general and working with teams. I would highly recommend it if you have not read it yet.
Next up, The Lean Startup.
The Lean Startup. I just randomly got it and read it. I was going to go into game development then after reading it I totally changed what I was going to do.
I'm not sure of any good courses. Getting an MBA is often helpful for getting into PM.
Here is a list of books I'd recommend:
Tuned In
Joel on Software
Don't Make Me Think
The Lean Startup
The Mythical Man Month
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO
The Design of Everyday Things
Escape Velocity
Competition Demystified
The Art of Agile Development
1. "
The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries
2. "Insanely Simple" by Ken Segall
3. "How to Measure Anything" by Douglas W. Hubbard
A few I enjoyed:
* Outcomes Over Outputs: Why Customer Behavior is the Key Metric for Business Success
* Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs
* The Lean Startup (often referenced in terms of agile processes, but I think the most important lessons are around product management)
Similar to what I am reading in Eric Ries' "
The Lean Startup". As Ries points out, you have to be careful which metrics are driving development. Only watch metrics that can deliver meaningful insight to help make good business decisions.
Has the "Build, Measure, Learn" development cycle fallen out of favour? Or perhaps, it just applies to a subset of business models.
I've seen this mentioned in things like The Lean Startup, but never as the focus. Do you know any books/studies/similar about targeting early adopters?
I also read The Lean Startup, but didn't like it much. Actually it didn't teach me anything new. Maybe because I read it after reading the "Running Lean" by Ash Maurya and "Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob Walling. They cover the same ideas and are more practical.
My top priority books:
Software Requirements - Karl Wiegers
Programming TypeScript - Boris Cherny
Associate Cloud Engineer Study - Dan Sullivan
Design Patterns - Gang of Four
Refactoring - Kent Beck, Martin Fowler
Programming Pearls - Jon Bentley
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler
The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
CSS: The Definitive Guide - Eric A. Meyer, Estelle Weyl
Working Effectively with Legacy Code - Michael Feathers
Head First Design Patterns - Eric Freeman, Bert Bates
Code Complete - Steve McConnell
Peopleware - Tim Lister, Tom DeMarco
Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
The Clean Coder - Robert C. Martin
Clean Architecture - Robert C. Martin
Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug
Functional Design Patterns for Express.js - Jonathan Lee Martin
The Surrender Experiment - Michael A. Singer
The best books I've ever read:
Principles - Ray Dalio
The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
The Effective Executive - Peter F. Drucker
Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill
Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink, Leif Babin
Influence - Robert B. Cialdini
The Startup Way - Eric Ries
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
12 Rules for Life - Jordan B. Peterson
Measure What Matters - John Doerr, Larry Page
The Fish That Ate the Whale - Rich Cohen
The E-Myth Revisited - Michael E. Gerber
The Score Takes Care of Itself - Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh
Management - Peter F. Drucker
Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
Thanks! From that list, I've read Outlier, The Lean Startup, and Power of Habit. Currently reading A Short History Of Nearly Everything, and I plan on following that with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. After that, I will probably jump on Defining Decade.
I really liked
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - it's very opinionated (in a good way) about what a startup is and how they are rather different from "normal" companies.
All I need to do now is invent a time machine to send it to myself 20 years ago... :-)
It's also very prescriptive about the activities a startup management team should be focusing on which I suspect is a great place to start if you are coming into a new team in a leadership role.
The point of The Lean Startup isn't to give you advice to run a successful VR/gaming company, though. It's to teach you that your assumptions are probably wrong, and you should figure out ways to test them and get feedback as quickly as possible. It's easy to run a bad test or misinterpret your results -- which is I think what you're getting at -- but it's still important to test things, and at least for me, it seemed like that was the main takeaway from the book.
I'd suggest you go read
The Lean Startup, as this is the source for the suggestions on HN.
You validate ideas by applying validated learning:
1. Figure out what you want to learn (ex. an assumption: customers want this product because it allows them to easily do x)
2. Figure out how you will learn via metrics (ex. measure: how many customers sign up based on advertising based on this assumption)
3. Do what is required to gather the metrics. (ex. act: advertise based on the assumption to gather metrics for analyses to validate your assumption).
Sort of sounds like Act/Track/Learn :)
The Lean Startup proposes that you approach a product by asking the following questions:
1. Is this product valuable to my customers?
2. Would customers buy this product?
3. Would customers buy this product from me?
4. Can I build this product?
Point 1 & 2 refer to validating the viability of ideas, while 3 & 4 is more of an introspection regarding availability of skills/resources/advantage etc.
Good luck!
HN - Replies:
Yes thank you very much for detailed and helpful comment. You are very right in your well written points. Discovered “The Lean Startup” book only very late in the game lol. But I doubt it would have changed our course much since we are true rebels and any Tried and Proven Strategy is probably not exciting enough ;) !
Thanks again and have a great day!
The only test that matters is the market. The lean startup was the first book that sort of helped me understand that mindset, for any of its faults it is still a classic for a reason and at least helps in shifting perspective from "create the perfect idea" to "find any problem that needs to be solved and begin iterating to a solution"
They do. I was once an active IMVU user. Outward appearances can be deceiving, but believe me they are profitable. If you read Eric Ries book 'The Lean Startup' you can have a glimpse of IMVU's back story there.
Some of the lighter business books are great to listen to as audiobooks while you are travelling - while walking through airports, waiting in line, on a plane. If the book is too complex, then you are better off reading the book yourself.
Outliers, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Lean Startup, How to win friends and influence people.....
-
The Lean Startup, by Eric Rives
- The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson
- The Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim
- On the shortness of life, by Seneca
- 1984, by George Orwell
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins changed the way I see myself and the world in a big way. I don't necessarily see his approach as a pathway to AI (though I don't dismiss it), but I thought it had some easily understandable insight into how our minds work.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries got me thinking about applying the scientific method to things I never thought of before.
Published in 2011,
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries has been considered the startup bible for almost a decade. According to the publisher, the book "has sold over one million copies and has been translated into more than thirty languages." It was also on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
I wondered how the book stood its test of time, and re-read it a few weeks ago. The only thing I remembered from reading it the first time was its famous “build-measure-learn” loop, therefore I was surprised the book is more about entrepreneurship in general, management & accounting, than about MVPs (minimal viable products) and customer interviews. It turns out the famous lean startup method is about more than building MVPs as fast as you can.
Here's our 5 take-aways.
According to the '
The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries in simple over view of when to pivot:
"If the company is making good progress toward the ideal, that means it’s learning appropriately and using that learning effectively, in which case it makes sense to continue. If not, the management team eventually must conclude that its current product strategy is
flawed and needs a serious change. When a company pivots, it starts the process all over again, reestablishing a new baseline and then tuning the engine from there. The sign of a successful pivot is that these engine-tuning activities are more productive after the
pivot than before."
What does your book writing process look like now? What did you learn writing
The Lean Startup and how much of the teachings of the lean concept itself are applicable to book writing?
Cheers! /Martin
I'm well aware of that and, to be quite honest, it isn't particularly impressive.
But there is a piece of perspective that is perhaps missing. I've seen him preach to companies that have orders of magnitude more active users and orders of magnitude as much profit as he had revenue. And making people there believe that he somehow knows something about what it takes to make a company successful. To make a successful product.
I've seen companies who had brilliant people who built more business for their company than this guy ever built for himself be told that "why can't you be more like that". Because it is always more attractive for some types of companies to listen to some outside hack than to actually pay attention to unglamorous people with far more potential. It is easier to admire something that comes with a book, ceremonies and eloquent salesmanship. And sadly, it is easier to take what they say seriously.
I've worked on products that had an order of magnitude more users (products you might well have used) and wondered "why am I doing this again?" because at the company I was working, that wasn't really numbers indicative of a successful product.
IMVU is 23 people. It is the equivalent of a mom and pop shop in this context. I'm sure his story is compelling to someone hacking together a product in their spare time and dreaming of doing a startup. But you do need to understand that he has very little to offer to the kinds of companies this cult does real damage to.
Using the numbers you quote (they tend to vary) IMVU has an order of magnitude fewer users than MySpace. MySpace. The graveyard. That's 4 users for every copy of "The Lean Startup" book sold (well, probably fewer since I haven't kept up with his book sales).
IMVU has fewer users than people who've seen Ries talk - live or online.
IMVU is not a notable success.
He is a successful seller of self help books. No doubt about that.
1. Bad Blood, John Careyou
2. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
3. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
4. Zero to one Peter Thiel
5. The republic – Plato
6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
7. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd Kindle Edition
8. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
9. Never split the difference
10. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Hardcover
11. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
12. Economy course: https://www.core-econ.org/
I agree with this. I feel much less "confused" after reading The Lean Startup, and start embracing the mentality.
Go and read the book "
The Lean Startup." Then ask yourself the question again.
Explanation: Have you teste dyour hypothesis? Why are you so sure you would need more than one person working on the startup? What made you reach that conclusion? If you are just going by what everyone says, then allow me to challenge your train of thought. You do not need a team to build a startup. It is more efficient if all members are working in unison towards the same goal, but it is more effective to have one person applying lean thechniques than two applying non-lean business knowledge.
You can't create value without good UXEntirely incorrect. Read the Lean Startup. Value creation is 100% possible without any UX or anything tangible that the customer "sees" at all. A delivery pizza place provides value. I call them, they deliver pizza. There's no "UX" there beyond what already existed (my phone, a working phone line).
Too many people think the first thing that needs to be solved is how something looks or feels. It's not. You can solve a problem without any UX.
Business is hard. Anything of value takes effort and time. Read "The Lean Startup" and "The 4 hour work week". And whatever you do, don't build a website - a website is not a business. Start with eBay, then try something like Shopify once things get better, and spend your money testing ideas and assumptions.
I didn't care much for Ries' "The Lean Startup", but one thing that did stick with me about it was the example of just doing stuff 'by hand' to see if there's a market for it, without worrying about creating some super-cool highly automated and perfect system from the get go, as would be our inclination as hackers. The oDesk story seems to indicate that they did something similar - putting people in touch very much 'by hand' initially. It'd be interesting to hear about the transition, but I think it's a good concept to keep in mind, as long as you are reasonably sure that, at some point, things can be automated pretty well.
Although I think Crossing the Chasm is a great book and will give you perspective... it is largely about the final stages of being a startup. After you cross the Chasm, you are a mainstream company. The 2 books that I recommend for early stage startups are "The Lean Startup" (especially for consumer) and Four Steps to the Epiphany (especially for B2B).
Read the Lean Startup and learn what an MVP really is. And MVP can be built without writing any code. Your first few months should be figuring out what your customers want.
I second all the suggestions of @statictype. Find various ways to receive unbiased opinions from ppl who fit your target user group. Don't invest too much time UNTIL you've received enough validation.
As a compliment to that, I highly recommend that you read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Best of luck.
Specifically to your question of defining the best features, goals, and products, I recommend these books:
* 20 YC Lessons
* Outcomes Over Output (a lightweight version of The Lean Startup)
* Strategy Rules
* How Google Works
Here's the rest of my Product Manager book reviews: https://www.briansnotes.io/audience/product-manager/
I often find myself reading about 30% of books like "
The Lean Startup," and moving on. Not necessarily the first 30%, but overall. Understand the thesis, and move on.
I have yet to find a business book where this doesn't apply. I only finish the ones where I particularly like the writing style or the anecdotes.
I'd actually recommend avoiding
The Lean Startup if you read anything at all and have been paying attention to blogs and the news. It doesn't say anything you haven't already heard, and is kind of high level (or "hand wavy" if you want to be harsher).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup contains most of what you need to know.
Yeah, I understand the anger part. The thing is, I've read this in at least a couple of books. I think Tim Ferris suggested it in The 4-Hour Work Week and I also think it's mentioned in The Lean Startup. Oh well; I like building stuff.
Permission Marketing - Seth Godin, made me think about what he calls interruption marketing.
Purple Cow - Seth Godin, made me think about standing out.
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries, really changed the way I think about... Well, nearly everything that costs effort.
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins, good theory about why God most probably doesn't exist.
The magic of reality - Richard Dawkins, great story about evolution, religion, etc.
A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson, brilliant book. Perfect summary of our scientific advancements during the last centuries. He made me think about possible natural disasters.
Personal thoughts (trying to channel pg with a huge stack of applications to get through - I imagine the guy who first applied Naive Bayes to email spam being quite comfortable making snap decisions over small variables):
This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.
Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" - come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - he wasn't the first person to do something like this.
Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' - he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".
Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.
For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.
I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).
The best definition of a startup that I've heard so far is from Eric Ries's book,
the Lean Startup:
"An organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty."
I think anyone that wants to take a risk and actually create something should be allowed to call themselves at startup. Does it really matter if it's a business, website, startup? At the end of the day, it's pretty easy to tell who is serious and generally talented verses the people who are just hobbiest or not putting their full effort into their businesses.
> And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing.While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it.
Even "the pivot" itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the formula for startup success (very much the antithesis of luck).
Yes, you have to hustle. Yes, you have to build something people want. Yes, you should have an awesome team. When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. ("I couldn't get funding", "Google changed their algorithm", "I couldn't hire the right person for X")
Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.
A list I put together a while back:
https://www.encona.com/posts/product-manager-resourcesOverview books:
* Inspired
* The Product Manager’s Desk Reference
* The Lean Startup
* Agile Product Management with Scrum
Interview preparation (good for breadth, even if you’re not applying for jobs):
* Decode & Conquer
* Cracking the PM interview
Other good books for PMs:
* Hooked
* The Design of Everyday Things
* Zero to One
* Traction
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries probably is as close as it gets to what you’re describing.
Anything more specific can’t take variations in context and market development into account.
There’s no cookie cutter way of creating a successful startup from scratch.
If you have an existing network and if you’ve done it before then the chances are higher that you can reproduce successful outcomes. Still, there are quite a few examples of entrepreneurs who’ve created a successful startup but weren’t able to achieve similar results with their following endeavours.
Uncertainty and the search for a business model are the very nature of startups. Reproducible results come with established models.
This is literally the thought process that led to the creation of the LTSE. I was actually reading The Toyota Way while writing the draft manuscript for The Lean Startup
You're asking the wrong people.
1. Read "The Lean Startup."
2. Find the cheapest and fastest way to test whether potential customers think you should build it for them. For example, you could make a fake product web page with a "try free" button and count the number of people who click the button.
Asking us is not lean. Asking customers is not lean. Testing customers != asking them. Building it is too expensive a test to be lean.
Gotta run, can't put more words into this, sorry!
Have you read
The Lean Startup? That can help.
Also, TSTTCPW (the simplest thing that could possibly work). Pry a little piece of it loose. Don't think too much about which piece. Build the simplest possible version of that little piece. "Simplest" can be a tremendous challenge in itself, because scope creep and gold-plating are so easy. Part of the work will be decoupling your little piece from the rest of it. But make something that works!
I would guess you've been through it many times or are lucky enough to have a great intuition with this. I've personally not been so lucky.
I can say that in my experience reading Four Steps or The Lean Startup and actually doing a startup are completely different things. I thought I had the whole lean startup thing down, but I've messed up so many times. And it's not a case of "now I've learned my lesson" either. I've had great experiences with sticking to lean, and then afterwards I've slipped up again. For me it seems to be a case of waves of being good, and not so good. Over time I'm definitely getting better.
1. The courses on AI/Machine learning and blockchain (or anything that has do with 4th Industrial revolution) are great. Coursera is great for this.
The greatest impact was the combined effort of being able to do multiple courses (in so many different things) and being able to better understand different programming languages, technologies and marketing (SEO, ads, content marketing, referral marketing, driving sales).
Can't leave engineering. Engineering is the passion. I have a strong belief that all parts of business should be driven by engineers from development to sales and marketing. Yesterday I went to a meetup and I met sales people on the booths who had no idea on the product they were selling worked and how it could help others.
2.) If you don't have friends in school, go out to events, network. Talk to people, add them on LinkedIn. Found someone interesting online? Feel free to email them and get to know each other. Thats how I have built my network. Don't forget the nurture professional relationships. Your network is your networth.
3.) I have a 15000 people following, the articles that are of interest get viral. A few times I tried to post my articles on some FB groups. It did work out well but I don't do it anymore. Best is to just keep writing (you may post on Reddit, FB etc but be aware that you might get banned for self promotion).
3. 'The Lean Startup' and 'The defining decade' are the most impactful books.
4. You can see my Linked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ifahaduddin/
> At what point we should stop designing for future use cases?
Guessing the future and engineering to cope with it is a risky, error-prone business. Good engineering practice should always seek to minimise reliance on unreliable (prediction) data to create future-proof designs.
So I'd go with stopping as soon as it meets current use cases AND then shift gears to make it easy for someone else to pick-up in the future, e.g. write whatever tests are necessary and document thinking.
If it's easy to extend now, it will still be so in the future. Plus, there will be whatever learning has occurred since to make an even better job of it.
> How far should we go in making things generic?
Only if:
0) It's not only about guessing future needs.
1) The maintainers are over 90% certain it will make it easier for them to maintain and test now.
> Are there good resources for this?
There's a mountain of media on "Agile" software development, and it's different flavours. It's not particularly Software Engineering focused, but I enjoyed the "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries.
Good luck and have fun.
TLDR: Buy a copy of the Lean Startup, read it, action it.
My $0.02, having been a PM for many years:
Read Cracking the PM Interview [1] (for an overview of the job, not the actual interview tips) and The Lean Startup [2] (for general philosophy).
35 is a great age for a PM, especially since PM's often start elsewhere -- maturity is a plus here. I'd say there are 3 main ways into it -- as an engineer, who starts to do PM-type stuff on a team where there's no PM. As a designer, who starts to do PM-type stuff on a team where there's no PM. Or as an MBA who has a good sense for engineering and design. Certifications generally don't mean anything -- communication and leadership skills, good judgment, experience and a proven track record are what matter. But all those things can be demonstrated in previous non-PM roles, in order to make the initial switch.
Also, if you want to be a PM then you'd better enjoy meetings, slides, people, and communicating & convincing all day long, day-in day-out. If those make you say an enthusiastic "yes that's me!" then jump right in. If not... you're gonna have a bad time...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-PM-Interview-Product-Technol...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous...
I believe that this important mantra is illustrated by the use of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) technique. This is described in detail by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup (pgs. 99-102), wherein he explains the tremendous amount of learning and customer discovery that a startup founder/team can experience first-hand by making the effort to personally provide initial customers with customized one-on-one "concierge treatment"...
If you're starting I think you should read the lean startup
- how to start a startup podcast(Altman and co)
- The lean startup
- the twenty two immutable laws of marketing.
- getting to yes
After a couple of books though I would say it really comes down to just digging in and fighting it out. It is really easy to lose yourself in the world of business self help literature.
I'm not so enthusiastic about
The Lean Startup. It's worth reading, certainly, but it gets annoying as Ries spends a fair amount of time concentrating on "intrapreneurs" at large corporations, and insisting that divisions in large enterprises are analogous to startups.
Fine, fine. But don't call your book The Lean Startup, then. Or, if you're going to write a book with that title, write about actual startups, and get more in-depth.
> From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like
The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.
