Strap Up! It’s a Lean StartUp!
A startup begins with an idea, an innovation. It is something that you think that consumers would bite. It is not just an idea; this idea is then mapped out in to an action, creating a product or a services. Making it sustainable and successful makes a lean startup a meticulous and painstaking process.
Hey it’s not just any startup !
Lean startup does not create plans, it creates strategies to make it work. It understands the need of being efficient while getting metrics and continuous deployment. Although this kind of startup can only be seen as a guide to help a product to be market fit, it attempts to apply the Scientific Method, making it a more rigorous process.
Startup can also faces challenges as it weakens the ability to correctly run experiments.
There are ways on running and defining experiments correctly. These are:
1 – Build a Lean canvas
- It is vital in every venture to know your business model hypotheses.
- Since the canvas is only a page, it is easily understandable and easily updated.
- Consider the canvas as your strategic roadmap that will help you in assessing different areas by customizing the blocks that comprise of the canvas.
2 – What matters is where one starts
- In starting the canvas, cite areas to work on first such as the customer segment, the problem and the solution blocks.
- Know what stage you are in the startup to know where to work on.
- The blocks should be seen as the elements that are fundamental in your business.
3 – Risk
- Learn to tackle not just what matters, but also the risks that come with it.
- Identifying risks and addressing them during the early stages of the startup lessens bigger mistakes and problems in the future.
4 – Reality over leaps of faith
- Instead of creating leaps of faith kind of hypotheses, create hypotheses that are do-able or falsifiable.
- In creating hypotheses that are leaps of faith, time is wasted since most of the time entrepreneurs miss the step in making them truly testable.
- In startups, hypothesis should be proven or falsified as efficiently and fast as possible to address other matters.
- Speed is key.
- By creating less vague hypotheses, it would be easier and faster to address and test them.
5 – Measurable metric
- In attaching a measurable metric to the hypothesis, one can be able to track if the venture is a success or not.
- It would also help in improving the product.
6 – Auditable for all
- On preventing the risk of being biased, have your results be auditable and accessible to everyone on the team.
- This would also help in having everyone on the team participate and be hands on.
7 – Lessons learned report
- In measuring progress or in validating, lean startup usually reports in a lessons learned format.
- It is easier to see how they were disproven and help them in testing their next hypotheses.
- This report usually summarizes key hypotheses and insights and highlights the next steps to be done in future experiments. It also has a graph that shows the key macro metric that drives the venture.
- Easier to assess mistakes and future steps.
In using these steps and tips, lean startup can be assumed to be a truly laborious process from an idea to making it an action or a product. It can also be said that it is fact-based, always relying on facts based on experiments and on means of the company. It is also very objective to help sustain a product and cater to the market.
