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View modes, filters, sidenotes Compile the data you have gathered on your business and industry, including research on your target market and product or service offerings, details on the competitive landscape, and a financial plan that anticipates the next three to five years.
Use that information to fill in the sections of your plan outline. Get input and feedback from team members e. Make certain that the objectives of your plan align with marketing, sales, and financial goals to ensure that all team members are moving in the same direction. Although this section of the plan comes first, write the executive summary last to provide an overview of the key points in your business plan. Prepare a pitch deck for potential clients, partners, or investors with whom you plan to meet in order to share vital information about your business, including what sets you apart and the direction you are headed.
Be sure that your plan answers any common questions that investors may present, including the following: Who are the founders and management executives, and what relevant experience do they bring to the table? What is the problem you are solving, and how is your solution better than what currently exists?
What are the trends in your market, and how are you applying them to your business? Who are your direct competitors, and what is your competitive advantage?
What are the key features of your product or service that set it apart from alternative offerings, and what features do you plan to add in the future?
What are the potential risks associated with your business, and how do you plan to address them? How much money do you need to get your business running, and how do you plan to source it? With the money you source, how do you plan to use it to scale your business? Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account?
Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Dion van der Linden. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Whether you are a startup entrepreneur or corporate entrepreneur, there are important lessons here for you on your quest toward the new and unknown. The ideas in The Lean Startup will help create the next industrial revolution.
Seriously, stop and read this book now. If you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, read this book. If you are just curious about entrepreneurship, read this book. Do yourself a favor and read this book. This book provides a brilliant, well-documented, and practical answer. It is sure to become a management classic. The Lean Startup is the foundation for reimagining almost everything about how work works. This is a cookbook for entrepreneurs in organizations of all sizes.
It provides actionable ways to avoid product-learning mistakes, rigorously evaluate early signals from the market through validated learning, and decide whether to persevere or to pivot, all challenges that heighten the chance of entrepreneurial failure.
Should be required reading not only for the entrepreneurs that I work with, but for my friends and colleagues in various industries who have inevitably grappled with many of the challenges that The Lean Startup addresses.
This book is a must-read for entrepreneurs who are truly ready to start something great! New business enterprises. Organizational effectiveness.
R Start 2. Define 3. Learn 4. Leap 6. Test 7. Measure 8. Batch Grow Adapt Innovate Epilogue: Waste Not Brilliant college kids in a dorm are inventing the future. Heedless of boundaries, possessed of new technology and youthful enthusiasm, they build a new company from scratch. Their early success allows them to raise money and bring an amazing new product to market. They hire their friends, assemble a superstar team, and dare the world to stop them.
Ten years and several startups ago, that was me, building my rst company. I particularly remember a moment from back then: the moment I realized my company was going to fail. The dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money. We tried desperately to raise more capital, and we could not. It was like a breakup scene from a Hollywood movie: it was raining, and we were arguing in the street. It remains a painful memory. The company limped along for months afterward, but our situation was hopeless.
At the time, it had seemed we were doing everything right: we had a great product, a brilliant team, amazing technology, and the right idea at the right time. And we really were on to something. We were building a way for college kids to create online pro les for the purpose of sharing … with employers.
Everyone who thought you were foolish for stepping out on your own will be proven right. In magazines and newspapers, in blockbuster movies, and on countless blogs, we hear the mantra of the successful entrepreneurs: through determination, brilliance, great timing, and—above all—a great product, you too can achieve fame and fortune. There is a mythmaking industry hard at work to sell us that story, but I have come to believe that the story is false, the product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalization.
In fact, having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I have seen rsthand how often a promising start leads to failure. The grim reality is that most startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists. Why is it so popular? I think there is something deeply appealing about this modern-day rags-to-riches story.
It makes success seem inevitable if you just have the right stu. If we build it, they will come. After more than ten years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Entrepreneurship is a kind of management. We have wildly divergent associations with these two words, entrepreneurship and management.
Lately, it seems that one is cool, innovative, and exciting and the other is dull, serious, and bland. It is time to look past these preconceptions. Let me tell you a second startup story. Their previous company had failed very publicly. Their credibility is at an all-time low. They are following a visionary named Will Harvey, who paints a compelling picture: people connecting with their friends, hanging out online, using avatars to give them a combination of intimate connection and safe anonymity.