It depends on whether you're giving up on the process or the goal. Startups "give up" or pivot on their original and subsequent ideas so often that's it's considered a best practice. This is different from founders giving up on starting a business.
Like you mentioned, the habit is what matters.
I used to think like this. At it's core, it's a variation of "never give up", mixed with "the power of habit".
I agree with "the power of habit" part.
From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.
The bottom line message seems to be "keep insisting and you'll be successful". I spent 3+ years working in a game that never took off as a side project. In hindsight, I should have taken the hint of the lack of traction early on and dropped the whole thing. Instead I sank countless hours into a project that never worked out. How many prototypes could I have produced in the same time?
Bottom line, habits are good, so long as we don't mix it up with the concept of "don't give up and you'll be successful".
It’s not good advice. It’s misleading, a poor generalization, and entirely misses the point of what an MVP is.
An MVP is not defined by time to build, but by the minimum necessary to build to make the very first sale. MVP is the minimum necessary to capture the Minimum Viable Audience. That could be a landing page or it could be a spreadsheet or it could be a complex app. It could be a game demo. The point is only build the minimum to be able to capture a customer and iterate.
An MVP is not associated with a time frame at all. YC is wrong. Just read The Lean Startup which popularized the term.
As a founder I’m pretty sick of these unrealistic platitudes tossed around by VCs and accelerators. It’s not educating anyone.
Steve Blank's snake oil??? "The 4 steps to the epiphany" was a transforming book for me and other entrepreneurs and the popular "The Lean Startup" follow up from Eric Ries a direct result of working with Steve. He genuinely cares about entrepreneurs and the valley ecosystem go watch "The secret history of Silicon Valley"
It depends what they're looking for: Facts, insights or opinions and news on startups. Here's a list of items which i've always liked. To be honest you can get so much just from reading Hacker News.
Books:
Founders at Work
The Lean Startup
The Four Hour Work Week
Hackers & Painters
Getting Real - 37 Signals/Jason Fried
F'd Companies (Maybe not crucial but helped me think about startups needing to fulfill a need/fix a problem).
Articles: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
http://thestartupfoundry.com/
http://avc.com
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/
http://steveblank.com/
http://onstartups.com/
Market (Raw startup information/links):
http://betali.st/
http://angel.co
Interview Specific:
http://foundation.bz
http://mixergy.com
http://thisweekin.com - TWI Startups or VC are both good shows.
YC Startup School Videos (Not exactly interviews but great).
Startup News: http://thenextweb.com
http://techcrunch.com
http://readwriteweb.com
http://venturebeat.com
http://gigaom.com
Update: YC also has a library of information here too:
http://ycombinator.com/lib.htmlI enjoy getting up in front of a crowd of people and helping them learn new concepts in an entertaining fashion. I have taught classes, delivered presentations, recorded video podcasts with millions of views, traveled as a motivational speaker, and performed standup comedy all over the U.S.
What I like about speaking that you don't get from writing:
1) Seeing people's reaction in near real-time. This is a good feedback loop when you're working on how to explain a new product or feature before producing an on-demand recording that could be viewed by 1000x the people in the audience. It's like a focus-group or a series of live A/B tests.
2) A chance to convert the less-dedicated into customers/fans/subscribers. It seems a lot of people are too lazy to read long articles let alone books these days. A good video can go a long way. I watched a lecture by Eric Ries and immediately acquired The Lean Startup for my Kindle.
I think speaking is a great way to get people excited about a topic and teach them a handful of concepts. If my talk is successful, I will have inspired many to drill in on the topic later or become a fan of my product, my podcast, or my standup comedy. I always try to accompany my talks with easy-to-remember URLs or QR codes so that it minimizes the friction between their interest for more information and taking the next step.
Two classic books that are fast reads and will also help you are 1) The Launchpad (about YC) and 2)
The Lean Startup. Both are old books but they cover many of the same concepts and ways of thinking.
I’d add that if you do nothing else, read the first 3 chapters of The Mom Test; it provides a great overview for evaluating ideas.
It really depends on how you define "start-up".
eric ries, in his book The Lean Startup, defines it as follows:
"A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."
so lets see. Is this website a human institution? Probably. If its not, it certainly passed the Turing test.
Is it designed to create a new product or service? not really. Its selling stickers that the user has the ability to customize. This isn't all that new or original of a concept.
Is it doing so under extreme uncertainty? I would say not. This is selling a product that there is already known demand for. It is not extremely uncertain if there is a market for their product.
So my 2 cents is that this is not a "start up" but rather merely a new web business. Still, good for them! May the Force be with them, and may they find beautiful solutions to their problems.
Audio books.
Because of WFH, found a lot of additional time. Used that for listening to around 10 audio books in the past year. Most of the books I read were from a project management and entrepreneurship perspective. I used/discussed concepts learnt for work and felt slightly better off because of that. An example was using 5-whys for process improvement from The Lean Startup.
Don't Make Me Think is a great book. Even though the example screenshots are from the early 2000s, the principles still apply. I recommend that book to all of my engineers.
However, I recently read The Design of Everyday Things and was really disappointed. The sections about door handles, stoves, and elevator buttons are interesting but that's only 1/3 of the book. The rest is about iterative design and system failure, for which there are better books like The Lean Startup and Drift Into Failure.
There is a lot of confusion created when we start pushing Lean Startup for non-startup situations. It isn't meant to be a universal/one-size-fits-all approach to building a business.
A startup is "an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty" (quoting the insider cover of Eric Reis's The Lean Startup). If there isn't extreme uncertainty, then it isn't a great fit as an overall strategy.
On the other hand, the LS counterpoint would be that you'll miss considerable insights if you rely on existing knowledge/research (Ford's classic "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse" quote....)
After reading '
The Lean Startup' I've decided to start a pet project where I could apply lean ideas in product development.
I'm sure there were tons of posts like this over the years but writing about it helps to consolidate the knowledge and the feedback really helps with the learning.
So please bear with me during this journey and thanks for your patience, time and knowledge shared with me.
I had the goal of learning UX basics in as little time as possible.
I took a 2 hour General Assembly course and found it incredibly useful - it sounds crazy but I feel like I learned 50% of what I needed to know about UX in just those 2 hours.
I asked some UX peeps what books they recommended and I purchased 2 and never read a single page (they were The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Sprint by Google Ventures).
For web app UX, I found this 30 minute video extremely useful (great to see how a non-design person might make something, then how that same non-design person can change the primitive app they made into something very nice!).
Design for Non-Designers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21byk2WWz3k
If you're an engineer looking to try bootstrapping a business (as opposed to going the venture capital route), try the “Startups For the Rest of Us” podcast. Start from the beginning. Or startupbook.net for mostly the same content in book form.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.
Indeed. The OODA loop model describes how you can win a competition by responding to a changing situation on the battlefield faster than your opponent.
The Lean Startup describes basically the same thing but for civilian companies, and where the opponent is "the market" rather than a more well defined enemy.
"The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay is also a very good book on this subject.
I think "
The Lean Startup" is a good book - it presents a model for creating a successful business which diverges from older more traditional business thinking. Some successful technology companies feel the same way. I also think books like this should be read as guideposts, not as some orthodoxy. If a suggestion from the book goes against particular circumstances or common sense, you do what your common sense tells you.
Nonetheless, they seem to have missed important lessons from the book. Or re-learned them rather. The odd thing is they then claim the book does not cover these things, and distracted them from these problems. I don't understand why this is said, since the book does cover these things.
The blog post says:
> Lean Startup principles distracted us from four livelihood-threatening fundamentals. First, you need rigorous product management. Don’t speculate. Build no feature unless you understand it thoroughly and have unshakeable evidence that multiple customers need it --urgently.
But this lesson learned is one of the Lean Startup principles.
From "The Lean Startup":
"For example, how many features do we really need to include to appeal to early adopters? Every extra feature is a form of waste, and if we delay the test for these extra features, it comes with a tremendous potential cost in terms of learning and cycle time. The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time."
...I quote only one paragraph from the Lean Startup, but the idea about no excessive features in an MVP is repeated throughout the book.
It's possible the Lean Startup approach has some holes in it, but warning against too many features in an MVP is not one of them.
So, being fairly recent to Silicon Valley myself, I would say without a doubt, start-up reading is insanely helpful. I'd start with some of the books with lots of amazing start-up lessons like
the Lean Startup and read blogs from other entrepreneurs and notable VCs (Paul Graham, Bothsidesofthetable, AVC, et al). Hacker News is also a pretty great community to search for help on stuff as it comes up.
Beyond doing lots of reading, I'd say, it depends. The start-up mantra is, build something people want. If you find writing/blogging can help you on that path, do it. Certainly meeting and talking to lots of potential customers is a must. Building a product is also a must. I think about the choices of what I'm doing and always try to filter it by whether or not it will get me closer to these things.
But it will really depend on your business. I'd personally recommend finding certain things to relax you that you invest some time in, whether it be meditation or exercise etc. Other than that, try to focus your energy on the next best thing that will get you closer to customers.
AREAS
--------
Software Quality or Fintech. Don't waste a good team on something like a Kale Smoothie Delivery Service For Beardy Hipsters. Software Quality is a huge, growing issue - we have more and more young/new coders arriving, massively increasing demand for code, and yet no government enforced standards (such as those found in Law, Architecture and Accounting). The industry is suffering the exact same issues that Fred Brooks wrote about 50 years ago, despite all our modern frameworks and IDEs, because we're just doing more stuff with fewer people. Starting points: The Open Group (and TOGAF), ITIL, MinistryofTesting.com
INSPIRATION
------
Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was deliberately put into a wide variety of situations and experiences to inspire his imagination and fuel his emotional responses. Get out of starbucks, do crazy shit and get uncomfortable - allow it to fuse emotion and desire for change, because that's where motivation comes from. (related: read Think and Grow Rich if you haven't already)
FROM IDEA TO BUSINESS
---------------
Read 'The E-myth revisited' and 'The Lean Startup'
What's the definition of an MVP, a minimum viable product?
According to The Lean Startup by Eric Ries it's - and I'm paraphrasing here - the minimum set of features that allows you to validate a marketing hypothesis. An MVP therefore can be considered an experimental setup that allows you to measure and learn in order to use that information to build a better product in the next iteration.
How that validation and the minimal setup required for it looks like entirely depends on the product, which is why setting a hard time limit that's equally applicable to each product category probably isn't going to work.
The shorter the time between turnarounds (i.e. between build-measure-learn cycles) the better.
Some of best initial MVPs are simple websites describing the product and showing a call-to-action button. If a sufficient number of potential customers click that button that's validated learning and an indicator for you to build a more sophisticated version of that product.
Thanks for reply. I've already read
The Lean Startup. The reason why I say 99% I'm sure that it'll be successful, is I talk to 23 of my potential costumers and 22 of them said Yes I would definitely buy your product, I like it and I need it. One of them said, mmm I must see the software now I can't tell anything. It's related to medicine, and because me too have this kind of problem and all other my doctor friends, I think it will work.
Some time ago I've tried to learn Ruby on Rails but in my first week I saw that it's not that easy. I've learned how to make a website, blog etc., but making complex softwares are too hard for me. I need some time, which I don't have. Every workday I must be at the clinic and I have too many patients, I come home very tired, even though I work on my startup.
One thing I don't understand, why should one learn to code, if he has enough money to hire someone to code? I always see everywhere that founders must learn to code. Why? I understand that it will save money and you can do whatever you want, you'll have freedom by coding. But is it worth it? To be able to code as an average hacker you should spend at least 3 month to learn to code.
A movement fueled by a book promoter with no notable track record of success for what he is preaching? Yeah, it was a fad.
To be fair, Ries stole a lot of nice bits from different schools of thought. There's stuff his books that actually works.
But you would have to be soft in the head to think that his book represented wisdom. In fact, wisdom does not come from a book – it comes from reading a lot of books, making a lot of mistakes, working with a lot of people, building a lot of stuff, and still understanding that this does not necessarily represent something that can be distilled into bullet proof heuristics. There's always unseen and uncounted factors that you will miss.
In contact with large, established organisations this book tends to produce cargo cults. Simplistic management self-help literature combined with institutional mediocrity, stupidity, fear of change, and hard-shelled delusion is a horrible mix.
The good thing is that these cargo cults tend to die after a few years. The bad thing is that anything associated with them then gets tainted.
The Lean Startup was a management fad and it didn't make people any smarter. It just gave them different ceremonies to perform in order to feel good about themselves. And as all fads, it has now passed. It is okay to move around the cabin and think for yourself again.
I would recommend "Functional Stupidity" by Mats Alvesson as a form of inocculation against this type of self-pleasuring heuristic-seeking.
Read the Lean Startup, I think it is helpful for software entrepreneurs
The Lean Startup was never written to help startups, it was written to bolster Eric Ries's enterprise consulting.
I suppose I wasn't very clear, but what I was trying to say is that a lot of entrepreneurs are turning to Lean for a framework that will lead them to success. That's about as big of a misunderstanding as thinking being able to predict the weather will allow you to force a sunny day tomorrow. Eric Ries has never claimed to be able to do the latter, and I was just pointing that out. But right up there with misunderstanding #1 about Lean (i.e., "Lean means bootstrapped cheap right?") has got to be this particular misunderstanding.
What I meant by jury is still out, is that we might find that the framework suggested in The Lean Startup actually increases success rates amongst startups in addition to being a model for revealing truth. Revealing truth faster will allow startups to extend their runway and if we find that most successful businesses only require X pivots on average before they start to profitable, we very well might see startups be able to accomplish these X pivots succeed where they may have followed a more traditional launch and pray model and achieved fewer than X pivots, running out of runway.
If it sounds like I'm trying to be negative about the book, I'm not. It's fantastic and I'm absolutely suggesting everybody buy a copy :P
I really enjoyed and got value from books about companies/people I admire; Hatching twitter, In the Plex, Elon Musk, etc.
More specific topics, however:
* "what every body is saying" - how to read/understand body language
* "an astronauts guide to life on earth" - by Chris Hadfield, lots of good general advice
* "speed reading" - for digesting information quickly (albeit, I find with less depth)
* "The 8 traits successful people have in common" - kinda painfully obvious advice, but often it's the context and stories that help you digest a message
* "the lean startup" - wasn't mindblowing but looks aligned with what you've been reading, still worth reading.
Really interesting explanation.
I bought 2 books today.
The Lean Startup - (Kindle edition) $12.99
Design for Hackers - (Dead tree edition) $25.32
1.) It's surprising to me that The Lean Startup is priced at 12.99 if they give amazon 70% of the royalties. Seems like they should have priced it at 9.99.
2.) Design for Hackers is a book where illustrations matter. Paying for the dead tree version is better. At only a few bucks off the dead tree version, the Kindle version doesn't seem fairly priced considering the degraded reading experience.
This... sort your ideas in terms of which ones you like the most - if you like them equally, do a coin flip - as someone said, if you want the coin to land on one side, you actually had a preference.
Talk them over with someone you trust - never keep ideas only to yourself, that's not a good idea.
Then, do some kind of experiment to validate your idea. Do a very early MVP, a "pretotype" - you might want to take a look at the Design Thinking, there's lot of material, but what you want to know is Pretotyping - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4AqxNekecY
It's tied to the "Fail Fast" mantra :) , and the Lean Startup by Eric Ries, or my favourites, Steve Blank and Alex Osterwalder - see this slideshow:
http://www.slideshare.net/Alex.Osterwalder/successful-entrep...
I'm doing something of the sort - a very early pretotype to have a starting point to talk with my potential customers and discover their REAL needs (aka what they WOULD pay money for :) ). Remember, "no plan survives contact with the enemy".
I felt The Lean Startup could've been written in one-fourth of the amount of pages Ries used. There was a lot of fluff to wade through and I kept thinking "Come on, come on! Where's the good stuff? Where are the principles and case studies?" Perhaps I took the book a bit too seriously and had high expectations going in – I took notes and was really intent on studying the book – so perhaps one would get more out of it if used for more casual reading.
> In his influential 2011 book
The Lean Startup, Eric Ries advises companies entering a new market to develop a "minimum viable product"—the simplest product good enough to attract paying customers. This strategy allows a company to begin selling real products to real customers—and get real market feedback—as quickly as possible.
I think the problem is that they're only interested in selling fully autonomous self-driving vehicles. There's very little market advantage in selling a "mostly" self-driving car, and Waymo doesn't want to be in generic car sales for years until they're ready. So they have to hold out for the 0 to 100 switch flip.
And they don't get to make mistakes and iterate on core functionality, so they have to wait. People's lives and schedules will be at the mercy of these vehicles, in a wide variety of operating contexts. They have to get it 100% right. If they kill people the brand itself is potentially dead.
So the picture is they need to go 0 to 100 with near 100% accuracy. Anything less is at best brand dilution or at worst corporate suicide.
Tesla's approach matches the MVP idea more closely since they can add small features incrementally. Presumably their eventual goal is to be able to say "with this update your car is now fully autonomous". But they're in the business of selling cars to begin with, so every release short of full autonomy is A-OK. Autonomy is a feature, not the product.
I'm dyslexic, I hate reading. I've always taken the attitude of 'just do it' and 'learn from mistakes' but a couple of weeks ago I decide I will start reading at least a book a month.
After reading the Lean Startup I feel like I've learnt more about building Startups than what I have reading various startup related articles on HN all year.
I'm sure this isn't the case with all books but I wouldn't agree that it's better just to go out there and try to do stuff you don't really understand. You'll probably just be wasting your time in most cases.
But the thing that caught on about the idea of a "lean startup" in the area I live in (Salt Laje City) wasn't so much the concept of "it takes less money to start a business now" as "your customers know what they want more than you do." Because of this, every investor instructs you to read a book called "Nail It Then Scale It," which is a dumbed down version of
The Lean Startup, which is a dumbed down version of Four Steps to the Epiphany.
The process is explained like this. "You have an idea. But is it validated? Go ask a bunch of people if they think it's a good idea." People aren't encouraged to build a minimum viable product to iterate on first.
I see this as a huge step backward, removing the intuition of a founder and killing serious innovation. The thing is this model works great for some SaaS companies that try to figure out which software is needed in industry X then create it for them. But that path of entrepreneurship makes me cringe. That sounds like no fun at all. Will it be successful? Sure, a bunch of $1-50 million companies will come out of that, but just building stuff people tell you to? No thanks.
The truest entrepreneurship, or at least what I want to be involved in, is where you operate according to your own vision and intuition, and give people something they had never imagined. That's incredibly hard to do, but that's what's so exciting about building companies, at least to me.
- The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
- Start with No by Jim Camp
- How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
- The Everything Store by Brad Stone
- The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly
Thanks for posting your insider's view. I agree their mistakes are not unique, but the scale of the failure and the level of dumbness makes them a much bigger failure than most.
They started in 2013, long after books like "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" explained exactly why scaling up before you have traction is a huge mistake. They could have learned the "this isn't working" lesson for an order of magnitude less money. If they had done that, they a) would have had capital to recover from their early mistakes, and b) would have been much better placed to find that low-cost solution.
When I look at a crater like that, I think about the 50+ seed rounds (or 20 A rounds or whatever) that could have happened but didn't because they got high on their own slide decks. They blew up not because they couldn't have discovered these problems, but because they didn't want to.
