Synopses & Reviews
Advice for entrepreneurs looking to build a business people actually want to invest inDesigned to reduce waste by testing the market for a product early and often, the concept of the lean startup has been embraced around the world, and successful entrepreneurs and authors Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits join the conversation with their own personal experiences. The Lean Entrepreneur is designed to make lean startup and customer development principles immediately actionable no matter what the industry, size, or stage.
This must-read book presents a lexicon of concepts and a universally applicable road map to success, as well as illustrative examples of innovative approaches to industry-specific disruption ranging from technology startups to consumer packaged goods to music to investment and finance. Providing a step-by-step approach to best practices, and giving readers a business model analysis guide, the book is rich in cases studies, illustrative graphics, worksheets, and exercises for a truly immersive guide to starting or improving a company. Invaluable reading for all readers in all businesses, the book teaches entrepreneurs how to approach risk head-on and test market ideas immediately, foster stronger customer relations, test different business model risks, and create a customer funnel based on buyers' process in order to eliminate unnecessary time and effort.
A lean entrepreneur has already bought into lean startup, customer development, design thinking, and other iterative, customer-centric methods of product development. The lean entrepreneur wants to know how to apply these to their business. In other words: how to get started tomorrow. This book shows the way.
- Expands on the core ideas of the "Lean Startup" concept, adding the use of powerful, low-cost analytics to the mix
- Explains how earlier, more frequent market research can save a business time and money
- Incorporates cases studies, graphics, worksheets, and exercises to help readers better understand the key concepts expounded in the text
Packed with information that can help business at all levels of development—from initial ideas to established companies looking to innovate—The Lean Entrepreneur is the field guide for creating innovative businesses.
Synopsis
Deemed a "must-read" by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, The Lean Entrepreneur provides a four-step framework to inventing and building a product that people actually want. The book details lean startup concepts, a step-by-step approach to best practices, and a business model analysis guide. It also includes cases studies, rich graphics, and worksheets and exercises. Regardless of the stage of your business--whether still in concept or well-established and looking for new innovation--The Lean Entrepreneur teaches readers how to "get out of the building," foster stronger customer relations, test different business model risks, find venture capitalists, and create a customer funnel based on buyers' process.
Synopsis
You are not a Visionary . . . yet. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to become one.Most of us believe entrepreneurial visionaries are born, not made. Our media glorify business outliers like Bezos, Branson, Gates, and Jobs as heroes with X-ray vision who can look to the future, see clearly what will be, imagine a fully formed product or experience, and then simply make the vision real.
Many in our entrepreneur community still believe that to be visionary, we must merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore all doubt. With this mindset, companies build doomed products in a vacuum; enterprises make ill-fated innovation investment decisions; and employees and shareholders come along for an uncomfortable ride.
Falling prey to the Myth of the Visionary confuses talented entrepreneurs, product managers, innovators, and investors. It leads us to heartbreaking, costly, and preventable failures in new product and venture development.
The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation, and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet.
Anyone can be visionary. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to:
- Apply actionable tips, tricks, and hacks from successful lean entrepreneurs
- Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt existing markets and create new ones
- Drive strategies for efficient market testing with Minimal Viable Products
- Engage customers with Viability Testing and radically reduce the time and budget for product development
- Rapidly create cross-functional innovation teams that devour roadblocks and set new benchmarks
- Bring your organization critical focus on the power of loyal customers and valuable products you can build to serve them
- Leverage instructive tools, skill-building exercises, and worksheets along with bonus online videos
Synopsis
The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to become a
visionary"A sprawling overview of some of the biggest ideas in the start-up world."
—SETH GODIN, Author The Icarus Deception
"The Lean Startup methodology has become a fundamentally critical approach to creating and building a startup. Brant and Patrick explain in a very accessible way, with extended case studies from a variety of exciting, contemporary startups, with awesome bonus illustrations from everyone's favorite robotic dinosaur, Fake Grimlock. If you are a startup entrepreneur, this is a must-read book for your startup journey."
—Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group; co-founder, TechStars; and creator of the Startup Revolution series of books
"If you're an entrepreneur, making stupid mistakes is inevitable. The Lean methodology will help you cut down on them drastically. Do yourself a favor and pick up The Lean Entrepreneur. It will make your journey into the unknown much, much smoother."
—Julien Smith, New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents
"This fascinating new book shows that at the intersection of disruption and lean company thinking, there is a new world of: lean entrepreneurship—empowered individuals who bring the world kicking and screaming into the future. I can't wait."
—Paul Kedrosky
"The Lean Entrepreneur cruises at 50,000 feet with a view of the context we are operating in today's economy. At the same time, it dives deep into key ways the new startup tools, frameworks, and mechanisms can be leveraged to take advantage of a world filled with uncertainty and opportunity."
—Scott Case, CEO, Startup America Partnership
Synopsis
You are not a Visionary… yet.
The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to become one.
Most of us believe entrepreneurial visionaries are born, not made. Our media glorify business outliers like Bezos, Branson, Gates, and Jobs as heroes with X-ray vision who can look to the future, see clearly what will be, imagine a fully formed product or experience and then, simply make the vision real.
