Imagine how much you’d learn from 10 steadily improving prototypes vs 1 giant, fully-featured prototype. The faster you move through this loop, the faster you’ll learn, and the more progress you’ll make. Then you build the minimal product to test that hypothesis, and so on. Then you update the hypothesis or set a new one. Often this means exposing users to the product and collecting data on their behavior.įinally, you analyze the data and reflect – how far off was your hypothesis? What do you need to change about your strategy? Should you actually change your entire direction? Next, you build the MINIMAL product necessary to test the hypothesis. What do you believe about your customers that is vital to your business? How are you going to measure this? Build-Measure Learnįirst, you set your hypothesis. How can you learn what your users want, as quickly as possible, and with as few resources as possible? The strategies of Lean Startup answer this question. You have real, quantitative data to show what you have learned. Validated learning is having testable hypotheses about the world, designing experiments to test those hypotheses, and analyzing the data to evaluate your hypotheses. (“Well of course X didn’t work, that means we should do Y!”) You keep repeating this and making progress.īut you need to approach learning with discipline, a process called “validated learning.”īad learning is executing a plan without much prior thought, seeing it work or fail, and giving a post-hoc rationalization. Based on this new information, you adjust your strategy, like turning the steering wheel. You collect information about your customer, just like seeing where you are on the road. Veer a little right, and you turn to the left before you go offroad.Ī startup’s the same way. When you get on the road, you make constant adjustments to the steering wheel, based on where you see yourself on the road. Because startups face so much uncertainty, you have to make continuous adjustments to your startup plan, based on the information you get back. The goal of a startup is to learn what their customers want and will pay for, as quickly as possible. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of The Lean Startup

The lean startup sparknotes