Yup, and the process has been crystallized in a book called The Lean Startup.
Oh, I forgot
Get into a mastermind group (or two)
Listen to "startup for the rest of up" podcast
Listen to "the startup chat"
Attend MicroConf Europe
Read books like "the lean startup", traction, smartcuts, the war of art, the dip, etc...
> For those expecting a detailed step-by-step roadmap of
the Lean Startup, you're likely to be disappointed. The subject is simply too large to be covered in one book, and many of the individual concepts have already been covered in other sources (Eric does a great job of suggesting further reading).
This book makes my cynic sense tingle.
Anyone have a list of the further reading, because what I'm interested in are concrete things to do, not "high-level" concepts.
> Eric has done a great job of providing examples of the Lean Startup in the context of large organizations such as Intuit and IGN, and devotes the last few chapters of the book to this very topic
I think big companies are the target market for his book. He would like to sell his consulting services to them.
Nothing wrong with that - he seems like a really bright guy with a lot of good ideas, who does indeed know his stuff, and could provide a lot of value to companies. He also "walked the walk", having a successful company of his own. It's just that I don't know if real startups will derive that much value from the book, from what I've read of it.
Here's the top review for it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3287ICLQ9STI3/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...
Not entirely positive...
I wish you had read
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It stresses the fact of build a Mean Viable Product very early on and testing hypothesis like "will artists pay for this service" in a real life scenario with an ok product. Aardvark did this in a really cool way (check Aardvark out).
Also, there is a notion amongst us entrepreneurs to persevere amongst all odds. This might be dangerous at times. There might be a massive market for your product yet you have approached it in the wrong way. The thing is, if you have no data, it is very difficult to know what REALLY went wrong. For example: Drew Houston from Dropbox early on stated that selling Dropbox through adwords was costing them something like 300 dollars per acquisition, once they introduced their double-sided referral scheme Dropbox started selling like mad. It was what Eric Ries calls a Pivot.
Hi, I'd suggest that you read
The Lean Startup if you haven't, it should put you on the right track to determine priorities.
Web development is a beast and very different from traditional thick clients as you often have to cater for multiple types of users (roles & permissions) as well as multiple portals (different user interfaces and interaction based on users). Most projects would typically require at least two distinct portals: traditional user portal and administration portal. For franchises there are usually two levels of administration (top level/standard level) that requires different views of the data (ex. across the franchise for administrators and impersonation of standard franchisees).
In my experience there isn't really a simple crud application - the information you collect depends on the functionality you provide. Many users is also very abstract as it will impact your infrastructure requirements - too many unnecessary abstraction layers will really slow down development but is typically required for SOA/N-Tier/CQRS stacks.
My advice is simple: Pick one thing and go through the process of validated learning. It's possible to run a successful business on an adhoc stack - it's not required to run perfect software from the beginning, but flexibility and adaptability sure helps. I'd almost say build something quick and dirty that you can change/scrap easily depending on your business requirements till you reach the point of the business being profitable, then you can invest more into it.
Context: Eric Reis is the writer of "The Lean Startup" and the person who coined the term MVP.
Colloquial use: "We were working on an enterprise database solution, then pivoted to a social network for toddlers."
Intended use: "We were working on a time tracking application for freelance designers, and pivoted to making it for lawyers instead."
There are lots of kinds of pivots (customer segment, platform, channel, value capture, engine of growth etc) - in essence, it's about taking what you've learned so far, and using that knowledge to tweak your approach to solving the problem you're working on.
Eric Ries' 'The Lean Startup' is the canonical reference for this stuff.
I just added these books to my "To Get" list.. Which is already large.
As a broke fresh college graduate, one of the most widely talked about books (and one I actually bought myself) was Eric Ries' The Lean Startup. It really helped me feel like I had a sense of direction instead of "thinking I knew" something,
Hi Eric! I enjoyed "
The Lean Startup" and I think the approach for the new book is very interesting.
Besides establishing the backer-only discussion community, what other lean methodologies are you using to write this book?
Along those lines, have there been any significant pivots yet? Obviously, the kickstarter seems to be doing well at over 3.5x pledged over the goal. Do you think that this is validation of the new content that the book promises to deliver or is it simply riding the coat-tails of the previous success you had with "The Lean Startup"? How are you measuring success?
I only now noticed that there's also a Reddit AMA, apologies if you've answered in that thread already.
'- At the moment we are doing at least $20k per month since we launched our mobile app.'
You're making money now which is way more than where many other start ups are at.
I think you would benefit from rallying around an established approach to business and development which is well documented and outlines some key principals and a philosophy for getting things done. 'The lean startup' and 'getting real' etc by 37 Signals come to mind and reading either of those books will help you progress.
Further it sounds like you collectively are at the classic trap outlined in the book 'the e-myth' where you are both working hard in-the-business but not taking time to work on-the-business. Have a strategic weekend away at a beach house or such like.
Sounds like you also are needing more assistance generally attend done more local tech events and startup events find other you can bounce these sort of issues off in person. Working a few days a week at a tech orientated co-working space can work well.
Finally let what the customers want inform you, get closer to your best customers, visit them if you can, focus on the features and tech approach that will help you best customers the most. The lean startup is great for helping you get this focus clear. Finally it sounds like you and your co-founder need to have a serious talk, might need to grab a beer together and just have an honest duscussion of where you are at and whats not working right now and what you could imagine it could be if you guys got a few things sorted, seems like ur not on the same page right now IMHO. Good luck
It is more than a business plan. I have been reading Eric Ries's
The Lean startup, and I find that the ideas shown there are more focused as defining a process to deal with uncertainty in startups using scientific methods. It is amazing!.
It definitely helps your business plan, but I think it goes beyond just the business plan, it actually provides a process to align and direct your startup to success.
Reading “
The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries.
He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work.
He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards:
1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis.
2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”).
3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn.
4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat.
Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning.
Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive.
It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
The Startup Owner's manual is a very thorough book. It's meant to be used. Much more practical than Lean Startup in my opinion, though a tougher read.
The Lean Startup is a good high level overview of the underlying concept. I found it a bit overly focussed on launching "lean startups" within big companies. This may have been to boost consulting. Whatever the reason, it made the book less relevant to my experience.
But the Lean Startup is a quick, easy read, and you will get some actionable knowledge out of it if you're not already familiar with the ideas.
If you already know the concept, but want to put it into practice, go with Steve Blank's book.
The field is maturing. People are starting to figure out what Toyota learned sixty years ago and American manufacturers figured out thirty years ago: process matters. Funny thing about the Agile manifesto, if you read it carefully, they wrote in 2001 (?) that "we've discovered from experience that these things work" (I'm paraphrasing) but they do not say "we have theory to explain why these things work". It turns out that ten years later, we're learning that the reason they work is that they either make the process and its problems visible (Scrum, Kanban) or offer techniques to improve the process (Scrum, XP). Beyond software development, Lean concepts (again adapted from manufacturing) are being applied to entrepreneurship. Why wouldn't an entrepreneur who's read The Lean Startup want someone specifically to focus on the "ops" of his process? I admit that I don't think meal ordering processes are likely to be a meaningful bottleneck, but who can say?
Wow, the author of that FC piece pretty much completely misunderstands the ideas behind the Lean Startup approach. That article is riddled with so many invalid assertions and misunderstandings as to be effectively useless. It adds nothing to the discussion about how to build a startup and simply makes the author look uninformed.
Anyone who's seriously interested in Lean Startup and Customer Development would be better served to read "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank, then Eric's book "The Lean Startup" before making any judgment on their merits.
I had the same realization few months ago with a product I have been growth hacking for too long, improving on feedback, A/B testing, only to figure out people don't
really care.
>> people want everything for free
just everything of that value to them. Give them a software that turns them 20 yrs old and they will pay.
If you are about to give up on putting more energy into it, talk to your friends maybe someone wants to jump on board and put energy into selling it.
Hey, you are around 22, already experiencing a seeming-to-fail business. Awesome. Extract your take-aways, learn, move on. Go and read The Lean Startup if you haven't read it yet.
If he hasn't already, the author should really read
The Lean Startup before criticizing the term that it popularized. In the context of the Lean Startup, the V in MVP doesn't refer to financial viability.
"To apply the scientific method to a startup, we need to identify which hypotheses to test. I call the riskiest elements of a startup's plan, the parts on which everything depends, leap-of-faith assumptions."
"Once clear on these leap-of-faith assumptions, the first step is to enter the Build phase as quickly as possible with a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP is that version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development time." - Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
An MVP is simply the smallest possible product that is capable of testing your assumptions about the value you think you can provide to customers. An MVP doesn't have to represent a viable business model, it only has to provide a viable means of testing your assumptions.
The passage about IMVU from Ries' book,
The Lean Startup:
"She downloads the product, and then we say 'Okay, invite one of your friends to chat.' And she says, 'No way!' We say, 'Why not?' And she says, 'Well, I don't know if this thing is cool yet. You want me to risk inviting one of my friends? What are they going to think of me? If it sucks, they're going to think I suck, right?' And we say, 'No, no it's going to be so much fun once you get the person in there; it's a social product.' She looks at us, her face filled with doubt; you can see that this is a deal breaker."
From what I've read in blogs and The Lean Startup talking to the people you expect to use your product is the way to go. If you're selling an application for teachers aren't the teachers the people who will know if they'd use it (to an extent)?
Prior, books like
The Founder's Dilemma and
The Lean Startup are geared towards people who want to build the stereotypical startup. I have no desire to take on those kinds of risk, even for the possibility of the outsized rewards promised. I just want control of my time, where I spend it, what I do with it. This book, more than any other book I've read since
The Four-Hour Workweek promises to deliver on that wish.
The problem with The Four-Hour Workweek is that Tim Ferriss is a productivity monster and his muse method only really works for people like him. Four hours a week after months / years of 80 hour weeks.
Zero to One - Peter Thiel
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
This list, compiled by Chris Johnson, includes a book called "Trust Me, I'm Lying", by Ryan Holiday.
One thing to note is that Chris worked with Ryan and has a close relationship with him (Chris actually wrote the trailer for Ryan's book).
And judging from Ryan's usual tactics, Chris wrote this list simply to push Ryan's book, which he cleverly included alongside clear classics like The Lean Startup, In The Plex, and The Innovator's Dilemma.
Edit: Here are some other tactics cleverly used by Chris/Ryan in the post...
1) they mentioned Ryan Holiday in the first couple paragraphs so that the reader would have some familiarity with his name and be even more likely to click through to his book
2) they included Ryan's book early in the list but not as the first, and specifically after at least one book that you probably haven't heard of, but that seems credible
3) they marked The Innovator's Dilemma (arguably the most well known book in the list) as "optional," leading one to perceive that the other books in the list that aren't marked as optional must be even better
Edit: evidence for Chris and Ryan's relationship... https://www.google.com/search?q=chris+johnson+ryan+holiday
Have you had experience with his book? I'm looking to see if I should consider picking that up or The Lean Startup.
Three rewrites and not yet out of (or even in) beta:
http://nuuton.com/If you are seriously hoping for this to be a full time business then I would strongly recommend you read "The Lean Startup" or similar. This blind technical pursuit of perfection is a pretty classic approach for us techies and something i'm guilty of myself. It was actually that process that made me realise what my strengths actually were and what I would need to do to start a world class company (work with great people).
If this isn't really a commercial project then just ignore the above and happy hacking, perhaps you should consider open sourcing it?
You should read up on
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Google's strategy to release everything in pre-alpha stage, then slowly improve it from user feedback -- might not be the optimal marketing strategy that Apple perfected. But it's the optimal strategy to build an actual great product.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-ebook/d...
This is exactly the problem that makes the Lean Startup so interesting and radical. Everything we think we know about business has ingrained in us a sense of change equating to failure. We build up inflated expectations for our non-existant products and business models to employees, to investors, to friends and family, all the while ignoring the fact that all the assumptions on which we've based our businesses are just that, guesses. Then, when one or more of the assumptions is invalidated, we're so embarrassed about being wrong that we try to persevere even when we
know we're on the wrong track, and then run full speed into the wall instead of changing course.
Eric Ries has some really insightful ideas about how to turn these problems around, and if you haven't already read The Lean startup I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-...
I'd add
Business @ The Speed of Thought by Bill Gates. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh if you want.... It's a seriously interesting book. And this is coming from a guy who's a huge F/OSS ideologue and who really isn't a fan of Microsoft or billg. But I can give the Devil his due when necessary, and B@TSOT is a worthwhile read.
Of course, you might ask "Why, mindcrime, why do you recommend a billg book so highly?" Fair question... I find it interesting for the vision that Gates lays out regarding how organizations should use technology to operate more efficiently. He leaned heavily on the analogy with the human autonomic nervous system back in those days, and was throwing around the term "Digital Nervous System[1]" a lot... and I think that that concept A. makes and lot of sense, and B. is still - after all these years - largely unfulfilled.
If you're in the business of software (at least the business of business software) I think the Gates book is still very inspirational and could seed some very interesting ideas, vis-a-vis technology in organizations.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Nervous_System
Other than that, my own list would include:
The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Positioning - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Repositioning - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
Differentiate or Die - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
Intuition? Hell no, before reading TFSTTE, I would have done exactly the same thing. It's only because I was fortunate enough to be exposed to that that I now know better.
I can say that in my experience reading Four Steps or The Lean Startup and actually doing a startup are completely different things.
Absolutely, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Note that I didn't say "OMG, you guys suck, if you'd just read this book you'd all be millionaires and dining with Zuckerberg now". But the whole "Do a big-bang PR launch before you've proven anything" is textbook "how to fail as a startup", if you believe that @sgblank's stuff is valid.
I thought I had the whole lean startup thing down, but I've messed up so many times.
Tell me about it, we learn more everyday. I'm not saying any of this is easy, mind you. It's just that this particular example jumped out at me for being such an egregious example of such a common and well-cited mistake, that it's a little hard to believe.
And hey, I haven't proven anything yet, so nobody should feel any particular reason to care about my opinion. I'm just a guy who's a bit drunk, sitting in front of the computer a little bit bored before bedtime, and blabbing about stuff.
Life changing books...
I read Decartes in high school during the teenage existential crises we all go through and it blew my mind. Opened me up to the power of thinking from first principles and a love of philosophy and questioning everything. Cogito, ergo sum!
"Atlas Shrugged" gets a lot of hate, but it's a phenomenally important book. It was one of those that completely consumed me during the read. I could not put it down – stayed up late, work up early, and rushed home from work to get back to it.
"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.
Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good.
Thanks Eric, I really enjoyed
the Lean Startup. I'm an engineer, and I like to work on valuable and interesting problems.
1. What do you do when your market is so small that you can't grab some teenager off the street to try your product? I'm thinking of the people who buy X-ray machines for the airport, for example.
2. I know people who pretend to like ideas from your book. One guy applauds the idea of failing while also failing to do validated learning. Can you or I or anyone fix that? For example, we'll never test weather a user would prefer an interface other than a website.
3. How do I convince my boss that we need a research department?
4. Have you read Dealers of Lightning (about Xerox Parc) what is your take on it?
Did you see the bald guy with cream on his head is reading "The Lean Startup" at about 25s?
"There is no worldwide directory of people and, especially, (outdoors) clubs and events and it sucks"
There you go.
I would recommend asking a few outdoors friends whether they feel the same, and see if bringing about this worldwide directory would be a great thing to them.
To me, it sounds like a great opportunity because you have a specific audience to interact with, and there are opportunities to turn it into a business; think of outdoors venues and outdoor equipment companies who would want to promote their products and services to that range of people.
I would recommend asking friends, and in terms of further research, I recommend 2 books: Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston, and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Go for it!
I would recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. I wouldn't want to try and generalize the book, but essentially you propose a hypothesis, and then test your hypothesis using a Build/Measure/Learn feedback loop. This creates an environment that trains you to validate your ideas/approach, which in turn facilitates the most effective use of your (and your team’s) time and resources. Anyway, getting back to your question, I would do both concurrently and use the feedback from your customers to validate the features / functionality you build into your MVP.
This rings very similar to the Startup Way, Eric Ries’s new book about how larger organizations need to functionalize entrepreneurship and the successor to the Lean Startup. I’m reading it right now and having started an internal startup at a public software company years ago, it’s really quite good. My guess is Ben is reading it right now based on some of the verbiage like “atomized teams” that Eric uses repeatedly in the book.
And judging from Ryan's usual tactics, Chris wrote this list simply to push Ryan's book, which he cleverly included alongside clear classics like The Lean Startup, In The Plex, and The Innovator's Dilemma.Trust Me, I'm Lying just might wind up as a classic itself! OK, I know it's controversial, as is the author, and I get why. But there's some solid stuff in that book. I learned a lot from reading it, and I think there's some actionable advice in there, even if you don't want to go quite as "underhanded" as Holiday may have on occasion.
Note: I have no relationship with Ryan Holiday whatsoever, beyond having purchased and read a copy of his book.
I get the impression that you want to design stuff, and it's incidental that startups let you do it how you want. Judging by the "I've spent 1000s of hours (I kid you not) designing my products", you're doing the same as what I do with development, and I'd be wary of that.
Maybe, start by trying to let your tech/design be a means to an end and start by solving a problem for users. The launch websites for so many successful startups were super ugly[1]. 100's of hours per project with less than 5 users each, sounds like alarm bells to me. If you haven't already, read The Lean Startup[2]. Build MVP, validate and iterate or pivot accordingly.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...
[2] http://theleanstartup.com/
In the book, '
The Lean Startup' author Eric Ries actually used this strategy for his messaging company IMVU. Essentially he wanted to do the same thing I am doing, but for MSN, Yahoo, Aim, etc. It ended up being a catastrophic fail in one of the most read books in the startup world. Can you blame anyone for not trying it?!
Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.
I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)
There seems to be varying opinions on what a startup actually is. Some definitions focus on the ability to rapidly scale, while others emphasize the fragility of startups. For instance, Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, defines a startup as "a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty." This definition would tend to include almost every new business, while your definition of a startup would only include those which are structured for rapid growth. Maybe I'm being a bit too pedantic, but it seems the word "startup" is being used so inconsistently nowadays that it has lost a bit of its meaning.
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Lean Startup - Eric Reis
Rework - 37signals
Have you considered learning how to code? How hard is your idea to implement? I know people who were not coders at first but learned how to do it just so they could build prototypes and simple versions of the product. Check out codeacademy.com
And also this interview with YC partner Harjeet Taggar, he talks about learning how to code among other interesting stuff:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/30/y-combinator-harj-taggar-in...You should also be careful with that "99%" statement. I don't wanna discourage you or anything, but you should definitely think about validating all your assumptions before investing money and time into building your startup. I strongly recommend reading The Lean Startup.
And IMHO you should definitely have a technical co-founder. Even if you managed to save money and you can hire some decent programmers (which would be quite expensive for a student), you'll have no idea of how long it takes for something to done.
My perspective is you should listen to what your users say, but treat that as just one piece of input into what you do.
Ie, rather than this:
what we do = what users tell us
It should be:
what we do = f(what users tell us, x)
Where f is your own thinking, and x is other sources of useful data.
