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

By Eric Ries

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307887917

Reviews for The Lean Startup

[bizcoach_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very good book about the new science of starting a company - either as a stand alone company, or a disruptive product / division within a larger organization.It's much more detailed than the many blog posts by Eric Ries and includes a kind of accounting to track the learning a start up needs to know. Written with many anecdotes and stories but each illustrates a principle that you can take away and apply to different situations.

[benlinders-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book with lots of ideas to really connect to your customers!

[brikis98 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A pretty good read. I very much agree with the central points of the book: rapid iteration, small batches, actionable metrics, learning as progress, and above all, following a scientific method when building a startup. The book occasionally sounds a little bit like an infomercial, but for the most part, it's well balanced, and Eric Ries stresses the point that the magic is not in any specific terms or processes he coins, but in the general theory/idea of following a scientific process.

Some fun quotes:

"Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn't much matter if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible."

"I've come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. The effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated. I call this 'validated learning' because it is always demonstrated by positive improvements in a startup's core metrics."

"In fact, entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations. Managers who can lead teams by using the Lean Startup methodology should not have to leave the company to reap the rewards of their skills or have to pretend to fit into rigid branches of established functional departments. Instead, they should have a business card that says simply 'Entrepreneur' under the name."

A quote in the book from Peter Drucker: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should be done at all."

[shdawson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is a pretty good book, but it did not greatly excite me.

[jennysbookbag.com · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This one is worth reading.

[jmbenedetto · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A clear and well define method to improve inovation effectiveness. A must to read for any innovator.

[vvilliam_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An awesome and energizing book about how to apply scientific hypothesis testing to startup ideas. There are many great ideas for anyone who's ever had the urge to be an entrepreneur, or an intrapreneur. After reading this book, I lose sleep over how I could start testing ideas to turn them into realities.

[bbbart-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really like the scientific theory behind the Lean Startup, but somehow the book failed to interest me cover to cover.

Again, the typical American style (overly simplifying things, endless repetition, etc...) puts me off, as in most non-fiction books. Also, the examples used to underscore certain points didn't really serve that purpose.

Still, I got some very valuable lessons from this book and will certainly change the way I'm running my business for the better.

I would say it's recommended reading, but don't expect to be blown away.