The Lean Startup

About the book

Eric Ries's method for building a company under deep uncertainty, the situation where you cannot plan your way to product-market fit and have to learn your way there instead. The central claim is that a startup is really an experiment, and the job is to find out as fast and as cheaply as possible what customers actually want, rather than perfecting something nobody asked for.

About the author

Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur and writer who co-founded the startup IMVU and built the Lean Startup approach on top of ideas from lean manufacturing and customer development. The book grew into a wider movement and a follow-up, The Startup Way, about applying the same thinking inside large organisations.

Key ideas

• Build, measure, learn. Ship something small, measure how real users respond, and learn quickly. Speed through that loop matters more than any single feature.
• Minimum viable product. Release the smallest thing that tests your riskiest assumption, then improve from real evidence instead of opinion.
• Validated learning. Progress is what you have proven about customers, not the code you shipped or the hours you put in.
• Vanity metrics lie. Track the numbers that drive a decision, not the totals that only flatter you.
• Pivot or persevere. Read the evidence honestly and decide whether to change direction or hold the course. It is the hardest and most important call a founder makes.