My feeling is that "vision" and "data" aren't in conflict -- you should attempt to integrate data into an over-riding vision, but you should be prepared to ditch or tweak the vision if it becomes too detached from reality.
I could write a lot more about this -- I think the problem goes a bit deeper than "faster horse" dynamics that some people have mentioned. The whole lean startup, listen to your customers thing is supposed to be about applying the scientific method to founding companies.
Trying out random things and recording the results might be "experimenting" in the normal sense, but it's not the scientific meaning of experimenting. You should concoct a theory and work out what you need to look for before you start looking. The Lean Startup book itself goes into a lot of depth about which metrics to track, how different marketing models require different metrics, etc (everyone thinks they know "lean concepts" because they read a few blog posts but the book goes into way more depth).
- The 4 Hours Work Week (Tim Ferriss)
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
Start talking with your intended target market to see what their thoughts are about the idea. Make a mockup and a landing page (Visuals help tremendously). Show both of these to your intended target market. Also reading books like The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. (I know everybody say's read these books but they really are helpful)
> Reading "
The Lean Startup" or "The Art of the Start" doesn't really qualify you to make such nonsensical statements about how a multi-billion-dollar publicly traded company should behave.
I've read neither, I do have a degree in economics though... does that count?
Do you have a short position on SCTY? If so, then I understand your "comments" and why you're pissed. Sorry? LOL
> He needs to have much better sense than that as a CEO, his duties to his shareholders demand it.
Last time I checked, he recused himself and the shareholders have to approve the deal ... what are you going on about?
Minimum Viable Product. Defined in the book The Lean Startup.
I'm pretty sure based on your answers you have no idea how things work in the real world. Reading "The Lean Startup" or "The Art of the Start" doesn't really qualify you to make such nonsensical statements about how a multi-billion-dollar publicly traded company should behave. A startup burning through $10M of VC funding is completely different from a publicly traded company burning through $2B in funding. You can't even justify it at this point. Tesla Energy is a dream, you can't waste $2.6B on an unproven dream and then buy a completely unprofitable cash-bleeding company when you yourself are bleeding cash. He needs to have much better sense than that as a CEO, his duties to his shareholders demand it.
In no particular order:
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
EDIT: list formatting
Sure, there are a lot of companies that initially sounded like bad ideas. But there are ideas that aren't just bad; they aren't thought through.
I hear dozens of people tell me about an idea and it's apparent that there's no chance they will succeed with this. A lot of time they're trying to enter a market they know nothing about (as this article described), for example finance students trying to do a clean-tech startup. Other times, it's the market opportunity. These ideas that suck so badly are just people who haven't been around startups to realize how to think about them. They're the kind of people who I wonder if they've ever read The Lean Startup, PG's blog, or any of the commonly-accepted startup wisdom.
I found
The Lean Startup relied heavily on anecdotes. The article gives it 5 stars, despite this being one of their main complaints about other books.
To give one example, the book talks about how in their 3d virtual chat game, IMVU, as a shortcut, they initially had the characters teleport around because they didn't have time to implement walking animations. They got some positive feedback from users about the teleporting "feature", and concluded teleporting was a great selling point and they shouldn't implement walking. The book then starts teaching what lessons you should take from this story.
However, around the same time they were making IMVU, Linden Labs made Second Life which did have walking animations and I believe was more successful than IMVU.
It was a common pattern in The Lean Startup to point to a single example that the author thinks worked out well for IMVU and extrapolate advice from it while ignoring any counter-examples.
"Multidisciplinary" means two different disciplines side-by-side. You could be a computer programmer and also a salesman, for example. "Transdisciplinary" or "interdiscipinary" means combining tools without regard for disciplinary boundaries. If you've ever read
The Lean Startup you can see how computing and sales might be combined into one problem-solving method as opposed to being two separate functions that just happen to be done by one person.
The key to the latter is to have an interesting problem to solve and then look for methods, rather than starting with a couple of methods and then looking for a problem. So my advice to you is, figure out what problem or opportunity you want to work on. Then look for tools in any discipline that will help you.
The real world? You are in the real world. There are always ways to make things better around you, no matter what situation you are in. If this is hard to think of, then start by writing 5 things that could be better/easier every day. Then increase that by 5 every day until 50. Then you will see there are opportunities everywhere. Also, I mentioned that you should read Paul Graham's essays and The Lean Startup.
I can see two questions. Let me start with books I can recommend:
(1) Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers — Weinberg, Gabriel
(2) Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't — Harnish, Verne
(3) The Lean Startup — Ries, Eric
(4) 100 Days of Growth - Sujan Patel & Rob Wormley
(5) Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose - Tony Hsieh
I recently read '
The Lean Startup' and 'The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy'. I would recommend both books.
I think 'The Lean Startup' is not just a good read for startups in the usual sense; it's also a great advise on how to handle personal projects.
With regards to 'The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy' I think the stoic view of life is great and fits well into our western mindset while still being somewhat 'zen' like. I plan to read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations at some point since it's a bit like a diary of a stoic.
I will soon start with 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage'[0] which was recommended in a previous HN thread.
---
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_Tsukuru_Tazaki_and_Hi...
I'm not sure how much of this is satire and how much is just jabs at the way things are. It reads a lot like "Cracking the Coding Career" or "
The Lean Startup": a piece written for the older (35+) generation trying to understand this modern field that generates so much money. For instance, when you're working for a startup having kids is not an attractive option. Startup hours are nothing like a 9 to 5 and insanely risky. Not to mention the cost of living if you in the Silicon Valley area.
Why wouldn't the majority of your friends on Facebook share similar political views? That's surely a factor of why you are friends in the first place. You wouldn't share a political article to them with the intention of proving an argument. There isn't much debate to be had with them.
Why would you not use small apps that make small things convenient? This is brought to attention so often in the article but it's not even unique to Silicon Valley. It's common to a whole generation.
The constant use of social media also makes it painfully obvious that this article isn't following the life of an engineer.
Most of this probably is satire, but it seems in poor taste.
No, at least based on what I've heard (I have not succeeded as an entrepreneur yet). Instead, find a problem that scratches a personal itch and is big enough to impact the country, or ideally the world. Then iterate in quick cycles, with customer feedback at each cycle. Eric Ries' 'The Lean Startup' is recommended by many. The meetups can help you get word out about your product, but so can social media, for a lot less.
In no particular order:
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
* Introducing Go, by Caleb Doxsey.
If you'd like to read what I think of these books, you can read my blog post about them here: http://aalhour.com/blog/2018/01/02/review-of-my-2017-reading...
I agreed with everything right up until the "extra time for design" section. I spent last year building a startup and have thought a lot about MVPs. Coming from a background of building big expensive systems, it took a lot to shake the mindset of "do it right from the ground up". My cofounder did a great job at pushing me towards the absolute minimal solution to learn what we wanted to learn - I don't need to spin up a backend and write CSS, I can use Wix to mock it up and see how that goes, THEN build it properly.
The idea is to learn as much as possible (read The Lean Startup if you haven't). If you build too much in one go, you're going to have tied yourself to one vision of how your users will use the product and be more closed to learning from them what they actually need. Note that you were persuaded by a designer to make the design nicer, not a user, potential user or even product manager.
What was the problem with launching, and then deciding that design was the next priority and working on it while your product was running?
[disclaimer: I definitely haven't got this figured out as we shutdown the company and I'm back building Big Expensive Systems]
A few months ago I made a post on Reddit (
http://redd.it/v8y2o) about an idea for a video game trading community. I had always wanted a way to get more value for my games but wasn't sure how much demand there was for something like this. I had recently finished reading
The Lean Startup, which talks of creating a Minimum Viable Product to get your idea out there as quick as possible. I thought this approach would work well for me so I set out to do that. I quickly threw together a bare minimum site where you could only sign up with Facebook and add the games titles that you would be willing to trade. You couldn't actually trade or really do anything at all, but I knew this would be enough to let me know if this idea was worth pursuing.
I was thinking maybe a few hundred people would see it and I'd be able to get some feedback on the idea, but within a few hours the post was at the top of r/gaming and managed to reach the front page for a while.
Since then the site has been launched and has recently came out of beta. We have over 2000 trades completed and 5000 games from 25 platforms.
If anyone has a minute to spare I'd love to hear your feedback.
No problem. Regarding the landing page, just keep it dead simple. The more stuff you add, the higher your bounce rate (people will leave). Just test some minimum feature. You can always follow up with an email with a link to a survey, which you can build on Survey Monkey or something (there may be better/cheaper tools).
For startup events, I would say just go and strike up some conversations. People are generally helpful and will share their experiences. It's a good way to learn. Speaking of, when I was first learning about startups I listened to the podcasts at the Stanford E- Corner basically non-stop: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/
I would consider studying Eric Ries and Steve Blank as well regarding "lean startups". "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" are books worth spending the money on.
It's good that you're in NYC. There's a strong community there.
Cheers!
While I agree with the basic premise of the article on complacency and lack of risk taking in innovation, there is another side to this argument that is well covered in Eric Ries's new book "
The Lean Startup" on making both innovation and learning what works more efficient.
We seem to live in an increasingly stratified society: much of the work force has obsolete skills and too often a lack of incentive to retrain while a smaller number of people are pushing the envelope on learning new ways of running businesses and new ways to develop tech.
Do you want to do this for fun or business? If purely for fun, then I don't see any major flaws in your current approach. Sure, you end up with unfinished projects but you're hopefully learning tons and having a blast.
But if you're thinking about structuring things so you can better go from ideas to businesses, you need to reevaluate your entire approach. You need tools that can practically guide you through the stages of creating a software business, not just a general philosophy of getting things done.
Currently in the startup world, there's an interesting convergence between customer development and lean as applied to tech startups. Customer development is described in Steven Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and Eric Ries' "The lean startup" is the book on lean startups. Both Blank and Ries have contributed to this convergence that I talk about at their respective sites [1] [2] but there's also overviews available [3] [4]. But why am I even recommending these two approaches? Because they cover business development from start to finish from as applied to software startups, so you know the advice is specific to our industry and very practical in nature. If you're serious about the business of software, customer development and lean startup will help you create a business with better certainty of execution and outcome. Together they provide a very potent combination of roadmap and compass, and principles and philosophy.
[1] http://steveblank.com/
[2] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/
[3] http://www.recessmobile.com/blog/my-take-on-customer-develop...
[4] http://danielmckenzie.com/blog/2010/07/design-thinking-custo...
My Modified Answer from Quora:
I'm at a start-up that is a follower of the lean startup movement, a term coined by Eric Ries.
The ideology behind a lean startup is a customer-centric approach where you build a minimum viable product (MVP) and always be learning from your customers and make changes till you build out something that they actually want to use. Be flexible on your vision, and don't waste time and resources to build out an amazing product that no one wants.
For a SaaS partner, conventions and meet ups are probably the best places to start. It helps when you're building a relationship by getting out of the office and talking to your customers, and cold calling isn't the warmest approach (duh). Meet-ups are a great opportunity to build relationships and get to know your customer's needs and eventually make the sell. As you keep talking to people, keep making notes of iterations on your product to build something that those customers want.
There are so many companies that have flopped in the past, such as WebVan, who built out expensive supply chains before really understanding their customer's needs. They were an early pioneer of e-commerce, but many argue that it grew too fast for people to really jump on board. Had they slowed down and spent time understanding their customer's needs, they wouldn't have over-invested in infrastructure.
In short, don't build out a product with all the features and functionality you want before you figure out what your customers want/need. As you talk to people about your MVP, you'll organically figure out who your pilot customers will be.
Get out of the office and talk to customers!
Suggested reading:
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (fresh off the press!)
Running Lean by Ash Maurya http://www.runningleanhq.com/
The Lean Startup - Too bad this wasn't around when I was starting my (now failed) startup 4 years ago.
Softwar - Larry Ellison's story. Fascinating read.
Games People Play - Classic by Eric Berne. Must read psychology. Short, and you will get so much out of it.
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff - Must read psychology. Short, and you will get so much out of it.
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - Will re-read soon to get to the next level.
I have to disagree with #1. The overwhelming response at this stage is a big FRIG OFF from the other end who in the past 10 years have steadily been receiving from various "disruptive" startups, who all read the same pile of garbage that is "
The Lean Startup", who all preach the same fucked up assumption- that the rest of the world has access to the same socioeconomic environment, "The Country Club", friend of a CEO father who knows people, etc.
I feel that it's no longer a merit based but short term pump and dump in which private equity is traded but not without surrendering your control as the founder and that you are now on the dole on a community of investors that trade shares for pennies and have every legitimate reason to dump it to unsuspecting public market to reap profits.
Advices like #1, In 2018, honestly irrelevant, and increasingly sounding like the new telemarketer. For instance, I repeatedly get calls or emails from a variety of SaaS founders or other developers who started their product that I've grown to detune and avoid them.
The big marketing fields are prohibitively expensive so those with the pocket can bid up and essentially deny competitors access to the same consumers.
Trying to sell something that doesn't exist can be done, but not without compromises with unclear results. Why? The power dynamic is asymmetric due to the sheer capital and a hound of top tier lawyers ready to sink their teeth into your startup.
Meaning, they can even sign a memo or an agreement to express interest and then pull out. What the fuck are you gonna do, sue a Fortune 1000 company?
If you're not familiar with the concept at all, "
The Lean Startup" isn't bad. Otherwise, it's fairly fluffy in terms of content, and you'd be better off with something like:
Nail Then Scale It: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055D7O1U/?tag=dedasys-20
I've heard good things about this too: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006UKFFE0/?tag=dedasys-20 - if anyone wants to comment on how it compares to "Nail It".
I've also got Steve Blank's book, but haven't read much of it yet. I'm signed up for the course though, and agree that he seems like a good speaker, although I haven't had much time for it yet.
I’m 37 and have recently started a role as head of product.
Although my background is in design, I’ve spent the last 15 years variously doing design, ux and web development. I got into it as the previous person left suddenly and I sort of took over and was doing it a while before it was made official.
Product management is a mix of ux, development and business, so it helps to have an interest and understanding of these things.
For me the biggest change has been going from solving problems to finding and articulating the problems for the team to solve. I’ve had to hold myself back from getting stuck in to finding answers so that I allow the team autonomy and also don’t accidentally short circuit the process.
The LEAN Startup is worth reading, as is Designing Products People Love by Scott Hurff, and The LEAN Product Playbook. Strategise by Roman Pilcher has some good stuff on business strategy and innovation theory. I signed up to a free trial with Safari Books Online and read everything I could in the time. Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning has some good videos too.
I'm 20 years old and have a web and design agency with a co-founder and currently two employees (+ flexible workers). I can relate.
When I was younger (I know how this sounds) I read "The Lean Startup" and drank the Koolaid. I was feeling like a failure because I wasn't building the next big thing (tm) although I had an IQ of 152 and wrote code since ages. I think that some aspects of the startup bubble can be seriously bad for mental health. I've learned to accept myself and the world and cut the bullshit and "will to power"-esque thinking. Sometimes I still have feelings of unmet potential, but fortunately I now understand that a fast-growing startup is one of many solutions (and sometimes not even a solution at all). I can now learn to allow myself to find peace.
This is actually directly advocated in The Lean Startup book, with the example of a shopping app where the employees would go themselves to pick up food before building the actually shopping app. This sounds great for when the products works in the end, but I always wondered if this is really what we should be doing if we find out later that something actually can't be done or scaled well.
I don't get what he's got against eBooks. Half the comments are asking him about Kindle versions.
Looks like it could be a very interesting book though, if it's written top to bottom, and not just a bunch of his blog stuff lashed together with duct tape and twine.
I recently read The Lean Startup, against my better instincts, and was duly disappointed. A few key ideas and lots of what felt like hand waving to me. I think Eric is the real deal, but somehow managed to produce a book aimed at the management of large companies, rather than people running actual startups. Steve's book, on the other hand, promises "lots of details" and "metrics that matter". Hopefully, actual things that can be measured, rather than "innovation accounting"...
I'm surprised nobody has asked this, but do you know
why your company failed?
1.5 years in development is too long to be in a silo without getting feedback from prospective customers; read about Customer Development (Steve Blank's "4 steps to the Epiphany" book) and Lean Startup methods (Eric Ries - The Lean Startup). And yes, you do not need to write a single line of code to get feedback from prospective customers. "Hey Mr. Customer, I was thinking of building X to solve your problem Y. What do you think?" is the cheapest thing you can do before you write a single LOC, the simplest question you can ask to gauge their immediate reaction.
Steve Blank says the difference between successful and failed startups is that the successful ones truly understand why customers buy. If people are buying from you but you don't understand why, you just got lucky and you won't know what hit you when your luck runs out, could be a market shift, or induced by a competitor. I'd humbly assert, if you failed, try to understand why you failed, so that you don't repeat your mistakes. If you don't know why you failed, then you just might repeat them - and thus that 1.5 years may very well just be useless (although I'm positive it's not). Write it down in words and internalize your lessons.
Also, reasons for failure could be further divided into things under your control and things not under your control. If it wasn't under your control, don't beat yourself over it. If it was, now you're that much wiser. Without a great wave, the best surfer in the world is still just some guy on a surf board.
Good luck and all the best!
1) Never Split the Difference
Really, this book changed how I view communication and negotiation forever. It will definitely impact your life positively.
2) The Lean Startup
A classic, but worth re-reading. Everytime I read the book, it leaves a greater imprint on how I think.
3) The Obstacle is the Way
How to turn obstacles into solutions. This book is a great treatise on Stoicism via examples. I read the book at the start of the year which to mentally set the right tone for the months to follow. The book "coaches" the reader in the basic tenets of the Stoic philosophy by drawing examples from history and sports, by the end of the book you are left with a more intuitive and practical understanding of Stoicism than an academic one.
Hmm. Was this written in 1999? Or perhaps the notion of
the Lean Startup is not understood in London?
Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist.
Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them.
What's missing?
NON-FICTION
1) Thinking fast and slow
(currently reading)
2) The Lean Startup
(Read when I joined founders institute, was helpful in quite number ways. Doubled it with same course on udemy )
3) Banker to the poor - Md. Yunus
(Got a chance to interview Md.Yunus,)
4) Business Model Generation http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/book
(Quite a read, for business model generation. One can explain whole biz plan in 1 page)
5) The Dilbert principle
6) Steve Jobs
FICTION
1) The Hobbit
2) Ulysses
3) Sense of ending
Hmm... there have been a few, and I'd have to look through my "read books stack" to remind myself exactly which ones fell into 2011 and not prior years... but offhand, I'd mention:
Fiction:
Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson
Zero History - William Gibson
11/22/63 - Stephen King
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
Non-fiction:
Ghost in the Wires - Kevin Mitnick
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Built To Last - Jim Collins
Business Model Generation - Alexander Osterwalder
Started, but unfinished, may yet make the list:
Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard
Reamde - Neal Stephenson
The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
> If that’s what you’re looking for, we recommend Eric Ries’
The Lean Startup, a must-read in our opinion.
There are better books, I think. I've just read Nail It Then Scale It, which is mostly better than Ries' book. Steve Blank's new book also comes to mind, and Running Lean also comes highly recommended from others I know. Ries' book is too generic and leaves you without much of substance once you're done with it.
