The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.
Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.
Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.
Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. 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.
A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.
Entrepreneurs can’t forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan – and on the brink of success.
A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.
The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.
When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.
The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.
The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
When in doubt, simplify.
Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.
The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.
Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”2.
The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.
Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.