The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a book by Eric Reis that presents a method for developing and managing startups or new ventures in bigger organizations.
According to Reis, startups need to operate following their own methods in order to succeed. What works in established companies may actually damage the development of a startup. However, startups policies and procedures shouldn’t be created at random, but they should be the result of proper techniques and research. For more details see my post The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: Book Review
My Favorite Top 25 Quotes from The Lean Startup
1. “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
2. “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
3. “As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
4. “A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
5. “If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”
6. “The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.”
7. “Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is at the core of the Lean Startup model.”
8. “Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.”
9. “This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”
10. “The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.”
11. “When in doubt, simplify.”
12. “When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.”
13. “Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.”
14. “Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.”
15. “Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”
16. “The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.”
17. “If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.”
18. “Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.”
19. “The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.”
20. “Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.”
21. “In the Lean Startup model, an experiment is more than just a theoretical inquiry; it is also a first product.”
22. “What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?”
23. “Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
24. “Failure is a prerequisite to learning.”
25. “Entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.”
