Richie Bartlett
Great book! Helped me understand how to build a startup faster and more focused.
We’re building more products today than ever before, but most of them fail–not because we can’t complete what we want to build but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.
In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving product/market fit for your fledgling venture. You’ll learn ideas and concepts from several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, business model design, design thinking, and Jobs-to-be-Done. This new edition introduces the continuous innovation framework and follows one entrepreneur’s journey from initial vision to a business model that works.
- Deconstruct your idea using a one-page Lean Canvas
- Stress-test your idea for desirability, viability, and feasibility
- Define key milestones charted on a traction roadmap
- Maximize your team’s efforts for speed, learning, and focus
- Prioritize the right actions at the right time
- Learn how to conduct effective customer interviews
- Engage your customers throughout the development cycle
- Continually test your product with smaller, faster iterations
- Find a repeatable and scalable business model
We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. With the advent of the internet, cloud computing, and open source software, the cost of building products is at an all-time low. Yet, the odds of building successful startups haven’t improved much: most new products still fail.
The more interesting fact is that of those startups that succeed, two-thirds report having drastically changed their plans along the way. So, what separates successful startups is not necessarily starting with a better initial plan (or Plan A), but finding a plan that works before running out of resources.
Up until now, finding this better Plan B or C or Z has been based largely on gut, intuition, and luck. There has been no systematic process for rigorously stress testing a Plan A. That is what Running Lean is about. This book presents a systematic process for iterating from Plan A to a plan that works before running out of resources.