Tips? Not as such, since I don't know anything about you or your business. But I can share some reading suggestions - things that helped me and that I consider valuable:
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Positioning - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Repositioning - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
Differentiate or Die - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
The Ultimate Marketing Plan - Dan S. Kennedy
The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes
All Marketers Are Liars - Seth Godin
The Purple Cow - Seth Godin
And add in one generic "Marketing 101" textbook. Find something at a used bookstore or order used on Amazon. Something like this, or similar:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0132177153/ref=sr_1_4...
I guess there actually is a tip embedded in all that... "learn as much as you can about marketing". I'm still learning myself, and I've only learned enough to have a vague notion of how much I don't know, but I've gained a real appreciation for the importance of this stuff.
I don't think there is an specific list that fits all entrepreneurs, but this is the list that has helped me a lot on getting things up and running:
* The Lean Startup
* Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup.
* Startup@Cloud: 33 tips for running your company using cloud-based software.
It seems like you're trying to apply a Business to Business (B2B) mentality to a business to consumer relationship. Is there a reason for that? Is that your background? The problem is, business to consumer is low margin, high volume. You need to find a way to make that work.
It sounds like you want to do a LawPivot, for general consumer application. You want to build a MARKET, which is the hardest thing imo to do in the startup world. Too many variables, and even with millions of dollars and a great founding team, you can fail (Airtime didn't fail, but for what they were hyped up as, I think it did). If you want to really do this, start with a small sector.
Btw, LawPivot would not work over tweets - it would ruin their professional presence (at least currently). Maybe you want to make a 411 tweet-bot of sorts? Where you tweet a question, and you answer it?
I feel as though you're hitting several different things at once, try to hit one thing, HARD.
Also, automate business to consumer, IN THE LONG TERM. Short term, anything goes. Mechanical Turk, you and a friend doing google searches after reading tweets, anything. Get paid, then automate. This is covered in "The Lean Startup", required reading.
That was just my stream of consciousness, thanks for reading!
Question everything - make each person defend their position and assumptions in a meaningful and considered way. We use red teaming on proposals for development work. This is where feature requests are peer reviewed to sense check the thinking and then we also follow Eric Reis principles from "The Lean Startup" which covers dealing with this type of thing in some detail.
Last week WSJ reported Jeffrey Immelt is the frontrunner for Uber's next CEO. Out of the blue this article pops up. With sections about "Transformation", his connections to Silicon Valley, how he's hip and watches Netflix;
with quotes like
>"We were a classic conglomerate. Now people are calling us a 125-year-old start-up."
>"The two things that influenced me the most were Marc Andreessen’s 2011 Wall Street Journal article, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” and The Lean Startup—Eric Ries’s book, which I literally read in a day."
The PR spin machines are already churning.
"If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders are clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers." - Sun Tzu
I think startups have a lot to learn from the military community. Yes, for the most part modern militaries are extensive bureaucracies, but military thinkers and intellectuals are really at the forefront of management science. John Boyd basically wrote The Lean Startup 30 years before Eric Ries did.
True! In the book '
The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries, he actually had the same idea for a growth strategy for his messaging platform IMVU. It is not a new concept.
The idea is this breaks down the barrier to entry to start incorporating multiple unifications. For example, we start with messaging and next we unify emails. From there we unify live streaming, and then something else. I am not saying these are the things we are going to go on to unify, but that is the concept.
If you read The Lean Startup there are examples in there. I mentioned above WPEngine did it, but also look at Food on the Table. These stories show the lean startup done right. The story above is so riddled with holes. It's like the guys heard some buzzwords, read a wikipedia page, and ran with their limited understanding of it.
I agree. I like the section in
The Lean Startup on the related idea of the 'concierge MVP', whereby you're serving your initial customers very manually to really understand their needs before investing heavily in automated systems.
The example from the book that comes to mind (and I forget the name of the startup) was a grocery delivery app. They started out by manually going up to people at the grocery store and offering to give them suggestions on groceries to buy based on meal ideas. Eventually, they got someone to agree to participate and provided enough value to the person that they could - and did - get paid by the customer. This helped validate their idea to started building out the app that would do the same thing using software.
I know this is somewhat heretical - but I don't actually like
The Lean Startup book that much.
I was pointed to Lean Startup back in 2010 as a solution to some of the problems I was looking at. The folk I talked to, places like the LSC mailing list, and reading the online/offline writings of Steve Blank, Eric Ries and many others helped a lot.
I was really looking forward to Eric's book - but it didn't really hit the spot I was hoping it would hit. It's very much aimed (I think) at explaining the ideas to the world in general - rather than being a guide to folk who want to apply the ideas. There's nothing wrong with the former, but I was hoping for the latter.
Aye, that's the plan. I've been reading a few books about startups. I've read Venture Deals and I have worked with multiple agreements like stock purchase, asset purchase, note purchase, term loan credit agreements.
I have worked with fictitious clients in helping them incorporate, plan a business, initiate a stock purchase, asset purchase, and lastly, how to handle taxation.
I'm midway through The Lean Startup and unfortunately, I realize the startup field is dominated by engineers with inventions. I understand the purpose of funds like Ycombinator and techstars is to provide guidance for engineers and to help them understand the non-engineer aspects that go with running a company. I want some of that experience! They just don't offer it in my law school.
I've worked in a clinical program with real inventors, but it was directed towards helping them with trademarks and patents and not so much as helping them plan a business.
ronyfadelonDec 15, 2019
- How to change your mind by Michael Pollan
- The Lean Startup
- Company of One
WestCoastJustinonNov 12, 2013
[1] http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuo...
RainymoodonSep 4, 2014
Essays (any) - Paul Graham
I personally enjoyed "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edwards as well.
kurt_onOct 15, 2011
http://theleanstartup.com/
hajriceonApr 9, 2011
I would also recommend the ultimate sales machine. Even though I've only read 20 pages since I started reading it one month ago (yes, I run a startup), it's really interesting and helpful.
finkin1onSep 6, 2012
HiroshiSanonMay 7, 2018
southfloridaonJune 24, 2014
mikeg8onNov 25, 2013
huuuonDec 27, 2014
Great story.
russjhammondonDec 30, 2011
vegancaponApr 9, 2015
bjinwrightonFeb 11, 2013
real-hackeronJune 4, 2017
The master switch; Sapiens/Homo Deus; How to Win Friends and Influence People; The animal farm; The lean startup; The Bible.
Ctrl+F these names in this page for rationale.
Is there an "awesome books" repo on Github? I wonder.
daniel_simonMar 17, 2013
aorshanonApr 25, 2012
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is also a great place to start.
cstejereanonDec 27, 2011
Stephn_RonApr 13, 2015
anarchitectonJune 24, 2014
Made to Stick looks great. Added to my wishlist, thanks.
orasisonMar 7, 2016
Read "The Lean Startup":
http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-...
charlieparkonAug 3, 2011
If you're starting a startup, I'd recommend The Lean Startup over all of those, though.
codyZonMar 31, 2013
God forbid any of my peers start reading Drucker...
andreasklingeronDec 24, 2011
It is maybe overhyped and the cause of Sect-like movement. But definitely one of the most important books for me this year. Thanks Eric!
eriesonApr 13, 2015
The next book - the sequel to The Lean Startup - will come out in 2016 or 2017 and will be traditionally published.
jacques_chesteronAug 9, 2015
When you learn that it's a book deal spun out of a blog, the frustrating reading experience makes much more sense.
petereteponMar 5, 2015
jacques_chesteronOct 1, 2018
mark_biotasksonJuly 12, 2018
tswartzonJune 25, 2013
Also, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. This helped create more effective and compelling content. It's very high-level though.
emitstoponApr 10, 2016
Generally newly created, but not necessarily. In 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries one of the primary examples is based around Intuit, which is a large publicly traded company.
davidjnelsononFeb 25, 2019
pothiboonDec 29, 2011
This is in line with "The Lean Startup" from Eric Ries. It's Lean Startup for people who succeed in raising money
cpursleyonAug 25, 2020
I'd love some book recommendations with actionable info and with actual details on how to execute.
keithbaonOct 2, 2014
dynamite-readyonJan 3, 2020
Like, taking a rough guess, I wonder if there aren't as many successful startups, as there are successful writers. But no one takes those guides to writing a successful book quite as seriously as those guides to running or starting a successful business.
OnyeaboAdubaonMar 25, 2013
hackerboosonMar 31, 2015
chairmankagaonApr 2, 2018
I saw a site that highlighted the official audiobook/ebook of "The Lean Startup" on one page. I love this as a generic solution.
amorphidonNov 29, 2011
orangethirtyonOct 12, 2012
cal5konMar 9, 2013
neurobuddhaonMay 30, 2016
I've read two titles from this list (The Lean Startup and Trust Me, I’m Lying) and halfway through both realised I knew it already.
No book has all the answers. It's better to attack a business idea intelligently in your own unique way.
jsmartonlyonJan 7, 2012
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
written by Eric Ries
briandearonJuly 18, 2012
mastermojoonOct 10, 2018
lbronJan 31, 2014
I'd start be reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
ojbyrneonSep 19, 2012
One minor irritant so far - there are readings from two other books, which I'll probably buy, but not expect we're needed. The Lean Startup is one of them.
147onAug 8, 2015
pacnwonJune 14, 2015
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries,
Rework - Jason Fried & DHH,
Getting Real - Jason Fried
iamandrusonDec 27, 2011
badrchoubaionJune 6, 2020
blakzer0onJan 31, 2015
I would suggest you stop and take a day off before you get fully burnt out.
There is no sense in spending all this time and energy on a product you haven't even validated especially before you've launched.
You could spend years making the "perfect product" without ever knowing if the product is something someone will purchase. Or you could ship a minimum viable product and test whether your product is something someone will purchase.
Eric Ries talks about the minimum viable product in his book "The Lean Startup", which I would highly recommend. I think it would help you and your marketing partner get some much needed context to your situation.
Good luck!
webmavenonNov 26, 2020
Good (even great) book, but has some flaws and focuses mostly on enterprise costumers. The revised version The Startup Owner's Manual is more polished and covers a wider range of business models.
> - The Lean Startup
An excellent recommendation. The other books in the series (especially IMO Running Lean and Lean Analytics) are also worth a look:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/7509FE4F-9888-4384-ACBC-D...
WestCoastJustinonJune 19, 2013
[1] http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuo...
mindcrimeonJuly 20, 2020
The Startup Owner's Manual (note: this and the entry above are sorta/kinda the same book, just different editions. But there's enough difference between the two that I recommend both)
The Art of the Start
The Lean Startup
The Mom Test
HamlineonApr 2, 2014
ifoundthetaoonDec 23, 2015
How Ideas Spread - It was decent, I feel like it could be condensed into an infographic after the fact, and hold great value.
The Lean Startup - Excellent. Changed the way I do business.
A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1 - Great book, wonderful universe. Apparently Martin loves himself a good descriptions of clothes.
A Clash of Kings: A song of Ice and Fire, Book 2 - Great book.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Good book for a kid, pretty irritating kid though (the kid in the book, not mine).
The Andromeda Strain - Excellent!
Christ the Sum of All Spiritual Things - Great book! Very healthy view of a Christocentric theology.
Dracula - Sleeper hit of the year. This book was awesome.
Pippi Longstocking - Read this to my son, and we really enjoyed it.
The Secrets of Power Negotiating - Helped me out during the process of buying a house by understanding various negotiation gambits. Would recommend.
Scrum - Another book that changed the way I work. Would absolutely recommend it.
The Wizard of Oz - Much better than the movie.
The 4-Hour Workweek - .... It was "okay". I don't know. I'm still torn.
The Swiss Family Robinson - Awesome book, full of fun things to talk about with your kids.
The BFG - This was the start of the Roald Dahl stage for bedtime reading.. It's a great book, one of my favorite Dahl books.
Matilda - Reading this as an adult, it was not nearly as fun as when I was a kid, however my son loved it.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox - Fun and easy read for the kids.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Pretty decent book.
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator - Terrible. Absolutely terrible.
davidwonDec 30, 2011
The top rated review of The Lean Startup basically trashes it, saying it never gets very specific, and is sort of a vehicle for Eric Ries to sell himself.
charfordonApr 9, 2015
Next up, The Lean Startup.
147onSep 20, 2013
johnobrien1010onFeb 22, 2018
Here is a list of books I'd recommend:
Tuned In
Joel on Software
Don't Make Me Think
The Lean Startup
The Mythical Man Month
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO
The Design of Everyday Things
Escape Velocity
Competition Demystified
The Art of Agile Development
kozakonJuly 22, 2016
2. "Insanely Simple" by Ken Segall
3. "How to Measure Anything" by Douglas W. Hubbard
bwh2onJune 8, 2021
* Outcomes Over Outputs: Why Customer Behavior is the Key Metric for Business Success
* Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs
* The Lean Startup (often referenced in terms of agile processes, but I think the most important lessons are around product management)
olkidonAug 23, 2016
Has the "Build, Measure, Learn" development cycle fallen out of favour? Or perhaps, it just applies to a subset of business models.
irremediableonApr 8, 2016
grigyonDec 24, 2011
douglaswlanceonDec 16, 2019
The best books I've ever read:
ishwarnonNov 26, 2013
arethuzaonMar 5, 2015
All I need to do now is invent a time machine to send it to myself 20 years ago... :-)
It's also very prescriptive about the activities a startup management team should be focusing on which I suspect is a great place to start if you are coming into a new team in a leadership role.
onlyrealcuzzoonFeb 9, 2019
147onMar 21, 2016
'Definition of Wizard of Oz testing in Eric Ries' book "The Lean Startup": "where customers believe they are interacting with the actual product, but behind the scenes human beings are doing the work"'
kellrosonMay 13, 2013
You validate ideas by applying validated learning:
1. Figure out what you want to learn (ex. an assumption: customers want this product because it allows them to easily do x)
2. Figure out how you will learn via metrics (ex. measure: how many customers sign up based on advertising based on this assumption)
3. Do what is required to gather the metrics. (ex. act: advertise based on the assumption to gather metrics for analyses to validate your assumption).
Sort of sounds like Act/Track/Learn :)
The Lean Startup proposes that you approach a product by asking the following questions:
1. Is this product valuable to my customers?
2. Would customers buy this product?
3. Would customers buy this product from me?
4. Can I build this product?
Point 1 & 2 refer to validating the viability of ideas, while 3 & 4 is more of an introspection regarding availability of skills/resources/advantage etc.
Good luck!
schwanrayonAug 27, 2018
Yes thank you very much for detailed and helpful comment. You are very right in your well written points. Discovered “The Lean Startup” book only very late in the game lol. But I doubt it would have changed our course much since we are true rebels and any Tried and Proven Strategy is probably not exciting enough ;) !
Thanks again and have a great day!
vikramkronJune 23, 2019
teemo_cuteonMar 26, 2014
1newmessageonJan 14, 2016
Outliers, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Lean Startup, How to win friends and influence people.....
edpichleronSep 3, 2017
- The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson
- The Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim
- On the shortness of life, by Seneca
- 1984, by George Orwell
time0utonFeb 5, 2019
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries got me thinking about applying the scientific method to things I never thought of before.
yesdelftonOct 3, 2020
I wondered how the book stood its test of time, and re-read it a few weeks ago. The only thing I remembered from reading it the first time was its famous “build-measure-learn” loop, therefore I was surprised the book is more about entrepreneurship in general, management & accounting, than about MVPs (minimal viable products) and customer interviews. It turns out the famous lean startup method is about more than building MVPs as fast as you can.
Here's our 5 take-aways.
grif-finonSep 29, 2016
"If the company is making good progress toward the ideal, that means it’s learning appropriately and using that learning effectively, in which case it makes sense to continue. If not, the management team eventually must conclude that its current product strategy is
flawed and needs a serious change. When a company pivots, it starts the process all over again, reestablishing a new baseline and then tuning the engine from there. The sign of a successful pivot is that these engine-tuning activities are more productive after the
pivot than before."
dalysonApr 13, 2015
Cheers! /Martin
vannevaronJan 21, 2021
https://tim.blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metrics-vs-actionable-met...
bborudonSep 6, 2018
But there is a piece of perspective that is perhaps missing. I've seen him preach to companies that have orders of magnitude more active users and orders of magnitude as much profit as he had revenue. And making people there believe that he somehow knows something about what it takes to make a company successful. To make a successful product.
I've seen companies who had brilliant people who built more business for their company than this guy ever built for himself be told that "why can't you be more like that". Because it is always more attractive for some types of companies to listen to some outside hack than to actually pay attention to unglamorous people with far more potential. It is easier to admire something that comes with a book, ceremonies and eloquent salesmanship. And sadly, it is easier to take what they say seriously.
I've worked on products that had an order of magnitude more users (products you might well have used) and wondered "why am I doing this again?" because at the company I was working, that wasn't really numbers indicative of a successful product.
IMVU is 23 people. It is the equivalent of a mom and pop shop in this context. I'm sure his story is compelling to someone hacking together a product in their spare time and dreaming of doing a startup. But you do need to understand that he has very little to offer to the kinds of companies this cult does real damage to.
Using the numbers you quote (they tend to vary) IMVU has an order of magnitude fewer users than MySpace. MySpace. The graveyard. That's 4 users for every copy of "The Lean Startup" book sold (well, probably fewer since I haven't kept up with his book sales).
IMVU has fewer users than people who've seen Ries talk - live or online.
IMVU is not a notable success.
He is a successful seller of self help books. No doubt about that.
MattLeBlanc001onDec 27, 2018
2. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
3. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
4. Zero to one Peter Thiel
5. The republic – Plato
6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
7. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd Kindle Edition
8. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
9. Never split the difference
10. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Hardcover
11. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
12. Economy course: https://www.core-econ.org/
acoyfellowonJune 20, 2012
orangethirtyonAug 27, 2012
Explanation: Have you teste dyour hypothesis? Why are you so sure you would need more than one person working on the startup? What made you reach that conclusion? If you are just going by what everyone says, then allow me to challenge your train of thought. You do not need a team to build a startup. It is more efficient if all members are working in unison towards the same goal, but it is more effective to have one person applying lean thechniques than two applying non-lean business knowledge.
fookyongonDec 16, 2011
Entirely incorrect. Read the Lean Startup. Value creation is 100% possible without any UX or anything tangible that the customer "sees" at all. A delivery pizza place provides value. I call them, they deliver pizza. There's no "UX" there beyond what already existed (my phone, a working phone line).
Too many people think the first thing that needs to be solved is how something looks or feels. It's not. You can solve a problem without any UX.
johnorourkeonDec 16, 2015
davidwonOct 4, 2012
andrewtbhamonSep 26, 2011
inkaudioonFeb 9, 2012
read: http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html
Also read following:
Read
Getting Real ( http://gettingreal.37signals.com ) - By 37signals
Rework ( http://37signals.com/rework/ )
37signals blog seris - bootstrapped, profitable & proud
( http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2937-every-bootstrapped-profi... )
Read
Start Small, Stay Small ( http://www.startupbook.net ) by Rob Walling
http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ - He also has a great blog
Read
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/01/the-10-keys-to-selling-...
