A guide to building companies through startups. The book introduces many foundational ideas, but also includes repetitive advice, often trying to fit the "lean" narrative.

It's worth reading if it's your first read on startups, but otherwise it might not provide much new insight.

My Notes

• A startup is an human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
• Innovation is at the heart of a startup’s success.
• Startups operate with too much uncertainty and don’t know yet who their customer is or what their product should be, which is one of the main reason they fail.
• The Lean Startup model takes its name from the Toyota manufacturing revolution led by Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, who transformed Toyota into a flourishing global company by focusing on four principles:
  1. Drawing on the knowledge and creativity of individual employees
  2. Shrinking batch sizes
  3. Utilizing just-in-time production and inventory control
  4. Accelerating cycle times
• The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build as quickly as possible.
• The Lean Startup model emphasizes fast cycle times, understanding customer needs without direct inquiry, and using scientific methods to inform decisions.
• “Learning” is usually the oldest excuse of people for failure of execution.
• Validated learning is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow.
• The main concepts in the early days should deal with these following questions.
  • What should we build and for whom?
  • What market could we enter and dominate?
  • How could we build durable value that would not be subject to erosion by competition?
• Anything that isn’t providing value to the customer is waste.
• Most of the time consumers don’t know what they want in advance.
• Minimum viable products (MVPs) are essential to the Lean Startup method as they facilitate the process of validated learning as quickly as possible.
• A MVP aims to test fundamental business hypotheses.
• The cycle should be: Assumptions → Experimentation → Learning → Pivoting or Persevering
• A startup’s job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.
• Beware of vanity metrics like number of visitors, of purchases.. that only make your business good-looking.
• Focus on actionable metrics you can act on and learn with them.
• A Product/Market Fit is the moment when a startup finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate with its products.