The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video I want to introduce another core fundamental entrepreneurship book which is the Lean Startup by Eric Ries and it's for continuous innovation and improving your product and continuously staying one head of the curve now this theory is essentially industry standard you should not not follow it so let me tell you a little bit about this book Eric was Steve blanks student at Stanford and when you look at the arithmetic G's their methodologies work very well together if you recall Steve's is about gathering feedback upfront before you build Eric's is for after you build it's built on top of Steve's feedback model and it helps with continuous innovation it's essentially very good for new innovative startups but I recommend it for all companies because whatever I do I do exactly this model whether it's improving my books or whether it's improving my courses or whether it's improving some apps that I built or whether it's anything else I always follow this model let me explain to you what this model is it's predicated on this Minimum Viable Product what does that mean it means that which you when you release the product you don't overthink it and you don't release some gigantic version of the product unless you're extremely sure it's gonna be great but in almost no case that's the case so you don't know we think and you don't overdo and you release the small smallest viable version of the product to a small group and sometimes people call that the alpha testing group the beta testing doesn't matter it's unofficial but you collect feedback and then you gather that feedback and you make your next relatively small iteration and because it's small it's gonna be rapid small and rapid changes and then you give it to the same group back for more feedback and maybe you expand the group add some more people to the group give it to a bigger audience gather more feedback and because you'll get more feedback quickly you'll be able to make the next set of changes quickly and you'll be able to give that next set of changes to the same group again and expand the group so your product will have this iterative quick changes that improve the product based not on theory but specifically on customer feedback who are using it and of course you don't want to take their feedback word-for-word you want to think about it so you want to synthesize your own ideas with the feedback and be really open to the feedback this way you're gonna have a really good roadmap almost like a real-time roadmap that will be that will be made available to you through that feedback and so you're not gonna make any mistakes and you're gonna innovate in the right direction and you want to continue this cycle forever during the lifetime of your product or business the only difference is the rate of iterations will slow down a little bit during the maturity phase in the beginning companies and startups it's not unheard of that they make changes all the time every day when I release my app on Android I literally made three updates a day because I needed to go really fast but then I slowed down to once a day then I slowed down to once a week then I slowed down even more and even more once it reaches a certain level of maturity so that's the standard way and I recommend using Steve blanks model to get feedback before you even launch and before you write a single line of code and after you've created and released your product then you use Eric Ries iterative model to iterate over your product rapidly and improve it rapidly which is gonna continue to always keep you one step ahead of your competitor.