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-100-rules-for-being...
Read
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/ - Eric Ries blog
Read
How to win at the sport of Business by Mark Cuban
his blog : http://blogmaverick.com/
Also keep in mind, most great products / services are not revolutionary but evolutionary. Google, Facebook both improved on existing ideas, Apple's ipod was not an original Apple idea/tech either : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1053152/Apple-admit-...
briandearonMay 27, 2012
kriroonJune 17, 2013
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCimRGeoiwUPmIddym-HdaCg
"The Lean Startup" by Ries is also good but RL is more condensed (lean?!) imo
"Startup Owner's Manual" is also good and they have a course on edx iirc
Edit: It's a udacity class, close enough. Link:
https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245
markhallonApr 29, 2013
As a compliment to that, I highly recommend that you read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Best of luck.
bwh2onApr 19, 2021
* 20 YC Lessons
* Outcomes Over Output (a lightweight version of The Lean Startup)
* Strategy Rules
* How Google Works
Here's the rest of my Product Manager book reviews: https://www.briansnotes.io/audience/product-manager/
joecassononOct 22, 2016
I have yet to find a business book where this doesn't apply. I only finish the ones where I particularly like the writing style or the anecdotes.
davidwonMar 31, 2015
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup contains most of what you need to know.
codazodaonJuly 7, 2017
AvalaxyonMay 14, 2013
Purple Cow - Seth Godin, made me think about standing out.
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries, really changed the way I think about... Well, nearly everything that costs effort.
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins, good theory about why God most probably doesn't exist.
The magic of reality - Richard Dawkins, great story about evolution, religion, etc.
A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson, brilliant book. Perfect summary of our scientific advancements during the last centuries. He made me think about possible natural disasters.
4891onNov 5, 2013
This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.
Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" - come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - he wasn't the first person to do something like this.
Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' - he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".
Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.
For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.
I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).
andygcookonAug 21, 2012
"An organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty."
I think anyone that wants to take a risk and actually create something should be allowed to call themselves at startup. Does it really matter if it's a business, website, startup? At the end of the day, it's pretty easy to tell who is serious and generally talented verses the people who are just hobbiest or not putting their full effort into their businesses.
callmeedonJune 16, 2014
While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it.
Even "the pivot" itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the formula for startup success (very much the antithesis of luck).
Yes, you have to hustle. Yes, you have to build something people want. Yes, you should have an awesome team. When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. ("I couldn't get funding", "Google changed their algorithm", "I couldn't hire the right person for X")
Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.
rahimnathwanionJune 9, 2021
Overview books:
* Inspired
* The Product Manager’s Desk Reference
* The Lean Startup
* Agile Product Management with Scrum
Interview preparation (good for breadth, even if you’re not applying for jobs):
* Decode & Conquer
* Cracking the PM interview
Other good books for PMs:
* Hooked
* The Design of Everyday Things
* Zero to One
* Traction
BjoernKWonFeb 17, 2019
Anything more specific can’t take variations in context and market development into account.
There’s no cookie cutter way of creating a successful startup from scratch.
If you have an existing network and if you’ve done it before then the chances are higher that you can reproduce successful outcomes. Still, there are quite a few examples of entrepreneurs who’ve created a successful startup but weren’t able to achieve similar results with their following endeavours.
Uncertainty and the search for a business model are the very nature of startups. Reproducible results come with established models.
eriesonJune 26, 2019
raganwaldonDec 12, 2012
1. Read "The Lean Startup."
2. Find the cheapest and fastest way to test whether potential customers think you should build it for them. For example, you could make a fake product web page with a "try free" button and count the number of people who click the button.
Asking us is not lean. Asking customers is not lean. Testing customers != asking them. Building it is too expensive a test to be lean.
Gotta run, can't put more words into this, sorry!
beatonFeb 4, 2016
Also, TSTTCPW (the simplest thing that could possibly work). Pry a little piece of it loose. Don't think too much about which piece. Build the simplest possible version of that little piece. "Simplest" can be a tremendous challenge in itself, because scope creep and gold-plating are so easy. Part of the work will be decoupling your little piece from the rest of it. But make something that works!
joelg87onApr 24, 2013
I can say that in my experience reading Four Steps or The Lean Startup and actually doing a startup are completely different things. I thought I had the whole lean startup thing down, but I've messed up so many times. And it's not a case of "now I've learned my lesson" either. I've had great experiences with sticking to lean, and then afterwards I've slipped up again. For me it seems to be a case of waves of being good, and not so good. Over time I'm definitely getting better.
FahadUddin92onSep 26, 2018
The greatest impact was the combined effort of being able to do multiple courses (in so many different things) and being able to better understand different programming languages, technologies and marketing (SEO, ads, content marketing, referral marketing, driving sales).
Can't leave engineering. Engineering is the passion. I have a strong belief that all parts of business should be driven by engineers from development to sales and marketing. Yesterday I went to a meetup and I met sales people on the booths who had no idea on the product they were selling worked and how it could help others.
2.) If you don't have friends in school, go out to events, network. Talk to people, add them on LinkedIn. Found someone interesting online? Feel free to email them and get to know each other. Thats how I have built my network. Don't forget the nurture professional relationships. Your network is your networth.
3.) I have a 15000 people following, the articles that are of interest get viral. A few times I tried to post my articles on some FB groups. It did work out well but I don't do it anymore. Best is to just keep writing (you may post on Reddit, FB etc but be aware that you might get banned for self promotion).
3. 'The Lean Startup' and 'The defining decade' are the most impactful books.
4. You can see my Linked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ifahaduddin/
lonelyasacloudonJune 24, 2020
Guessing the future and engineering to cope with it is a risky, error-prone business. Good engineering practice should always seek to minimise reliance on unreliable (prediction) data to create future-proof designs.
So I'd go with stopping as soon as it meets current use cases AND then shift gears to make it easy for someone else to pick-up in the future, e.g. write whatever tests are necessary and document thinking.
If it's easy to extend now, it will still be so in the future. Plus, there will be whatever learning has occurred since to make an even better job of it.
> How far should we go in making things generic?
Only if:
0) It's not only about guessing future needs.
1) The maintainers are over 90% certain it will make it easier for them to maintain and test now.
> Are there good resources for this?
There's a mountain of media on "Agile" software development, and it's different flavours. It's not particularly Software Engineering focused, but I enjoyed the "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries.
Good luck and have fun.
wmabonAug 20, 2020
crazygringoonMar 4, 2018
Read Cracking the PM Interview [1] (for an overview of the job, not the actual interview tips) and The Lean Startup [2] (for general philosophy).
35 is a great age for a PM, especially since PM's often start elsewhere -- maturity is a plus here. I'd say there are 3 main ways into it -- as an engineer, who starts to do PM-type stuff on a team where there's no PM. As a designer, who starts to do PM-type stuff on a team where there's no PM. Or as an MBA who has a good sense for engineering and design. Certifications generally don't mean anything -- communication and leadership skills, good judgment, experience and a proven track record are what matter. But all those things can be demonstrated in previous non-PM roles, in order to make the initial switch.
Also, if you want to be a PM then you'd better enjoy meetings, slides, people, and communicating & convincing all day long, day-in day-out. If those make you say an enthusiastic "yes that's me!" then jump right in. If not... you're gonna have a bad time...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-PM-Interview-Product-Technol...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous...
VeteranShieldonMay 10, 2013
studpeaceonSep 9, 2020
drewmasseyonAug 6, 2018
- The lean startup
- the twenty two immutable laws of marketing.
- getting to yes
After a couple of books though I would say it really comes down to just digging in and fighting it out. It is really easy to lose yourself in the world of business self help literature.
sabatonMay 3, 2012
Fine, fine. But don't call your book The Lean Startup, then. Or, if you're going to write a book with that title, write about actual startups, and get more in-depth.
zhdc1onJuly 15, 2021
It depends on whether you're giving up on the process or the goal. Startups "give up" or pivot on their original and subsequent ideas so often that's it's considered a best practice. This is different from founders giving up on starting a business.
Like you mentioned, the habit is what matters.
angarg12onJuly 15, 2021
I agree with "the power of habit" part.
From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.
The bottom line message seems to be "keep insisting and you'll be successful". I spent 3+ years working in a game that never took off as a side project. In hindsight, I should have taken the hint of the lack of traction early on and dropped the whole thing. Instead I sank countless hours into a project that never worked out. How many prototypes could I have produced in the same time?
Bottom line, habits are good, so long as we don't mix it up with the concept of "don't give up and you'll be successful".
simplecomplexonJuly 23, 2019
An MVP is not defined by time to build, but by the minimum necessary to build to make the very first sale. MVP is the minimum necessary to capture the Minimum Viable Audience. That could be a landing page or it could be a spreadsheet or it could be a complex app. It could be a game demo. The point is only build the minimum to be able to capture a customer and iterate.
An MVP is not associated with a time frame at all. YC is wrong. Just read The Lean Startup which popularized the term.
As a founder I’m pretty sick of these unrealistic platitudes tossed around by VCs and accelerators. It’s not educating anyone.
ridruejoonNov 5, 2016
brackinonSep 22, 2011
Books:
Articles:
Market (Raw startup information/links):
Interview Specific:
Startup News:
Update: YC also has a library of information here too: http://ycombinator.com/lib.html
PaulMestonMar 18, 2012
What I like about speaking that you don't get from writing:
1) Seeing people's reaction in near real-time. This is a good feedback loop when you're working on how to explain a new product or feature before producing an on-demand recording that could be viewed by 1000x the people in the audience. It's like a focus-group or a series of live A/B tests.
2) A chance to convert the less-dedicated into customers/fans/subscribers. It seems a lot of people are too lazy to read long articles let alone books these days. A good video can go a long way. I watched a lecture by Eric Ries and immediately acquired The Lean Startup for my Kindle.
I think speaking is a great way to get people excited about a topic and teach them a handful of concepts. If my talk is successful, I will have inspired many to drill in on the topic later or become a fan of my product, my podcast, or my standup comedy. I always try to accompany my talks with easy-to-remember URLs or QR codes so that it minimizes the friction between their interest for more information and taking the next step.
WestCoastJustinonSep 27, 2013
[1] http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuo...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Startup#Actionable_metrics
redmonAug 25, 2020
I’d add that if you do nothing else, read the first 3 chapters of The Mom Test; it provides a great overview for evaluating ideas.
chancedonFeb 1, 2013
- The Lean Startup [http://amzn.to/X3SYp0]
- Rework [http://amzn.to/14DHIXG]
- Art of the Start [http://amzn.to/Vt4aMj]
donnanortononMay 8, 2021
As an option, you can try to look for a downloadable version on these websites: https://custom-writing.org/blog/free-books-online#business
ryanx435onSep 30, 2012
eric ries, in his book The Lean Startup, defines it as follows:
"A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."
so lets see. Is this website a human institution? Probably. If its not, it certainly passed the Turing test.
Is it designed to create a new product or service? not really. Its selling stickers that the user has the ability to customize. This isn't all that new or original of a concept.
Is it doing so under extreme uncertainty? I would say not. This is selling a product that there is already known demand for. It is not extremely uncertain if there is a market for their product.
So my 2 cents is that this is not a "start up" but rather merely a new web business. Still, good for them! May the Force be with them, and may they find beautiful solutions to their problems.
anoncowonMar 21, 2021
Because of WFH, found a lot of additional time. Used that for listening to around 10 audio books in the past year. Most of the books I read were from a project management and entrepreneurship perspective. I used/discussed concepts learnt for work and felt slightly better off because of that. An example was using 5-whys for process improvement from The Lean Startup.
bwh2onApr 23, 2021
However, I recently read The Design of Everyday Things and was really disappointed. The sections about door handles, stoves, and elevator buttons are interesting but that's only 1/3 of the book. The rest is about iterative design and system failure, for which there are better books like The Lean Startup and Drift Into Failure.
jgreaseronOct 15, 2018
A startup is "an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty" (quoting the insider cover of Eric Reis's The Lean Startup). If there isn't extreme uncertainty, then it isn't a great fit as an overall strategy.
On the other hand, the LS counterpoint would be that you'll miss considerable insights if you rely on existing knowledge/research (Ford's classic "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse" quote....)
zarrobaonAug 4, 2017
I'm sure there were tons of posts like this over the years but writing about it helps to consolidate the knowledge and the feedback really helps with the learning.
So please bear with me during this journey and thanks for your patience, time and knowledge shared with me.
n0mi1konDec 16, 2018
I took a 2 hour General Assembly course and found it incredibly useful - it sounds crazy but I feel like I learned 50% of what I needed to know about UX in just those 2 hours.
I asked some UX peeps what books they recommended and I purchased 2 and never read a single page (they were The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Sprint by Google Ventures).
For web app UX, I found this 30 minute video extremely useful (great to see how a non-design person might make something, then how that same non-design person can change the primitive app they made into something very nice!).
Design for Non-Designers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21byk2WWz3k
metafunctoronOct 3, 2016
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.
WJWonMar 15, 2021
"The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay is also a very good book on this subject.
OlognonApr 16, 2013
Nonetheless, they seem to have missed important lessons from the book. Or re-learned them rather. The odd thing is they then claim the book does not cover these things, and distracted them from these problems. I don't understand why this is said, since the book does cover these things.
The blog post says:
> Lean Startup principles distracted us from four livelihood-threatening fundamentals. First, you need rigorous product management. Don’t speculate. Build no feature unless you understand it thoroughly and have unshakeable evidence that multiple customers need it --urgently.
But this lesson learned is one of the Lean Startup principles.
From "The Lean Startup":
"For example, how many features do we really need to include to appeal to early adopters? Every extra feature is a form of waste, and if we delay the test for these extra features, it comes with a tremendous potential cost in terms of learning and cycle time. The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time."
...I quote only one paragraph from the Lean Startup, but the idea about no excessive features in an MVP is repeated throughout the book.
It's possible the Lean Startup approach has some holes in it, but warning against too many features in an MVP is not one of them.
hazz99onMay 2, 2020
The Lean Startup [4] is often recommended, but I've been told it's extremely beginner-level (though I haven't read it, so my analysis might be unfair)
If you want to get really in-depth, there's a lot of really great interplay between the design discipline and entrepreneurship that is often overlooked. "Design Thinking" is much more than a buzzword, check it out.
[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Business-Model-Generation-Visionar...
[2] https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/09...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous...
ljtobeyonOct 22, 2013
Beyond doing lots of reading, I'd say, it depends. The start-up mantra is, build something people want. If you find writing/blogging can help you on that path, do it. Certainly meeting and talking to lots of potential customers is a must. Building a product is also a must. I think about the choices of what I'm doing and always try to filter it by whether or not it will get me closer to these things.
But it will really depend on your business. I'd personally recommend finding certain things to relax you that you invest some time in, whether it be meditation or exercise etc. Other than that, try to focus your energy on the next best thing that will get you closer to customers.
johnorourkeonOct 30, 2017
--------
Software Quality or Fintech. Don't waste a good team on something like a Kale Smoothie Delivery Service For Beardy Hipsters. Software Quality is a huge, growing issue - we have more and more young/new coders arriving, massively increasing demand for code, and yet no government enforced standards (such as those found in Law, Architecture and Accounting). The industry is suffering the exact same issues that Fred Brooks wrote about 50 years ago, despite all our modern frameworks and IDEs, because we're just doing more stuff with fewer people. Starting points: The Open Group (and TOGAF), ITIL, MinistryofTesting.com
INSPIRATION
------
Hari Seldon, hero of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was deliberately put into a wide variety of situations and experiences to inspire his imagination and fuel his emotional responses. Get out of starbucks, do crazy shit and get uncomfortable - allow it to fuse emotion and desire for change, because that's where motivation comes from. (related: read Think and Grow Rich if you haven't already)
FROM IDEA TO BUSINESS
---------------
Read 'The E-myth revisited' and 'The Lean Startup'
BjoernKWonJuly 22, 2019
According to The Lean Startup by Eric Ries it's - and I'm paraphrasing here - the minimum set of features that allows you to validate a marketing hypothesis. An MVP therefore can be considered an experimental setup that allows you to measure and learn in order to use that information to build a better product in the next iteration.
How that validation and the minimal setup required for it looks like entirely depends on the product, which is why setting a hard time limit that's equally applicable to each product category probably isn't going to work.
The shorter the time between turnarounds (i.e. between build-measure-learn cycles) the better.
Some of best initial MVPs are simple websites describing the product and showing a call-to-action button. If a sufficient number of potential customers click that button that's validated learning and an indicator for you to build a more sophisticated version of that product.
zeynalovonNov 3, 2012
Some time ago I've tried to learn Ruby on Rails but in my first week I saw that it's not that easy. I've learned how to make a website, blog etc., but making complex softwares are too hard for me. I need some time, which I don't have. Every workday I must be at the clinic and I have too many patients, I come home very tired, even though I work on my startup.
One thing I don't understand, why should one learn to code, if he has enough money to hire someone to code? I always see everywhere that founders must learn to code. Why? I understand that it will save money and you can do whatever you want, you'll have freedom by coding. But is it worth it? To be able to code as an average hacker you should spend at least 3 month to learn to code.
bborudonSep 5, 2018
To be fair, Ries stole a lot of nice bits from different schools of thought. There's stuff his books that actually works.
But you would have to be soft in the head to think that his book represented wisdom. In fact, wisdom does not come from a book – it comes from reading a lot of books, making a lot of mistakes, working with a lot of people, building a lot of stuff, and still understanding that this does not necessarily represent something that can be distilled into bullet proof heuristics. There's always unseen and uncounted factors that you will miss.
In contact with large, established organisations this book tends to produce cargo cults. Simplistic management self-help literature combined with institutional mediocrity, stupidity, fear of change, and hard-shelled delusion is a horrible mix.
The good thing is that these cargo cults tend to die after a few years. The bad thing is that anything associated with them then gets tainted.
The Lean Startup was a management fad and it didn't make people any smarter. It just gave them different ceremonies to perform in order to feel good about themselves. And as all fads, it has now passed. It is okay to move around the cabin and think for yourself again.
I would recommend "Functional Stupidity" by Mats Alvesson as a form of inocculation against this type of self-pleasuring heuristic-seeking.
cloudkingonApr 11, 2021
OnlineCourageonOct 29, 2019
9oliYQjPonSep 20, 2011
What I meant by jury is still out, is that we might find that the framework suggested in The Lean Startup actually increases success rates amongst startups in addition to being a model for revealing truth. Revealing truth faster will allow startups to extend their runway and if we find that most successful businesses only require X pivots on average before they start to profitable, we very well might see startups be able to accomplish these X pivots succeed where they may have followed a more traditional launch and pray model and achieved fewer than X pivots, running out of runway.
If it sounds like I'm trying to be negative about the book, I'm not. It's fantastic and I'm absolutely suggesting everybody buy a copy :P
weppleonSep 2, 2016
More specific topics, however:
* "what every body is saying" - how to read/understand body language
* "an astronauts guide to life on earth" - by Chris Hadfield, lots of good general advice
* "speed reading" - for digesting information quickly (albeit, I find with less depth)
* "The 8 traits successful people have in common" - kinda painfully obvious advice, but often it's the context and stories that help you digest a message
* "the lean startup" - wasn't mindblowing but looks aligned with what you've been reading, still worth reading.
sudonimonSep 14, 2011
I bought 2 books today.
