Beginners Guide to Lean Startup: Where to Look, What to Read and Who to Follow

So you’ve heard about Lean Startup, or been told you should know what it is, but a quick google reveals a tonne of materials and it’s all overwhelming. Maybe you’ve even read the Lean Startup, but don’t know how to turn it into practice?

Whether you’re a startup or established business exploring new ideas and models, Lean Startup is an incredibly useful approach to systematically de-risk your idea and any investment you’re making (whether that’s the opportunity cost of your own time, your employees time or your own money).

So What is Lean Startup?

A set of principles to test fundamentally risky things which have not been proven before. Aka our new idea.

Rather than trusting our gut instinct, Lean Startup holds that any new idea is just a big pile of guesses. To lower the risk of building a business around those guesses, we want to test them, in a scientific way we can trust, and in the real market we will ultimately be selling to.

To do this, we break down our ideas into their component risks, at a customer/user, business model and product level, and design experiments to test these risks as quickly as possible with real customers.

The faster we can run these cycles of experimentation, update our assumptions with our learnings and repeat the cycle, the better we will do, because we’re prioritising de-risking out business over everything else — even product build.

So, to test in line with Lean Startup Principles, you might not need a product at all. You just need a way to test that risk as quickly as possible in the market — a Minimum Viable Test.

To practice Lean this means we follow a basic loop:

1. Identify what we need to learn
2. Work out what we would need to measure to prove it true or false
3. Work out what we would need to build (remember this is building an experiment not necessarily an early version product)
4. Run the experiment and gather the data
5. Update our learnings and repeat

This article aims to help you get started and keep on practicing this loop, both by digging into the theory behind it, expanding to other core theories, and building your own toolkit to run experiments. It’s a first set of signposts.

If you just want some further definitions and delineations I dig into Lean vs Design Thinking vs Agile in another article.

My Top 3 Reads

1. Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Introducing the concept of Lean startup. A brilliant read and the founding text of the movement. However, alone, it can be hard to put into practice- it’s worth remembering as you read, it’s not so much a practical user guide, but a set of core principles which if you hold to, you’ll find easier to select the best tools for your own experimentation.

2. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Let’s get practical. The first and biggest risk in any business is: does anyone really care? Followed by: do they care enough to pay?

I recommend this book to everyone I teach, and it’s core curriculum at Harvard, UCL and Oxford for a reason.

Traditionally, we tried to answer these questions through focus groups, surveys and asking friends and family what they think. But these methods rely on people telling the truth. The challenge comes because people lie, often not for bad reasons, but simply because they don’t want to hurt our feelings, or they are just more optimistic about their future behaviour. How many of us have sworn that we’d go to the gym next week, only to find ourselves back in front of Netflix. Yes, it’s true, not everyone lies, but are you willing to bet your business on being able to tell whether someone will really do what they say when no real commitment is being asked?

The Mom Test is a brilliant read, one that can be devoured in an afternoon. It’s written succinctly but entertainingly. Most importantly, it’s practical and helps you get real data you can trust, fast.

3. Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder and Dr Yves Pigneur

The business model canvas is a tool many people have used, but I often come across people who quickly put it down again not having found it useful in practice! It’s well worth reading the book and putting it into action as you read it though- the more you use it, the more it becomes muscle memory. I’m also going to try and post some common errors using the canvas in articles which I’ll link here.

Follow/Subscribe

1. Alex Osterwalder : focusing more on corporate innovation with Strategyzer now, but still shares lots of handy tools!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexOsterwalder

2. Nick Norena: an amazing Lean Startup coach regularly sharing great articles and tools!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicknorena/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/njnorena

3. Grasshopper Herder Newsletter: a great newsletter created by Tristan Kromer (another great Lean Startup Coach) with curated weekly reads

Signup here: https://grasshopperherder.com/

4. Steve Blank: the father or grandfather of lean startup, former teacher of Alex Osterwalder and Eric Ries, brilliant to dive into more of the theory in blog form

Check out his blogs here: https://steveblank.com/

Tool Kit

1. The Real Startup Book: a creative commons playbook of different lean experiments you can run! https://realstartupbook.com/
2. Business Model Canvas: available to download along with lots of other great free tools at https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas

Business Model Canvases can be downloaded free via Strategyzer

3. Value Proposition Canvas: a tool to help you map your customers’ needs to the product you want to build them! Again there are some common pitfalls to the tool, but if you focus first on the right hand side customer map and only map the product to the customer’s jobs, pains and gains, it can be very helpful. (Additional article to follow) available to download free here: https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas

4. Miro: an online collaboration tool with templates for the business model canvas and easy to add post its, great for virtual team brainstorming when you can’t get together physically: https://miro.com/app/

5. Test and Learn Cards: offer a great way to make sure you’re designing your Lean experiments as scientifically as possible. If you like the idea but prefer to work in another format you can always turn them into templates in google docs, paper or your preferred online tool for easy collaboration with colleagues.

Test and Learn cards help you rigorously design Lean Startup Experiments

6. Risk Prioritisation Matrix: a really simple tool you can make out of anything at home: masking tape on a table, or just pen and paper. Use it to regularly identify, prioritise and design experiments for the biggest risks in your business model!

Spend 5 minutes brainstorming the risks in your idea: think of as many as you can and be specific

•Write 1 risk per post it note

Check: which risks have you missed? Until proved with customer data, it’s all assumptions!

Spend 1 minute dividing your post its into two piles (most and least important)

•Now bin the least important pile (if they’re important enough, they’ll come back in your next prioritisation)

Take 2 minutes to reframe your most important pile as questions (or learning goals)

Spend 5 minutes mapping your post-its on a 2x2 matrix (draw on A3 or use masking tape to make it on a wall) remember to rank post it notes relative to each others

Now rebalance your post it notes (they should be evenly distributed across the matrix)

Take at your top right hand post it note.

Spend 5 minutes brainstorming how you could test it this week, or in the next two weeks!

This is just a starter for 10, but I hope it helps! If you’ve found other useful people to follow and helpful books, blogs or tools please do share them below!