The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Kindle Edition

I had two primary issues with the book. First, the books is written by a software guy for software guys and start-ups. I can only recall one reference in all the pages to a hardware product. So this books in not for anyone that is looking to create physical and tangible products. In fact, hardware is hard and my research hasn't found anything remotely useful in applying lean start-up principles to hardware.

Second, the focus of the book is on "what" a lean start-up is and doesn't provide actionable information. Diarrhea of the word processor resulted in a 365 page definition of a lean start-up, where it could have been boiled down to less than 100 pages (minus 1-star for waste...Distill it down to an A3 using Lean Thinking). So let me save you some time.

1. An entrepreneur is a person who creates a business around a product or service under conditions of "extreme uncertainty", and should ascend the vision-strategy-product pyramid. (Google: Start with Why TEDx - Ries redefines that concept)
2. A start-up is a phase of the entrepreneur's organization, tasked with the goal of reducing the condition of "extreme uncertainty", and finding a sustainable business model (Google: Lean Business Model Canvas).
3. Use customer discovery (class) and validated learning (method) to find a sustainable business model around your product or service idea. The validated learning method of Build-Measure-Learn is synonymous with Plan-Do (Build), Check (Measure), and Act (Learn) cycle, which as most people know is derived from the scientific method.
a. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
b. Measure using Actionable Metrics instead of Vanity Metrics.
c. Learn from your MVP and Actionable metrics and Pivot to improve problem/solution and product/market fit or Persevere.
4. Finally, use lean principles (i.e. small batch sizes, 5 whys root cause analysis, chief engineer, blah, blah, blah) to stream-line your operation once you've found a viable business model and are ready to leave the start-up phase and enter the growth phase. (Minus 1-star: As a hardware guy and having extensive experience in lean it's blatantly obvious Ries is just starting his lean journey and his last section (Accelerate) is superficial, survey, regurgitation of some of the lean tools and ideas).

Reference More Actionable Books:
Running Lean - Ash Maurya
Art of the Start (Ch.1) - Guy Kawasaki

Reference Free Material:
Steve Blank's Website & Blog
Simon Sinek - Start with Why

The author represents the MBA approach to Bay Area startups. With a Yale BA and a Harvard MBA he has been the object of a lot of press coverage on his theory of lean startups and how it can be applied in more traditional business settings. He advice is to not waste years trying to make a business work. Kill it and move on. He goes into detail on how he did not follow this advice, wasting thousands of hours producing a product that was not well received because the market research did not ask the right questions and the product's users were not asked what they wanted. Being stubborn, the author and his partners kept at it until they stumbled onto the right answers after several tries. I guess the author is saying he has learned his lesson now. His latest startup is a people's stock exchange not beholden to short term gains.

Assuming you are reading the other product reviews, I'll try not to duplicate what I've noticed other reviewers are writing about The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

I will say this though:

o Eric tells a lot of stories to make his points, and focuses as much on convincing us to buy into the Lean Startup principles as he does teaching them. I like the stories though, and I bet I would really like this guy if I were to meet him.

o Eric sometimes gushes a bit about startups which are so young that I wonder if it is too early to call them a success. For example, Ries spends over 3 pages talking about Obama and Dodd-Frank, and praises the fledgling (at that time) Consumer Federal Protection Bureau for CONSIDERING his suggestion of starting their agency (with its $500 million budget) like it is a lean startup.

Again, these are 3 pages talking about how the CFPB *could* use lean startup methodologies, not about how they have actually used them.

Given the extremely limited usefulness of anecdotes such as these, you can't help but wonder if Eric in those moments more focused on trying to put people's names in a book than he is at giving readers something solid to benefit from.

At any rate, it's still a great book and definitely worth the money.

That said, if you want more of the HOW TOs of Lean Startup, I'm currently reading both Steve Blank's The Startup Owners Manual and Ash Maurya's Running Lean, and while I'm not finished with either of them yet, I can definitely tell you they take Eric's teachings to the next level -- and then some.

This book is a startup phenomenon and has almost become required reading for any startup founders. That being said, it is most useful for software startups and is significantly less useful for biotech and other life science startups. In our industry it is not possible to release a 'quick and dirty' product to test on a subset of customers because we have to abide by regulatory rules and laws.

So for me, the biggest takeaway from 'The Lean Startup' was Eric's explanation of the 'Five Whys' method to examine problems within any business. You can save a lot of time and money by gathering together everyone working on a particular project and drilling down into why a certain problem occurred. Instead of blaming individuals and stopping at the first level of the problem, such as a milestone not being met because of experimental failure, look at why the experiment failed. Are your scientists overworked? Was there a problem with reagent supply? Do you need to retrain staff or change suppliers or audit your supplies more regularly?