The Lean Startup - (Kindle edition) $12.99
Design for Hackers - (Dead tree edition) $25.32
1.) It's surprising to me that The Lean Startup is priced at 12.99 if they give amazon 70% of the royalties. Seems like they should have priced it at 9.99.
2.) Design for Hackers is a book where illustrations matter. Paying for the dead tree version is better. At only a few bucks off the dead tree version, the Kindle version doesn't seem fairly priced considering the degraded reading experience.
GFischeronJune 21, 2015
Talk them over with someone you trust - never keep ideas only to yourself, that's not a good idea.
Then, do some kind of experiment to validate your idea. Do a very early MVP, a "pretotype" - you might want to take a look at the Design Thinking, there's lot of material, but what you want to know is Pretotyping - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4AqxNekecY
It's tied to the "Fail Fast" mantra :) , and the Lean Startup by Eric Ries, or my favourites, Steve Blank and Alex Osterwalder - see this slideshow:
http://www.slideshare.net/Alex.Osterwalder/successful-entrep...
I'm doing something of the sort - a very early pretotype to have a starting point to talk with my potential customers and discover their REAL needs (aka what they WOULD pay money for :) ). Remember, "no plan survives contact with the enemy".
reasononMay 3, 2012
B-CononFeb 16, 2019
I think the problem is that they're only interested in selling fully autonomous self-driving vehicles. There's very little market advantage in selling a "mostly" self-driving car, and Waymo doesn't want to be in generic car sales for years until they're ready. So they have to hold out for the 0 to 100 switch flip.
And they don't get to make mistakes and iterate on core functionality, so they have to wait. People's lives and schedules will be at the mercy of these vehicles, in a wide variety of operating contexts. They have to get it 100% right. If they kill people the brand itself is potentially dead.
So the picture is they need to go 0 to 100 with near 100% accuracy. Anything less is at best brand dilution or at worst corporate suicide.
Tesla's approach matches the MVP idea more closely since they can add small features incrementally. Presumably their eventual goal is to be able to say "with this update your car is now fully autonomous". But they're in the business of selling cars to begin with, so every release short of full autonomy is A-OK. Autonomy is a feature, not the product.
leejw00t354onJune 30, 2012
After reading the Lean Startup I feel like I've learnt more about building Startups than what I have reading various startup related articles on HN all year.
I'm sure this isn't the case with all books but I wouldn't agree that it's better just to go out there and try to do stuff you don't really understand. You'll probably just be wasting your time in most cases.
austenallredonMar 31, 2013
The process is explained like this. "You have an idea. But is it validated? Go ask a bunch of people if they think it's a good idea." People aren't encouraged to build a minimum viable product to iterate on first.
I see this as a huge step backward, removing the intuition of a founder and killing serious innovation. The thing is this model works great for some SaaS companies that try to figure out which software is needed in industry X then create it for them. But that path of entrepreneurship makes me cringe. That sounds like no fun at all. Will it be successful? Sure, a bunch of $1-50 million companies will come out of that, but just building stuff people tell you to? No thanks.
The truest entrepreneurship, or at least what I want to be involved in, is where you operate according to your own vision and intuition, and give people something they had never imagined. That's incredibly hard to do, but that's what's so exciting about building companies, at least to me.
vo1donDec 19, 2017
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
- Start with No by Jim Camp
- How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
- The Everything Store by Brad Stone
- The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly
wpietrionApr 23, 2018
They started in 2013, long after books like "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" explained exactly why scaling up before you have traction is a huge mistake. They could have learned the "this isn't working" lesson for an order of magnitude less money. If they had done that, they a) would have had capital to recover from their early mistakes, and b) would have been much better placed to find that low-cost solution.
When I look at a crater like that, I think about the 50+ seed rounds (or 20 A rounds or whatever) that could have happened but didn't because they got high on their own slide decks. They blew up not because they couldn't have discovered these problems, but because they didn't want to.
tozeuronJune 5, 2018
andersthueonJuly 14, 2015
Get into a mastermind group (or two)
Listen to "startup for the rest of up" podcast
Listen to "the startup chat"
Attend MicroConf Europe
Read books like "the lean startup", traction, smartcuts, the war of art, the dip, etc...
davidwonOct 23, 2011
This book makes my cynic sense tingle.
Anyone have a list of the further reading, because what I'm interested in are concrete things to do, not "high-level" concepts.
> Eric has done a great job of providing examples of the Lean Startup in the context of large organizations such as Intuit and IGN, and devotes the last few chapters of the book to this very topic
I think big companies are the target market for his book. He would like to sell his consulting services to them.
Nothing wrong with that - he seems like a really bright guy with a lot of good ideas, who does indeed know his stuff, and could provide a lot of value to companies. He also "walked the walk", having a successful company of his own. It's just that I don't know if real startups will derive that much value from the book, from what I've read of it.
Here's the top review for it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3287ICLQ9STI3/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...
Not entirely positive...
brendanborginconApr 12, 2013
Also, there is a notion amongst us entrepreneurs to persevere amongst all odds. This might be dangerous at times. There might be a massive market for your product yet you have approached it in the wrong way. The thing is, if you have no data, it is very difficult to know what REALLY went wrong. For example: Drew Houston from Dropbox early on stated that selling Dropbox through adwords was costing them something like 300 dollars per acquisition, once they introduced their double-sided referral scheme Dropbox started selling like mad. It was what Eric Ries calls a Pivot.
kellrosonMay 1, 2013
Web development is a beast and very different from traditional thick clients as you often have to cater for multiple types of users (roles & permissions) as well as multiple portals (different user interfaces and interaction based on users). Most projects would typically require at least two distinct portals: traditional user portal and administration portal. For franchises there are usually two levels of administration (top level/standard level) that requires different views of the data (ex. across the franchise for administrators and impersonation of standard franchisees).
In my experience there isn't really a simple crud application - the information you collect depends on the functionality you provide. Many users is also very abstract as it will impact your infrastructure requirements - too many unnecessary abstraction layers will really slow down development but is typically required for SOA/N-Tier/CQRS stacks.
My advice is simple: Pick one thing and go through the process of validated learning. It's possible to run a successful business on an adhoc stack - it's not required to run perfect software from the beginning, but flexibility and adaptability sure helps. I'd almost say build something quick and dirty that you can change/scrap easily depending on your business requirements till you reach the point of the business being profitable, then you can invest more into it.
dkopionMar 9, 2016
nfmonAug 11, 2012
Intended use: "We were working on a time tracking application for freelance designers, and pivoted to making it for lawyers instead."
There are lots of kinds of pivots (customer segment, platform, channel, value capture, engine of growth etc) - in essence, it's about taking what you've learned so far, and using that knowledge to tweak your approach to solving the problem you're working on.
Eric Ries' 'The Lean Startup' is the canonical reference for this stuff.
zupa-huonFeb 3, 2014
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continu...
acoyfellowonJuly 1, 2012
As a broke fresh college graduate, one of the most widely talked about books (and one I actually bought myself) was Eric Ries' The Lean Startup. It really helped me feel like I had a sense of direction instead of "thinking I knew" something,
16bytesonApr 13, 2015
Besides establishing the backer-only discussion community, what other lean methodologies are you using to write this book?
Along those lines, have there been any significant pivots yet? Obviously, the kickstarter seems to be doing well at over 3.5x pledged over the goal. Do you think that this is validation of the new content that the book promises to deliver or is it simply riding the coat-tails of the previous success you had with "The Lean Startup"? How are you measuring success?
I only now noticed that there's also a Reddit AMA, apologies if you've answered in that thread already.
evolve2konMay 27, 2012
You're making money now which is way more than where many other start ups are at.
I think you would benefit from rallying around an established approach to business and development which is well documented and outlines some key principals and a philosophy for getting things done. 'The lean startup' and 'getting real' etc by 37 Signals come to mind and reading either of those books will help you progress.
Further it sounds like you collectively are at the classic trap outlined in the book 'the e-myth' where you are both working hard in-the-business but not taking time to work on-the-business. Have a strategic weekend away at a beach house or such like.
Sounds like you also are needing more assistance generally attend done more local tech events and startup events find other you can bounce these sort of issues off in person. Working a few days a week at a tech orientated co-working space can work well.
Finally let what the customers want inform you, get closer to your best customers, visit them if you can, focus on the features and tech approach that will help you best customers the most. The lean startup is great for helping you get this focus clear. Finally it sounds like you and your co-founder need to have a serious talk, might need to grab a beer together and just have an honest duscussion of where you are at and whats not working right now and what you could imagine it could be if you guys got a few things sorted, seems like ur not on the same page right now IMHO. Good luck
aespinozaonSep 23, 2011
It definitely helps your business plan, but I think it goes beyond just the business plan, it actually provides a process to align and direct your startup to success.
jchookonAug 5, 2020
He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work.
He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards:
1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis.
2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”).
3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn.
4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat.
Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning.
Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive.
It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
graemeonSep 19, 2012
The Lean Startup is a good high level overview of the underlying concept. I found it a bit overly focussed on launching "lean startups" within big companies. This may have been to boost consulting. Whatever the reason, it made the book less relevant to my experience.
But the Lean Startup is a quick, easy read, and you will get some actionable knowledge out of it if you're not already familiar with the ideas.
If you already know the concept, but want to put it into practice, go with Steve Blank's book.
joeclark77onAug 26, 2014
mindcrimeonFeb 20, 2012
Anyone who's seriously interested in Lean Startup and Customer Development would be better served to read "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank, then Eric's book "The Lean Startup" before making any judgment on their merits.
zupa-huonApr 13, 2014
>> people want everything for free
just everything of that value to them. Give them a software that turns them 20 yrs old and they will pay.
If you are about to give up on putting more energy into it, talk to your friends maybe someone wants to jump on board and put energy into selling it.
Hey, you are around 22, already experiencing a seeming-to-fail business. Awesome. Extract your take-aways, learn, move on. Go and read The Lean Startup if you haven't read it yet.
MoosePlisskenonFeb 24, 2014
"To apply the scientific method to a startup, we need to identify which hypotheses to test. I call the riskiest elements of a startup's plan, the parts on which everything depends, leap-of-faith assumptions."
"Once clear on these leap-of-faith assumptions, the first step is to enter the Build phase as quickly as possible with a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP is that version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development time." - Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
An MVP is simply the smallest possible product that is capable of testing your assumptions about the value you think you can provide to customers. An MVP doesn't have to represent a viable business model, it only has to provide a viable means of testing your assumptions.
dwyningsonSep 19, 2011
"She downloads the product, and then we say 'Okay, invite one of your friends to chat.' And she says, 'No way!' We say, 'Why not?' And she says, 'Well, I don't know if this thing is cool yet. You want me to risk inviting one of my friends? What are they going to think of me? If it sucks, they're going to think I suck, right?' And we say, 'No, no it's going to be so much fun once you get the person in there; it's a social product.' She looks at us, her face filled with doubt; you can see that this is a deal breaker."
rpicardonNov 13, 2011
vinceguidryonMay 5, 2015
The problem with The Four-Hour Workweek is that Tim Ferriss is a productivity monster and his muse method only really works for people like him. Four hours a week after months / years of 80 hour weeks.
kp25onAug 8, 2015
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
calibraxisonMar 5, 2015
- https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-start...
- https://modelviewculture.com/
- Something by Don Reinertsen, maybe The Principles of Product Development Flow, maybe something else.
- Valve Employee Handbook http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
- http://thinkrelevance.com/how-we-work
- Ries, The Lean Startup
All of these sources hide lots of dysfunction, so as always take them with a grain of salt. Take Ricardo Semler's fun books. In one of his Harvard Business School lectures, he mentioned how his books are artificially optimistic, because publishers want to sell more books.
rxlonAug 26, 2013
One thing to note is that Chris worked with Ryan and has a close relationship with him (Chris actually wrote the trailer for Ryan's book).
And judging from Ryan's usual tactics, Chris wrote this list simply to push Ryan's book, which he cleverly included alongside clear classics like The Lean Startup, In The Plex, and The Innovator's Dilemma.
Edit: Here are some other tactics cleverly used by Chris/Ryan in the post...
1) they mentioned Ryan Holiday in the first couple paragraphs so that the reader would have some familiarity with his name and be even more likely to click through to his book
2) they included Ryan's book early in the list but not as the first, and specifically after at least one book that you probably haven't heard of, but that seems credible
3) they marked The Innovator's Dilemma (arguably the most well known book in the list) as "optional," leading one to perceive that the other books in the list that aren't marked as optional must be even better
Edit: evidence for Chris and Ryan's relationship... https://www.google.com/search?q=chris+johnson+ryan+holiday
KaedononSep 19, 2012
webmavenonJune 24, 2014
'Team Geek' is a great primer on technical leadership: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018025.do
Another recommended book is 'Shipping Greatness': http://shippinggreatness.com
Assuming you're already familiar with 'The Lean Startup', there has been a series of excellent 'sequels' on many more specific disciplines that you will likely find useful: http://theleanstartup.com/the-lean-series
A recent addition (that I am still digesting) on Agile processes beyond Scrum is 'Unblock!': http://www.continuousagile.com/unblock/ (Posted to HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921200)
thomseddononMay 15, 2013
If you are seriously hoping for this to be a full time business then I would strongly recommend you read "The Lean Startup" or similar. This blind technical pursuit of perfection is a pretty classic approach for us techies and something i'm guilty of myself. It was actually that process that made me realise what my strengths actually were and what I would need to do to start a world class company (work with great people).
If this isn't really a commercial project then just ignore the above and happy hacking, perhaps you should consider open sourcing it?
vibrunazoonSep 13, 2012
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-ebook/d...
thesashonDec 1, 2011
Eric Ries has some really insightful ideas about how to turn these problems around, and if you haven't already read The Lean startup I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-...
mindcrimeonJan 22, 2012
Of course, you might ask "Why, mindcrime, why do you recommend a billg book so highly?" Fair question... I find it interesting for the vision that Gates lays out regarding how organizations should use technology to operate more efficiently. He leaned heavily on the analogy with the human autonomic nervous system back in those days, and was throwing around the term "Digital Nervous System[1]" a lot... and I think that that concept A. makes and lot of sense, and B. is still - after all these years - largely unfulfilled.
If you're in the business of software (at least the business of business software) I think the Gates book is still very inspirational and could seed some very interesting ideas, vis-a-vis technology in organizations.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Nervous_System
Other than that, my own list would include:
The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Positioning - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Repositioning - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
Differentiate or Die - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
mindcrimeonApr 24, 2013
I can say that in my experience reading Four Steps or The Lean Startup and actually doing a startup are completely different things.
Absolutely, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Note that I didn't say "OMG, you guys suck, if you'd just read this book you'd all be millionaires and dining with Zuckerberg now". But the whole "Do a big-bang PR launch before you've proven anything" is textbook "how to fail as a startup", if you believe that @sgblank's stuff is valid.
I thought I had the whole lean startup thing down, but I've messed up so many times.
Tell me about it, we learn more everyday. I'm not saying any of this is easy, mind you. It's just that this particular example jumped out at me for being such an egregious example of such a common and well-cited mistake, that it's a little hard to believe.
And hey, I haven't proven anything yet, so nobody should feel any particular reason to care about my opinion. I'm just a guy who's a bit drunk, sitting in front of the computer a little bit bored before bedtime, and blabbing about stuff.
chrischattinonMay 12, 2020
I read Decartes in high school during the teenage existential crises we all go through and it blew my mind. Opened me up to the power of thinking from first principles and a love of philosophy and questioning everything. Cogito, ergo sum!
"Atlas Shrugged" gets a lot of hate, but it's a phenomenally important book. It was one of those that completely consumed me during the read. I could not put it down – stayed up late, work up early, and rushed home from work to get back to it.
"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.
Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good.
0xdeadbeefbabeonApr 13, 2015
1. What do you do when your market is so small that you can't grab some teenager off the street to try your product? I'm thinking of the people who buy X-ray machines for the airport, for example.
2. I know people who pretend to like ideas from your book. One guy applauds the idea of failing while also failing to do validated learning. Can you or I or anyone fix that? For example, we'll never test weather a user would prefer an interface other than a website.
3. How do I convince my boss that we need a research department?
4. Have you read Dealers of Lightning (about Xerox Parc) what is your take on it?
reginaldoonMar 29, 2012
paulbjensenonNov 25, 2013
There you go.
I would recommend asking a few outdoors friends whether they feel the same, and see if bringing about this worldwide directory would be a great thing to them.
To me, it sounds like a great opportunity because you have a specific audience to interact with, and there are opportunities to turn it into a business; think of outdoors venues and outdoor equipment companies who would want to promote their products and services to that range of people.
I would recommend asking friends, and in terms of further research, I recommend 2 books: Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston, and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Go for it!
vmurthyonJuly 26, 2020
I'm being a bit generic but to speak with CEOs, it would greatly help to know about strategy and competition. It's a loaded term and here's what I would recommend:
1. Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage [0] or Understanding Michael Porter [1]
2. One of the things that really applies well to tech businesses has been Platform Business Model. This book [2] is a good starting point
3. The Lean startup [3] and Hacking Growth [4] round up the tech books that I have benefited from.
3b. Warren Buffet's letters are a classic to learn about businesses and help when you are dealing with CXOs.
4. With these basics in place, I would recommend Stratecherry - the blog and Economist for keeping up with the current developments in the field.
Good luck!
[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sus...
[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Understanding-Michael-Porter-Essen...
[2] https://www.amazon.com.au/Platform-Revolution-Networked-Tran...
[3] https://www.amazon.com.au/Lean-Startup-Innovation-Successful...
[4] https://www.amazon.com.au/Hacking-Growth-Fastest-Growing-Com...
FYI, I come from a similar background. Was a techie for 9+ years before switching to an MBA and can personally attest to the materials given above :)
shawnreillyonAug 17, 2013
andygcookonDec 14, 2017
mindcrimeonAug 27, 2013
Trust Me, I'm Lying just might wind up as a classic itself! OK, I know it's controversial, as is the author, and I get why. But there's some solid stuff in that book. I learned a lot from reading it, and I think there's some actionable advice in there, even if you don't want to go quite as "underhanded" as Holiday may have on occasion.
Note: I have no relationship with Ryan Holiday whatsoever, beyond having purchased and read a copy of his book.
haackonJuly 14, 2015
Maybe, start by trying to let your tech/design be a means to an end and start by solving a problem for users. The launch websites for so many successful startups were super ugly[1]. 100's of hours per project with less than 5 users each, sounds like alarm bells to me. If you haven't already, read The Lean Startup[2]. Build MVP, validate and iterate or pivot accordingly.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...
[2] http://theleanstartup.com/
peterschroederonJan 8, 2017
Though this isn't where I got the idea, I read about it the other day when I had some downtime.
I accept your challenge and will prove the future is in fact quite bright! :)
rooshdionOct 27, 2011
brettweaverioonDec 27, 2011
The Lean Startup - Eric Reis
Rework - 37signals
miononNov 3, 2012
And also this interview with YC partner Harjeet Taggar, he talks about learning how to code among other interesting stuff: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/30/y-combinator-harj-taggar-in...