Even better, instead of having to build all the clothing, furniture, and accessories these avatars would need to accessorize their digital lives, the customers would be enlisted to build those things and sell them to one another. At this point in our careers, my cofounders and I are determined to make new mistakes. We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems.
And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly—much too fast by traditional standards—shipping new versions of our product dozens of times every single day. But we emphatically did not do what they said. We viewed their input as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.
It builds on many previous management and product development ideas, including lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile development. It represents a new approach to creating continuous innovation. Despite the volumes written on business strategy, the key attributes of business leaders, and ways to identify the next big thing, innovators still struggle to bring their ideas to life.
This was the frustration that led us to try a radical new approach at IMVU, one characterized by an extremely fast cycle time, a focus on what customers want without asking them , and a scienti c approach to making decisions. I have always worked on the product development side of my industry; my partners and bosses were managers or marketers, and my peers worked in engineering and operations. Throughout my career, I kept having the experience of working incredibly hard on products that ultimately failed in the marketplace.
These supposed xes led to still more failure. So I read everything I could get my hands on and was blessed to have had some of the top minds in Silicon Valley as my mentors.
I was fortunate to have cofounders who were willing to experiment with new approaches. They were fed up—as I was—by the failure of traditional thinking. Also, we were lucky to have Steve Blank as an investor and adviser. Back in , Steve had just begun preaching a new idea: the business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development and therefore deserve an equally rigorous methodology to guide them.
He called that methodology Customer Development, and it o ered insight and guidance to my daily work as an entrepreneur. Measured against the traditional theories of product development I had been trained on in my career, these methods did not make sense, yet I could see rsthand that they were working.
I struggled to explain the practices to new employees, investors, and the founders of other companies. We lacked a common language for describing them and concrete principles for understanding them. I began to search outside entrepreneurship for ideas that could help me make sense of my experience. I began to study other industries, especially manufacturing, from which most modern theories of management derive. I studied lean manufacturing, a process that originated in Japan with the Toyota Production System, a completely new way of thinking about the manufacturing of physical goods.
I found that by applying ideas from lean manufacturing to my own entrepreneurial challenges—with a few tweaks and changes—I had the beginnings of a framework for making sense of them. This line of thought evolved into the Lean Startup: the application of lean thinking to the process of innovation. IMVU became a tremendous success.
Then I started to write, rst on a blog called Startup Lessons Learned, and speak—at conferences and to companies, startups, and venture capitalists—to anyone who would listen. In the process of being called on to defend and explain my insights and with the collaboration of other writers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs, I had a chance to re ne and develop the theory of the Lean Startup beyond its rudimentary beginnings.
My hope all along was to nd ways to eliminate the tremendous waste I saw all around me: startups that built products nobody wanted, new products pulled from the shelves, countless dreams unrealized.
Eventually, the Lean Startup idea blossomed into a global movement. Entrepreneurs began forming local in-person groups to discuss and apply Lean Startup ideas.
There are now organized communities of practice in more than a hundred cities around the world. Everywhere I have seen the signs of a new entrepreneurial renaissance. The Lean Startup movement is making entrepreneurship accessible to a whole new generation of founders who are hungry for new ideas about how to build successful companies. Thousands of entrepreneurs are putting Lean Startup principles to work in every conceivable industry.
The most nervous I have ever been in a meeting was when I was attempting to explain Lean Startup principles to the chief information o cer of the U.
Army, who is a three-star general for the record, he was extremely open to new ideas, even from a civilian like me. Pretty soon I realized that it was time to focus on the Lean Startup movement full time. My mission: to improve the success rate of new innovative products worldwide.
The result is the book you are reading. The ve principles of the Lean Startup, which inform all three parts of this book, are as follows: 1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my de nition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management speci cally geared to its context of extreme uncertainty.
Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stu , make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
This learning can be validated scienti cally by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere.
All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stu : how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable. Why Startups Fail Why are startups failing so badly everywhere we look? The rst problem is the allure of a good plan, a solid strategy, and thorough market research.
In earlier eras, these things were indicators of likely success. Startups do not yet know who their customer is or what their product should be. As the world becomes more uncertain, it gets harder and harder to predict the future. The old management methods are not up to the task.
Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. This school believes that if management is the problem, chaos is the answer. It may seem counterintuitive to think that something as disruptive, innovative, and chaotic as a startup can be managed or, to be accurate, must be managed. Most people think of process and management as boring and dull, whereas startups are dynamic and exciting.
