Lean Startup Quotes

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Reading is good, action is better.

if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is at the core of the Lean Startup model.

When in doubt, simplify.

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.

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.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

In the Lean Startup model, an experiment is more than just a theoretical inquiry; it is also a first product.

Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.

Listen to your customers, not your competitors.

Life's too short to build something nobody wants.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

I will learn by screwing up.

The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Anything those customers experience from their interaction with a company should be considered part of that company’s product.

The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.

Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.

You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.

Customers don’t care about your solution. They care about their problems. —Dave McClure, 500 Startups

there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.

All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning.

The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became

Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate enough times before running out of resources.

Perfectionism is a disease. Procrastination is a disease. ACTION is the cure.

This is an important rule: a good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.

It is insufficient to exhort workers to try harder. Our current problems are caused by trying too hard—at the wrong things.

In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings

Leveraging existing resources is innovation’s sweetest play.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.

Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

Toyota discovered that small batches made their factories more efficient. In contrast, in the Lean Startup the goal is not to produce more stuff efficiently. It is to-as quickly as possible-learn how to build a sustainable business.

We sometimes remind early-stage founders that, in many ways, they aren’t building a product. They’re building a tool to learn what product to build.

Don’t just ask questions. Know how the answers to the questions will change your behavior. In other words, draw a line in the sand before you run the survey.

Don’t sell what you can make; make what you can sell.

You can’t take learning to the bank; you can’t spend it or invest it.

if you are asking, you’re not there yet.

There is a reason all past management revolutions have been led by engineers: management is human systems engineering.

waiting too long to release can lead to the ultimate waste: making something that nobody wants.

entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.

when you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell.

If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?

Startup, I have always been a bit of a troublemaker at the companies at which I have worked, pushing for rapid iteration, data-driven decision making, and early customer involvement.

Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? 2. If there was a solution, would they buy it? 3. Would they buy it from us? 4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

The CEO and VP of product, instead of building their business, are engaged in the drudgery of solving just one customer’s problem. Instead of marketing themselves to millions, they sold themselves to one.

Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

People are accustomed to thinking of accounting as dry and boring, a necessary evil used primarily to prepare financial reports and survive audits, but that is because accounting is something that has become taken for granted.

I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions.

Love the Problem, Not the Solution.

Pursuing a rapid experiment and finding out you were wrong and changing directions isn’t failure. That is the road to success.

Products that delight customers do the unexpected. They solve a problem customers didn’t know they had, or they evoke a positive emotion.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

Your job isn’t to build a product; it’s to de-risk a business model.

Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.

Most of the time customers don’t know what they want in advance.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

They will ask to go back to the old way of working, in which they had the opportunity to “stay efficient” by working in larger batches and passing work between departments.

achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.

Most important, teams working in this system begin to measure their productivity according to validated learning, not in terms of the production of new features.

The common tendency of product development is to skip straight to the fourth question and build a solution before confirming that customers have the problem.

New customers come from the actions of past customers.

In the twenty-first century, we face a new set of problems that Taylor could not have imagined. Our productive capacity greatly exceeds our ability to know what to build.

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind.

Unfortunately, “learning” is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution. It’s what managers fall back on when they fail to achieve the results we promised.

Part of the special challenge of being a startup is the near impossibility of having your idea, company, or product be noticed by anyone, let alone a competitor.

The Lean Startup asks people to start measuring their productivity differently. Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

There are two types of uncertainty that influence a firm’s ability to create a customer: demand uncertainty (will customers buy it?) and technological uncertainty (can we make a desirable solution?).

This is one of the most important discoveries of the lean manufacturing movement: you cannot trade quality for time. If you are causing (or missing) quality problems now, the resulting defects will slow you down later.

Just as scientific experimentation is informed by theory, startup experimentation is guided by the startup’s vision. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can.

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

Once the baseline has been established, the startup can work toward the second learning milestone: tuning the engine. Every product development, marketing, or other initiative that a startup undertakes should be targeted at improving one of the drivers of its growth model.

After more than ten years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

In my Toyota interviews, when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs. You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.

Third, many entrepreneurs are afraid. Acknowledging failure can lead to dangerously low morale. Most entrepreneurs’ biggest fear is not that their vision will prove to be wrong. More terrifying is the thought that the vision might be deemed wrong without having been given a real chance to prove itself.

Westrum’s description of a rule-oriented culture is perhaps best thought of as one where following the rules is considered more important than achieving the mission—and we have worked with teams in the US Federal Government we would have no issue describing as generative, as well as startups that are clearly pathological.

