# The Lean Startup  ## Metadata - Author: [[Eric Ries]] - Full Title: The Lean Startup - Category: #books ## Highlights - I’m in this second story, too. I’m a cofounder and chief technology officer of this company, which is called IMVU. 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. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. 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. We really did have customers in those early days—true visionary early adopters—and we often talked to them and asked for their feedback. 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. ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=118)) - To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: 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. ([Location 188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=188)) - after seeing traditional management fail to solve this problem, some entrepreneurs and investors have thrown up their hands and adopted the “Just Do It” school of startups. This school believes that if management is the problem, chaos is the answer. Unfortunately, as I can attest firsthand, this doesn’t work either. ([Location 196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=196)) - 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.) that hold people accountable for performing well in their specialized areas ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=259)) - 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. ([Location 271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=271)) - Instead of making complex plans that are based on a lot of assumptions, you can make constant adjustments with a steering wheel called the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. ([Location 301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=301)) - the number of customers using products that didn’t exist three years ago and the percentage of revenue coming from offerings that did not exist three years ago. ([Location 464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=464)) - Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=498)) - The quantitative targets created the motivation to engage in qualitative inquiry and guided us in the questions we asked; ([Location 557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=557)) - which of our efforts are value-creating and which are wasteful? This question is at the heart of the lean manufacturing revolution; ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=623)) - 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 the startup’s core metrics. As we’ve seen, it’s easy to kid yourself about what you think customers want. It’s also easy to learn things that are completely irrelevant. Thus, validated learning is backed up by empirical data collected from real customers. ([Location 647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=647)) - Our customers intuitively grasped something that we were slow to realize. ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=680)) - This phenomenon creates a brutal incentive: postpone getting any data until you are certain of success. Of course, as we’ll see, such delays have the unfortunate effect of increasing the amount of wasted work, decreasing essential feedback, and dramatically increasing the risk that a startup will build something nobody wants. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=693)) - This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005PR422K&location=739))