But what is actually exciting is to see startups succeed and change the world. The passion, energy, and vision that people bring to these new ventures are resources too precious to waste.
We can— and must—do better. This book is about how. I identify who is an entrepreneur, de ne a startup, and articulate a new way for startups to gauge if they are making progress, called validated learning.
But when it comes to startups and innovation, we are still shooting in the dark. These are new problems, born of the success of management in the twentieth century. This book attempts to put entrepreneurship and innovation on a rigorous footing. It is our challenge to do something great with the opportunity we have been given. The Lean Startup movement seeks to ensure that those of us who long to build the next big thing will have the tools we need to change the world.
This often comes as a surprise to aspiring entrepreneurs, because their associations with these two words are so diametrically opposed. Entrepreneurs are rightly wary of implementing traditional management practices early on in a startup, afraid that they will invite bureaucracy or stifle creativity. Entrepreneurs have been trying to t the square peg of their unique problems into the round hole of general management for decades.
Unfortunately, this approach leads to chaos more often than it does to success. I should know: my rst startup failures were all of this kind. The tremendous success of general management over the last century has provided unprecedented material abundance, but those management principles are ill suited to handle the chaos and uncertainty that startups must face. I believe that entrepreneurship requires a managerial discipline to harness the entrepreneurial opportunity we have been given.
There are more entrepreneurs operating today than at any previous time in history. This has been made possible by dramatic changes in the global economy. To cite but one example, one often hears commentators lament the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States over the previous two decades, but one rarely hears about a corresponding loss of manufacturing capability.
In e ect, the huge productivity increases made possible by modern management and technology have created more productive capacity than rms know what to do with. Despite this lack of rigor, we are nding some ways to make money, but for every success there are far too many failures: products pulled from shelves mere weeks after being launched, high-pro le startups lauded in the press and forgotten a few months later, and new products that wind up being used by nobody.
The Lean Startup movement is dedicated to preventing these failures. Lean thinking is radically altering the way supply chains and production systems are run. Among its tenets are drawing on the knowledge and creativity of individual workers, the shrinking of batch sizes, just-in-time production and inventory control, and an acceleration of cycle times. It taught the world the di erence between value-creating activities and waste and showed how to build quality into products from the inside out.
The Lean Startup adapts these ideas to the context of entrepreneurship, proposing that entrepreneurs judge their progress di erently from the way other kinds of ventures do. With scientific learning as our yardstick, we can discover and eliminate the sources of waste that are plaguing entrepreneurship. A comprehensive theory of entrepreneurship should address all the functions of an early-stage venture: vision and concept, product development, marketing and sales, scaling up, partnerships and distribution, and structure and organizational design.
It has to provide a method for measuring progress in the context of extreme uncertainty. It can give entrepreneurs clear guidance on how to make the many trade-o decisions they face: whether and when to invest in process; formulating, planning, and creating infrastructure; when to go it alone and when to partner; when to respond to feedback and when to stick with vision; and how and when to invest in scaling the business. Most of all, it must allow entrepreneurs to make testable predictions.
For example, consider the recommendation that you build cross- functional teams and hold them accountable to what we call learning milestones instead of organizing your company into strict functional departments marketing, sales, information technology, human resources, etc. Perhaps you agree with this recommendation, or perhaps you are skeptical.
Either way, if you decide to implement it, I predict that you pretty quickly will get feedback from your teams that the new process is reducing their productivity. It is a straightforward prediction of the Lean Startup theory itself. When people are used to evaluating their productivity locally, they feel that a good day is one in which they did their job well all day.
When I worked as a programmer, that meant eight straight hours of programming without interruption. That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or—heaven forbid—meetings, I felt bad.
What did I really accomplish that day? Code and product features were tangible to me; I could see them, understand them, and show them off. Learning, by contrast, is frustratingly intangible. The Lean Startup asks people to start measuring their productivity di erently. The goal of a startup is to gure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.
In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time. Henry Ford is one of the most successful and celebrated entrepreneurs of all time. Since the idea of management has been bound up with the history of the automobile since its rst days, I believe it is tting to use the automobile as a metaphor for a startup.
An internal combustion automobile is powered by two important and very di erent feedback loops. The rst feedback loop is deep inside the engine.
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