The Lean Startup

Lesson 1. Introduction.

In recent decades, people have gotten used to the term ‘startup’ like never before. It seems like everyone is getting into the startup business. While this is not a bad thing, doing so without any knowledge certainly is! 

We should not forget that a startup has to transform into a big business someday. This should always be the primary goal. Most people with a startup fail to scale up their business down the road. They either fail to accomplish their initial goals or fail to see beyond those goals. 

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries points out exactly where we go wrong, and how. The book guides us to avoid those mistakes. It is the key to setting up a profitable and scalable business. We’ll see how startups are different from bigger companies, and how they operate in very different ways. We’ll learn how to build a sustainable business from the ground up. There are many wrong ways to analyze the success of a startup. We’ll learn how to avoid those and choose the right ones.

Lesson 2. Different from Bigger Companies.

Most large organizations and companies have a structured way of doing things. They have different layers within the company. Everyone has very specific jobs, and work in very specific ways. They plan way ahead of time and take their time to do things. 

The most important thing that any company relies on, is data. The data of previously launched products, and previously served markets. They take further decisions based on that very data. This gives them insights into how a product or service would perform in a certain market. They have the road pretty much paved for them already.

Startups, however, do not have these luxuries! They have to just take a deep breath and go for it. If a big company drifts along a highway, a startup has to make its way off roading through hills and valleys.

Startups generally do not have much data to study. Their products are new and have never been tested in actual markets, with very few exceptions. Neither do they have the time to gather such enormous amounts of data. So then, what do we do? Let’s first see what not to do!

Many founders of startups act like they’ve got it all figured out. Trust us, they don’t! No one can know how a business will do before it is out in the real world. Figuring out everything beforehand, is a corporate mirage. They use management tools like market forecasts and milestones, which seldom work out. They