Many in our entrepreneur community still believe that to be visionary, we must merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore all doubt. With this mindset, companies build doomed products in a vacuum; enterprises make ill-fated innovation investment decisions; and employees and shareholders come along for an uncomfortable ride.
Falling prey to the Myth of the Visionary confuses talented entrepreneurs, product managers, innovators and investors. It leads us to heartbreaking, costly and preventable failures in new product and venture development.
The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet.
Anyone can be visionary. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to:
- Apply actionable tips, tricks and hacks from successful lean entrepreneurs.
- Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt existing markets and create new ones.
- Drive strategies for efficient market testing with Minimal Viable Products.
- Engage customers with Viability Testing and radically reduce time and budget for product development.
- Rapidly create cross-functional innovation teams that devour roadblocks and set new benchmarks.
- Bring your organization critical focus on the power of loyal customers and valuable products you can build to serve them.
Leverage instructive tools, skill-building exercises, and worksheets along with bonus online videos.
About the Author
Brant Cooper helps organizations big and small move the needle. His startup career includes Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, inCode, and many others. He has experienced IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and miserable failure. Brant previously authored The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, the first purpose-written book to discuss Lean Startup and Customer Development concepts, earning a distribution of over 50k. Brant has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs across the globe and is a sought after speaker, having presented at leading companies such as Qualcomm, Intuit, Capital One and Hewlett-Packard. Brant is reachable @brantcooper. He lives with (and continuously learns from) his two daughters, Riva and Eliza, near Swami's in Encinitas, California.Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur, mentor, and author. He has founded two startups, serves as CMO at Drumbi, and cowrote The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany. His writing on debunking the origin of Henry Ford’s "faster horses" has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal blog, and The Browser. Patrick has spoken at tech conferences nationally, including SXSW Interactive (Austin, Texas), Michigan Lean Startup Conference, Lean Startup Machine San Francisco/Chicago/New York, as well as, internationally, The Turing Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland), Leancamp (multiple), and SVC2LX (Lisbon, Portugal). He tweets at @pv and blogs vlaskovits.com. Patrick enjoys advising (Drumbi, Chromatik)and mentoring and serves as a mentor for the 500 Startups and for The Lean Startup Machine.
Table of Contents
Special Thanks ix
Foreword xv
Introduction xvii
Chapter 1: Startup Revolution 1
The Myth of the Visionary (Take 1) 1
The Myth of the Visionary (Take 2) 4
Case Study: Disrupting Venture Capital 6
Which Is to Say, Disruption Hurts 12
Case Study: Customized Value Creation 21
And Cue the Lean Startup 23
Lean Startup, Please Meet the Lean Entrepreneur 25
Chapter 2: Vision, Values, and Culture 31
Vision and Values 31
Case Study: Is the Problem Really Solvable? 36
Lean into It: The Lean Startup Culture 38
Case Study: Experience-Driven Jumpstart 41
Case Study: KISSmetrics 45
Case Study: Root-Cause Analysis on Sales 50
Over the Horizon: A Framework 56
Case Study: Lean Startup Horizons 57
Chapter 3: All the Fish in the Sea 61
Case Study: The Ethology of the Fish 64
Know Your Audience: Why Segmentation Matters 66
Market Segment 70
Personas: Create a Fake Customer 71
Case Study: Salim’s Fish Inventory 72
Choosing a Market Segment 74
Case Study: Carla’s Dream Jobs 75
Case Study: It’s in the Name 78
Chapter 4: Wading in the Value Stream 83
Articulating the Value Stream 83
Case Study: Seeing from Customer’s View 85
Value-Stream Discovery 91
Case Study: AppFog’s High Hurdle 102
Chapter 5: Diving In 109
Listen to Your Customers—or Not 110
Customer Interaction 113
Case Study: Don’t Just Get Out of the Building, Get Out of the Country 115
Case Study: What’s the Worst That Can Happen? 121
Case Study: A Nonprofi t Lean Startup 123
Chapter 6: Viability Experiments 131
The Infamous Landing Page 132
Concierge Test 134
Case Study: Curating User Experience 135
Wizard of Oz Test 139
Case Study: Idea to Wizard of Oz in under 90 Days 140
Crowd-Funding Test 141
Case Study: Two-Sided Market Lean Startup 143
Prototyping 146
Case Study: MVP: Motor Vehicle Prototype 148
Chapter 7: Data’s Double-Edged Sword 151
Case Study: Disrupting the Undisruptable 155
New Products 158
Existing Products 163
Case Study: Instrumenting Growth 165
Chapter 8: The Valley of Death 169
Minimum Viable Product 171
Case Study: The Minimum Viable Audience 176
Case Study: Social Impact Lean Startup 180
Case Study: But My Marinara Is to Die For! 183
Case Study: O2, Telecom at the Speed of the Internet 189
Chapter 9: Real Visionaries Have Funnel Vision 193
Innovate the Funnel 195
Growth Waves 209
Case Study: Ten Lean Startup Buzzword Questions with Rob Fan 215
Chapter 10: The Final Word 225
Case Study: Drinking Kool-Aid and Eating Dog Food 229
Notes 237
Acknowledgments 241
About the Authors 244
Index 249