Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.
What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?
Reading is good, action is better.
Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.
The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.
Better to have bad news that’s true than good news we made up.
The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.
This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as ‘the X of Y,’ so this is going to be ‘the Microsoft of food.’ And yet disruptive innovations usually don’t have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn’t.
If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.
A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an ‘A’ pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that’s not how it works.
Except in very narrow cases, where there’s breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.
Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it’s not having an idea, it’s not being in the right place at the right time. It’s fundamentally company building.
At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.
As an entrepreneur, I knew that if my company failed, I could always try again. So I often felt that the only real risk of true financial ruin came from the possibility of a serious illness that either exceeded my insurance plans lifetime limits, or was not covered due to rescission.
Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.
The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.
It doesn’t matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.