"The key takeaway from Lean Startup can best be summed up around the concept of using smaller, faster iterations for testing a vision."
- Running Lean, page XXIII
"Most Plan A’s don’t work"- Running Lean, page 4
Learning and listening require the belief that I don’t have all the answers. Running Lean is all about learning and learning from other people.
Author Ash Maurya summarizes the book this way: “The essence of Running Lean can be distilled into three steps: Document your Plan A. Identify the riskiest parts of your plan. Systematically test your plan.”
You can listen without learning anything. He maintains that you must come up with a falsifiable hypothesis to test. If your hypothesis can’t be falsified, it can’t be confirmed and you won’t learn what you need. The goal of a startup is not growing, but learning. If you learn the right things, growing will take care of itself.
"Customers don’t care about your solution. They care about their problems."- Dave McClure, as quoted in Running Lean, page 7
First, you must learn about your customers. He advocates targeting early adopters. Ask early and often, “What do they need?” After all, “Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.”
It is naïve to think that customers will tell you what to do. He quotes Steve Jobs, “It is not the customer’s job to know what they want.” Henry Ford understood the same thing, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
This is where the testable hypothesis comes in. Don’t look for opinions, look for actions. “Don’t ask customers what they want. Measure what they do.”
In summary he says, “Startups can consume years of your life, so pick a problem worth solving.”
"Be different, but make sure your difference matters."- Running Lean, page 29
As mentioned before, “The initial goal of a startup is to learn, not to scale.” The learning is not merely about your customers, but about your business. What are you trying to do?
He adapts a one-page business model from some other source and calls it a “Lean Canvas.” This one-page business model includes not only your customers’ problems, but your solutions, your distribution plan, your “unfair advantage”, and your pricing strategy.
As I thought about a series of products I might launch in the future, it became obvious to me that I am going to end up guessing at everything. I may be good at wishing, but not at having a workable plan. Everything I would write on that “Lean Canvas” would be a guess. The fundamental tenet of Running Lean is “Your business model is not a dartboard.” This book came along at a good time for me.
While listening, testing and learning can seem daunting, it doesn’t need to be. Maurya maintains, “You can uncover 85% of your product’s problems with as few as five testers.” Find an action-based hypothesis. Test it with a few people.
Don’t assume. Learn. Adjust. Test again. Learn about problems. Find good solutions. Find ways to price and deliver the solutions. Test everything. Soon, in a matter of days or weeks, you will know what you need to have a workable plan and/or product.
So, what did I learn in reading Running Lean? I learned to quit guessing. Find ways to test every assumption. Whether it is an online product or a parenting class at church, I need to test my assumptions.