You should also be careful with that "99%" statement. I don't wanna discourage you or anything, but you should definitely think about validating all your assumptions before investing money and time into building your startup. I strongly recommend reading The Lean Startup.
And IMHO you should definitely have a technical co-founder. Even if you managed to save money and you can hire some decent programmers (which would be quite expensive for a student), you'll have no idea of how long it takes for something to done.
IsaacLonApr 28, 2012
Ie, rather than this:
what we do = what users tell us
It should be:
what we do = f(what users tell us, x)
Where f is your own thinking, and x is other sources of useful data.
My feeling is that "vision" and "data" aren't in conflict -- you should attempt to integrate data into an over-riding vision, but you should be prepared to ditch or tweak the vision if it becomes too detached from reality.
I could write a lot more about this -- I think the problem goes a bit deeper than "faster horse" dynamics that some people have mentioned. The whole lean startup, listen to your customers thing is supposed to be about applying the scientific method to founding companies.
Trying out random things and recording the results might be "experimenting" in the normal sense, but it's not the scientific meaning of experimenting. You should concoct a theory and work out what you need to look for before you start looking. The Lean Startup book itself goes into a lot of depth about which metrics to track, how different marketing models require different metrics, etc (everyone thinks they know "lean concepts" because they read a few blog posts but the book goes into way more depth).
ljyonDec 27, 2011
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
smallbigfootonMar 20, 2013
maratdonJune 22, 2016
I've read neither, I do have a degree in economics though... does that count?
Do you have a short position on SCTY? If so, then I understand your "comments" and why you're pissed. Sorry? LOL
> He needs to have much better sense than that as a CEO, his duties to his shareholders demand it.
Last time I checked, he recused himself and the shareholders have to approve the deal ... what are you going on about?
LostInTheWoods2onDec 8, 2011
pfarnsworthonJune 22, 2016
aalhouronDec 28, 2017
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
EDIT: list formatting
rjf1990onMay 19, 2014
I hear dozens of people tell me about an idea and it's apparent that there's no chance they will succeed with this. A lot of time they're trying to enter a market they know nothing about (as this article described), for example finance students trying to do a clean-tech startup. Other times, it's the market opportunity. These ideas that suck so badly are just people who haven't been around startups to realize how to think about them. They're the kind of people who I wonder if they've ever read The Lean Startup, PG's blog, or any of the commonly-accepted startup wisdom.
nearbuyonFeb 8, 2019
To give one example, the book talks about how in their 3d virtual chat game, IMVU, as a shortcut, they initially had the characters teleport around because they didn't have time to implement walking animations. They got some positive feedback from users about the teleporting "feature", and concluded teleporting was a great selling point and they shouldn't implement walking. The book then starts teaching what lessons you should take from this story.
However, around the same time they were making IMVU, Linden Labs made Second Life which did have walking animations and I believe was more successful than IMVU.
It was a common pattern in The Lean Startup to point to a single example that the author thinks worked out well for IMVU and extrapolate advice from it while ignoring any counter-examples.
joeclark77onAug 22, 2014
The key to the latter is to have an interesting problem to solve and then look for methods, rather than starting with a couple of methods and then looking for a problem. So my advice to you is, figure out what problem or opportunity you want to work on. Then look for tools in any discipline that will help you.
manglavonDec 11, 2012
evermikeonOct 1, 2018
(1) Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers — Weinberg, Gabriel
(2) Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't — Harnish, Verne
(3) The Lean Startup — Ries, Eric
(4) 100 Days of Growth - Sujan Patel & Rob Wormley
(5) Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose - Tony Hsieh
wsc981onApr 9, 2015
I think 'The Lean Startup' is not just a good read for startups in the usual sense; it's also a great advise on how to handle personal projects.
With regards to 'The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy' I think the stoic view of life is great and fits well into our western mindset while still being somewhat 'zen' like. I plan to read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations at some point since it's a bit like a diary of a stoic.
I will soon start with 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage'[0] which was recommended in a previous HN thread.
---
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_Tsukuru_Tazaki_and_Hi...
hifumionAug 16, 2016
Why wouldn't the majority of your friends on Facebook share similar political views? That's surely a factor of why you are friends in the first place. You wouldn't share a political article to them with the intention of proving an argument. There isn't much debate to be had with them.
Why would you not use small apps that make small things convenient? This is brought to attention so often in the article but it's not even unique to Silicon Valley. It's common to a whole generation.
The constant use of social media also makes it painfully obvious that this article isn't following the life of an engineer.
Most of this probably is satire, but it seems in poor taste.
CommunitivityonMar 4, 2015
aalhouronJan 2, 2018
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
* Introducing Go, by Caleb Doxsey.
If you'd like to read what I think of these books, you can read my blog post about them here: http://aalhour.com/blog/2018/01/02/review-of-my-2017-reading...
rkangelonNov 8, 2019
The idea is to learn as much as possible (read The Lean Startup if you haven't). If you build too much in one go, you're going to have tied yourself to one vision of how your users will use the product and be more closed to learning from them what they actually need. Note that you were persuaded by a designer to make the design nicer, not a user, potential user or even product manager.
What was the problem with launching, and then deciding that design was the next priority and working on it while your product was running?
[disclaimer: I definitely haven't got this figured out as we shutdown the company and I'm back building Big Expensive Systems]
brandonthejamesonMar 19, 2013
I was thinking maybe a few hundred people would see it and I'd be able to get some feedback on the idea, but within a few hours the post was at the top of r/gaming and managed to reach the front page for a while.
Since then the site has been launched and has recently came out of beta. We have over 2000 trades completed and 5000 games from 25 platforms.
If anyone has a minute to spare I'd love to hear your feedback.
dlfonOct 2, 2011
For startup events, I would say just go and strike up some conversations. People are generally helpful and will share their experiences. It's a good way to learn. Speaking of, when I was first learning about startups I listened to the podcasts at the Stanford E- Corner basically non-stop: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/
I would consider studying Eric Ries and Steve Blank as well regarding "lean startups". "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" are books worth spending the money on.
It's good that you're in NYC. There's a strong community there.
Cheers!
mark_l_watsononOct 1, 2011
We seem to live in an increasingly stratified society: much of the work force has obsolete skills and too often a lack of incentive to retrain while a smaller number of people are pushing the envelope on learning new ways of running businesses and new ways to develop tech.
arkitaiponSep 24, 2011
But if you're thinking about structuring things so you can better go from ideas to businesses, you need to reevaluate your entire approach. You need tools that can practically guide you through the stages of creating a software business, not just a general philosophy of getting things done.
Currently in the startup world, there's an interesting convergence between customer development and lean as applied to tech startups. Customer development is described in Steven Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and Eric Ries' "The lean startup" is the book on lean startups. Both Blank and Ries have contributed to this convergence that I talk about at their respective sites [1] [2] but there's also overviews available [3] [4]. But why am I even recommending these two approaches? Because they cover business development from start to finish from as applied to software startups, so you know the advice is specific to our industry and very practical in nature. If you're serious about the business of software, customer development and lean startup will help you create a business with better certainty of execution and outcome. Together they provide a very potent combination of roadmap and compass, and principles and philosophy.
[1] http://steveblank.com/
[2] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/
[3] http://www.recessmobile.com/blog/my-take-on-customer-develop...
[4] http://danielmckenzie.com/blog/2010/07/design-thinking-custo...
d-lectableonSep 14, 2011
I'm at a start-up that is a follower of the lean startup movement, a term coined by Eric Ries.
The ideology behind a lean startup is a customer-centric approach where you build a minimum viable product (MVP) and always be learning from your customers and make changes till you build out something that they actually want to use. Be flexible on your vision, and don't waste time and resources to build out an amazing product that no one wants.
For a SaaS partner, conventions and meet ups are probably the best places to start. It helps when you're building a relationship by getting out of the office and talking to your customers, and cold calling isn't the warmest approach (duh). Meet-ups are a great opportunity to build relationships and get to know your customer's needs and eventually make the sell. As you keep talking to people, keep making notes of iterations on your product to build something that those customers want.
There are so many companies that have flopped in the past, such as WebVan, who built out expensive supply chains before really understanding their customer's needs. They were an early pioneer of e-commerce, but many argue that it grew too fast for people to really jump on board. Had they slowed down and spent time understanding their customer's needs, they wouldn't have over-invested in infrastructure.
In short, don't build out a product with all the features and functionality you want before you figure out what your customers want/need. As you talk to people about your MVP, you'll organically figure out who your pilot customers will be.
Get out of the office and talk to customers!
Suggested reading:
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (fresh off the press!)
Running Lean by Ash Maurya http://www.runningleanhq.com/
MaroonDec 26, 2012
Softwar - Larry Ellison's story. Fascinating read.
Games People Play - Classic by Eric Berne. Must read psychology. Short, and you will get so much out of it.
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff - Must read psychology. Short, and you will get so much out of it.
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - Will re-read soon to get to the next level.
browsercoinonNov 1, 2018
I feel that it's no longer a merit based but short term pump and dump in which private equity is traded but not without surrendering your control as the founder and that you are now on the dole on a community of investors that trade shares for pennies and have every legitimate reason to dump it to unsuspecting public market to reap profits.
Advices like #1, In 2018, honestly irrelevant, and increasingly sounding like the new telemarketer. For instance, I repeatedly get calls or emails from a variety of SaaS founders or other developers who started their product that I've grown to detune and avoid them.
The big marketing fields are prohibitively expensive so those with the pocket can bid up and essentially deny competitors access to the same consumers.
Trying to sell something that doesn't exist can be done, but not without compromises with unclear results. Why? The power dynamic is asymmetric due to the sheer capital and a hound of top tier lawyers ready to sink their teeth into your startup.
Meaning, they can even sign a memo or an agreement to express interest and then pull out. What the fuck are you gonna do, sue a Fortune 1000 company?
davidwonSep 19, 2012
Nail Then Scale It: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055D7O1U/?tag=dedasys-20
I've heard good things about this too: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006UKFFE0/?tag=dedasys-20 - if anyone wants to comment on how it compares to "Nail It".
I've also got Steve Blank's book, but haven't read much of it yet. I'm signed up for the course though, and agree that he seems like a good speaker, although I haven't had much time for it yet.
mattkevanonMar 4, 2018
Although my background is in design, I’ve spent the last 15 years variously doing design, ux and web development. I got into it as the previous person left suddenly and I sort of took over and was doing it a while before it was made official.
Product management is a mix of ux, development and business, so it helps to have an interest and understanding of these things.
For me the biggest change has been going from solving problems to finding and articulating the problems for the team to solve. I’ve had to hold myself back from getting stuck in to finding answers so that I allow the team autonomy and also don’t accidentally short circuit the process.
The LEAN Startup is worth reading, as is Designing Products People Love by Scott Hurff, and The LEAN Product Playbook. Strategise by Roman Pilcher has some good stuff on business strategy and innovation theory. I signed up to a free trial with Safari Books Online and read everything I could in the time. Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning has some good videos too.
mockingbirdyonJuly 3, 2018
When I was younger (I know how this sounds) I read "The Lean Startup" and drank the Koolaid. I was feeling like a failure because I wasn't building the next big thing (tm) although I had an IQ of 152 and wrote code since ages. I think that some aspects of the startup bubble can be seriously bad for mental health. I've learned to accept myself and the world and cut the bullshit and "will to power"-esque thinking. Sometimes I still have feelings of unmet potential, but fortunately I now understand that a fast-growing startup is one of many solutions (and sometimes not even a solution at all). I can now learn to allow myself to find peace.
koubeonJune 10, 2020
davidwonFeb 10, 2012
Looks like it could be a very interesting book though, if it's written top to bottom, and not just a bunch of his blog stuff lashed together with duct tape and twine.
I recently read The Lean Startup, against my better instincts, and was duly disappointed. A few key ideas and lots of what felt like hand waving to me. I think Eric is the real deal, but somehow managed to produce a book aimed at the management of large companies, rather than people running actual startups. Steve's book, on the other hand, promises "lots of details" and "metrics that matter". Hopefully, actual things that can be measured, rather than "innovation accounting"...
jayliewonAug 1, 2011
1.5 years in development is too long to be in a silo without getting feedback from prospective customers; read about Customer Development (Steve Blank's "4 steps to the Epiphany" book) and Lean Startup methods (Eric Ries - The Lean Startup). And yes, you do not need to write a single line of code to get feedback from prospective customers. "Hey Mr. Customer, I was thinking of building X to solve your problem Y. What do you think?" is the cheapest thing you can do before you write a single LOC, the simplest question you can ask to gauge their immediate reaction.
Steve Blank says the difference between successful and failed startups is that the successful ones truly understand why customers buy. If people are buying from you but you don't understand why, you just got lucky and you won't know what hit you when your luck runs out, could be a market shift, or induced by a competitor. I'd humbly assert, if you failed, try to understand why you failed, so that you don't repeat your mistakes. If you don't know why you failed, then you just might repeat them - and thus that 1.5 years may very well just be useless (although I'm positive it's not). Write it down in words and internalize your lessons.
Also, reasons for failure could be further divided into things under your control and things not under your control. If it wasn't under your control, don't beat yourself over it. If it was, now you're that much wiser. Without a great wave, the best surfer in the world is still just some guy on a surf board.
Good luck and all the best!
aalhouronAug 21, 2018
Really, this book changed how I view communication and negotiation forever. It will definitely impact your life positively.
2) The Lean Startup
A classic, but worth re-reading. Everytime I read the book, it leaves a greater imprint on how I think.
3) The Obstacle is the Way
How to turn obstacles into solutions. This book is a great treatise on Stoicism via examples. I read the book at the start of the year which to mentally set the right tone for the months to follow. The book "coaches" the reader in the basic tenets of the Stoic philosophy by drawing examples from history and sports, by the end of the book you are left with a more intuitive and practical understanding of Stoicism than an academic one.
sblankonSep 7, 2014
Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist.
Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them.
What's missing?
arunabhonDec 26, 2012
1) Thinking fast and slow
(currently reading)
2) The Lean Startup
(Read when I joined founders institute, was helpful in quite number ways. Doubled it with same course on udemy )
3) Banker to the poor - Md. Yunus
(Got a chance to interview Md.Yunus,)
4) Business Model Generation http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/book
(Quite a read, for business model generation. One can explain whole biz plan in 1 page)
5) The Dilbert principle
6) Steve Jobs
FICTION
1) The Hobbit
2) Ulysses
3) Sense of ending
mindcrimeonDec 27, 2011
Fiction:
Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson
Zero History - William Gibson
11/22/63 - Stephen King
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
Non-fiction:
Ghost in the Wires - Kevin Mitnick
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Built To Last - Jim Collins
Business Model Generation - Alexander Osterwalder
Started, but unfinished, may yet make the list:
Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard
Reamde - Neal Stephenson
The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
davidwonMay 3, 2012
There are better books, I think. I've just read Nail It Then Scale It, which is mostly better than Ries' book. Steve Blank's new book also comes to mind, and Running Lean also comes highly recommended from others I know. Ries' book is too generic and leaves you without much of substance once you're done with it.
mindcrimeonAug 14, 2013
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Positioning - Al Ries & Jack Trout
Repositioning - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
Differentiate or Die - Jack Trout (with Steve Rivkin)
The Ultimate Marketing Plan - Dan S. Kennedy
The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes
All Marketers Are Liars - Seth Godin
The Purple Cow - Seth Godin
And add in one generic "Marketing 101" textbook. Find something at a used bookstore or order used on Amazon. Something like this, or similar:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0132177153/ref=sr_1_4...
I guess there actually is a tip embedded in all that... "learn as much as you can about marketing". I'm still learning myself, and I've only learned enough to have a vague notion of how much I don't know, but I've gained a real appreciation for the importance of this stuff.
aespinozaonJan 13, 2012
* The Lean Startup
* Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup.
* Startup@Cloud: 33 tips for running your company using cloud-based software.
manglavonOct 25, 2012
It sounds like you want to do a LawPivot, for general consumer application. You want to build a MARKET, which is the hardest thing imo to do in the startup world. Too many variables, and even with millions of dollars and a great founding team, you can fail (Airtime didn't fail, but for what they were hyped up as, I think it did). If you want to really do this, start with a small sector.
Btw, LawPivot would not work over tweets - it would ruin their professional presence (at least currently). Maybe you want to make a 411 tweet-bot of sorts? Where you tweet a question, and you answer it?
I feel as though you're hitting several different things at once, try to hit one thing, HARD.
Also, automate business to consumer, IN THE LONG TERM. Short term, anything goes. Mechanical Turk, you and a friend doing google searches after reading tweets, anything. Get paid, then automate. This is covered in "The Lean Startup", required reading.
That was just my stream of consciousness, thanks for reading!
bookitbeeonMar 26, 2013
tristanjonAug 26, 2017
with quotes like
>"We were a classic conglomerate. Now people are calling us a 125-year-old start-up."
>"The two things that influenced me the most were Marc Andreessen’s 2011 Wall Street Journal article, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” and The Lean Startup—Eric Ries’s book, which I literally read in a day."
The PR spin machines are already churning.
nateberkopeconMay 10, 2012
I think startups have a lot to learn from the military community. Yes, for the most part modern militaries are extensive bureaucracies, but military thinkers and intellectuals are really at the forefront of management science. John Boyd basically wrote The Lean Startup 30 years before Eric Ries did.
peterschroederonJan 7, 2017
The idea is this breaks down the barrier to entry to start incorporating multiple unifications. For example, we start with messaging and next we unify emails. From there we unify live streaming, and then something else. I am not saying these are the things we are going to go on to unify, but that is the concept.
j4ustinonApr 16, 2013
trvlngwlbryonJan 9, 2013
The example from the book that comes to mind (and I forget the name of the startup) was a grocery delivery app. They started out by manually going up to people at the grocery store and offering to give them suggestions on groceries to buy based on meal ideas. Eventually, they got someone to agree to participate and provided enough value to the person that they could - and did - get paid by the customer. This helped validate their idea to started building out the app that would do the same thing using software.
adrianhowardonMar 31, 2013
I was pointed to Lean Startup back in 2010 as a solution to some of the problems I was looking at. The folk I talked to, places like the LSC mailing list, and reading the online/offline writings of Steve Blank, Eric Ries and many others helped a lot.
I was really looking forward to Eric's book - but it didn't really hit the spot I was hoping it would hit. It's very much aimed (I think) at explaining the ideas to the world in general - rather than being a guide to folk who want to apply the ideas. There's nothing wrong with the former, but I was hoping for the latter.
bonesingeronNov 25, 2011
I have worked with fictitious clients in helping them incorporate, plan a business, initiate a stock purchase, asset purchase, and lastly, how to handle taxation.
I'm midway through The Lean Startup and unfortunately, I realize the startup field is dominated by engineers with inventions. I understand the purpose of funds like Ycombinator and techstars is to provide guidance for engineers and to help them understand the non-engineer aspects that go with running a company. I want some of that experience! They just don't offer it in my law school.
I've worked in a clinical program with real inventors, but it was directed towards helping them with trademarks and patents and not so much as helping them plan a business.