Book Review: The Lean Startup
Welcome, to my first book review. I haven’t been a good book reader growing up till a few months ago – true story. I’ve been reading a lot of breadth via blog posts and online articles, but lacked the depth. Now, I’ve been adding in the depth with books.
After reading each book, I’ll write up a mini-review. This [first] book review will be on The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – it’s almost the de facto manual for startups, and one I believe in a lot. I knew of its principles, but it took me a good while to read so I could better absorb everything.
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| The Lean Startup by Eric Ries available on Amazon |
My key take-aways:
- Customer discovery is so important to test the initial viability of an idea and beyond. This should be done early, often, and on-going as a means of learning to adapt the startup to market needs
- Building a lean product (minimal viable product, or MVP) enables a startup to be more successful (or fail faster) – build, measure, and learn faster
- If there’s a problem or a bug, people are behind it. By asking five succeeding whys, you’ll find the root of many problems are people – improper procedures to cut corners, poor product build due to poor training, etc.
- The principles of The Lean Startup aren’t just for startups. They’re great for even large corporations to continue to innovate and adapt
The Lean Startup is a very fascinating read, and one I love as an entrepreneur. It made me think about the steps I missed building my past startups, and what steps could have helped shape an idea like Body Bossto be more successful (or fail faster). But everything starts with building something.