If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what’s the market and what kind of product you should build.
Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.
Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.
Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.
The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.
Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
If you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t know what quality is.
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.
We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possible, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?
If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed – at seeing what happens – but won’t necessarily gain validated learning – If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.