In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.
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.
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.