No es suficiente con pedir a los traabajadores que se esfuercen más. Nuestros problemas actuales están provocados por esforzarnos demasiado en las cosas equivocadas

Consumers love novelty; businesses just call it risk

leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.

Only 5 percent of entrepreneurship is the big idea, the business model, the whiteboard strategizing, and the splitting up of the spoils. The other 95 percent is the gritty work that is measured by innovation accounting: product prioritization decisions, deciding which customers to target or listen to, and having the courage to subject a grand vision to constant testing and feedback.

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

Visionaries are especially afraid of a false negative: that customers will reject a flawed MVP that is too small or too limited. […] The solution to this dilemma is a commitment to iteration. You have to commit to a locked-in agreement—ahead of time—that no matter what comes of testing the MVP, you will not give up hope. Successful entrepreneurs do not give up at the first sign of trouble, nor do they persevere the plan right into the ground. Instead, they process a unique combination of perseverance and flexibility.

Impact is a critically important concept when it comes to social innovation, generally used in the context of measuring whether social interventions do or don’t work. But conceptually, it’s very similar to the problem of measuring success in a business before you have profits. That’s why lean methods are so perfectly suited to this kind of work. The only real difference is that instead of talking about maximizing shareholder value, Lean Impact talks about maximizing social impact. An advance party of pioneers, some of whom you’ll read about here, is already doing this, but we need more. This book is a way to help add to their numbers. Lean Impact is not only transformational for the social sector, though. My hope is that people in other kinds of businesses and organizations will also pick it up and, after reading about the dedicated people and clear strategies whose stories Ann Mei has gathered, think about how the products and institutions they build affect the world. All of us have more to learn about how we make impact so we can move together into this new era. —Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way

The story of Whole Foods Market provides dramatic evidence of the power of macro trends to create opportunities that savvy entrepreneurs can capitalize on. Such trends – in this case, sociocultural ones – create groups of customers having needs not served well by incumbent companies. The trend towards health and nutrition that began in the 1980s is still going strong,

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

After the plates are removed by the silent and swift waiting staff, General Çiller leans forward and says across the table to Güney, ‘What’s this I’m reading in Hürriyet about Strasbourg breaking up the nation?’ ‘It’s not breaking up the nation. It’s a French motion to implement European Regional Directive 8182 which calls for a Kurdish Regional Parliament.’ ‘And that’s not breaking up the nation?’ General Çiller throws up his hands in exasperation. He’s a big, square man, the model of the military, but he moves freely and lightly ‘The French prancing all over the legacy of Atatürk? What do you think, Mr Sarioğlu?’ The trap could not be any more obvious but Ayşe sees Adnan straighten his tie, the code for, Trust me, I know what I’m doing, ‘What I think about the legacy of Atatürk, General? Let it go. I don’t care. The age of Atatürk is over.’ Guests stiffen around the table, breath subtly indrawn; social gasps. This is heresy. People have been shot down in the streets of Istanbul for less. Adnan commands every eye. ‘Atatürk was father of the nation, unquestionably. No Atatürk, no Turkey. But, at some point every child has to leave his father. You have to stand on your own two feet and find out if you’re a man. We’re like kids that go on about how great their dads are; my dad’s the strongest, the best wrestler, the fastest driver, the biggest moustache. And when someone squares up to us, or calls us a name or even looks at us squinty, we run back shouting ‘I’ll get my dad, I’ll get my dad!’ At some point; we have to grow up. If you’ll pardon the expression, the balls have to drop. We talk the talk mighty fine: great nation, proud people, global union of the noble Turkic races, all that stuff. There’s no one like us for talking ourselves up. And then the EU says, All right, prove it. The door’s open, in you come; sit down, be one of us. Move out of the family home; move in with the other guys. Step out from the shadow of the Father of the Nation. ‘And do you know what the European Union shows us about ourselves? We’re all those things we say we are. They weren’t lies, they weren’t boasts. We’re good. We’re big. We’re a powerhouse. We’ve got an economy that goes all the way to the South China Sea. We’ve got energy and ideas and talent - look at the stuff that’s coming out of those tin-shed business parks in the nano sector and the synthetic biology start-ups. Turkish. All Turkish. That’s the legacy of Atatürk. It doesn’t matter if the Kurds have their own Parliament or the French make everyone stand in Taksim Square and apologize to the Armenians. We’re the legacy of Atatürk. Turkey is the people. Atatürk’s done his job. He can crumble into dust now. The kid’s come right. The kid’s come very right. That’s why I believe the EU’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us because it’s finally taught us how to be Turks.’ General Çiller beats a fist on the table, sending the cutlery leaping. ‘By God, by God; that’s a bold thing to say but you’re exactly right.