Eric Ries - The Lean Startup: How Todays Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The Lean Startup isnt just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business; its about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to health care, and to solving the worlds great problems. Its ultimately an answer to the question How can we learn more quickly what works and discard what doesnt?

Tim OReilly, CEO, OReilly Media

Eric Ries unravels the mysteries of entrepreneurship and reveals that magic and genius are not the necessary ingredients for success but instead proposes a scientific process that can be learned and replicated. Whether you are a startup entrepreneur or corporate entrepreneur, there are important lessons here for you on your quest toward the new and unknown.

Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO

The road map for innovation for the twenty-first century. The ideas in The Lean Startup will help create the next industrial revolution.

Steve Blank, lecturer, Stanford University,
UC Berkeley Hass Business School

Every founding team should stop for forty-eight hours and read The Lean Startup. Seriously, stop and read this book now.

Scott Case, CEO, Startup America Partnership

The key lesson of this book is that startups happen in the presentthat messy place between the past and the future where nothing happens according to PowerPoint. Riess read and react approach to this sport, his relentless focus on validated learning, the never-ending anxiety of hovering between persevere and pivot, all bear witness to his appreciation for the dynamics of entrepreneurship.

Geoffrey Moore, author, Crossing the Chasm

If you are an entrepreneur, read this book. If you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, read this book. If you are just curious about entrepreneurship, read this book. Starting Lean is todays best practice for innovators. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

Randy Komisar, founding director of TiVo and author of the bestsellingThe Monk and the Riddle

How do you apply the fifty-year-old ideas of Lean to the fast-paced, high-uncertainty world of startups? This book provides a brilliant, well-documented, and practical answer. It is sure to become a management classic.

Don Reinertsen, author, The Principles of Product Development Flow

What would happen if businesses were built from the ground up to learn what their customers really wanted? The Lean Startup is the foundation for reimagining almost everything about how work works. Dont let the word startup in the title confuse you. This is a cookbook for entrepreneurs in organizations of all sizes.

Roy Bahat, president, IGN Entertainment

The Lean Startup is a foundational must-read for founders, enabling them to reduce product failures by bringing structure and science to what is usually informal and an art. It provides actionable ways to avoid product-learning mistakes, rigorously evaluate early signals from the market through validated learning, and decide whether to persevere or to pivot, all challenges that heighten the chance of entrepreneurial failure.

Noam Wasserman, professor, Harvard Business School

One of the best and most insightful new books on entrepreneurship and management Ive ever read. Should be required reading not only for the entrepreneurs that I work with, but for my friends and colleagues in various industries who have inevitably grappled with many of the challenges that The Lean Startup addresses.

Eugene J. Huang, partner, True North Venture Partner

In business, a lean enterprise is sustainable efficiency in action. Eric Riess revolutionary Lean Startup method will help bring your new business idea to an end result that is successful and sustainable. Youll find innovative steps and strategies for creating and managing your own startup while learning from the real-life successes and collapses of others. This book is a must-read for entrepreneurs who are truly ready to start something great!

Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager
andThe One Minute Entrepreneur

Copyright 2011 by Eric Ries

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ries, Eric, 1978
The lean startup / Eric Ries. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. New business enterprises. 2. Consumers preferences. 3. Organizational effectiveness. I. Title.
HD62.5.R545 2011
658.11dc22 2011012100

eISBN: 978-0-307-88791-7

Book design by Lauren Dong
Illustrations by Fred Haynes
Jacket design by Marcus Gosling

v3.1

For Tara

Introduction

S top me if youve heard this one before. Brilliant college kids sitting in a dorm are inventing the future. Heedless of boundaries, possessed of new technology and youthful enthusiasm, they build a new company from scratch. Their early success allows them to raise money and bring an amazing new product to market. They hire their friends, assemble a superstar team, and dare the world to stop them.

Ten years and several startups ago, that was me, building my first company. I particularly remember a moment from back then: the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My cofounder and I were at our wits end. The dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money. We tried desperately to raise more capital, and we could not. It was like a breakup scene from a Hollywood movie: it was raining, and we were arguing in the street. We couldnt even agree on where to walk next, and so we parted in anger, heading in opposite directions. As a metaphor for our companys failure, this image of the two of us, lost in the rain and drifting apart, is perfect.

It remains a painful memory. The company limped along for months afterward, but our situation was hopeless. At the time, it had seemed we were doing everything right: we had a great product, a brilliant team, amazing technology, and the right idea at the right time. And we really were on to something. We were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing with employers. Oops. But despite a promising idea, we were nonetheless doomed from day one, because we did not know the process we would need to use to turn our product insights into a great company.

If youve never experienced a failure like this, it is hard to describe the feeling. Its as if the world were falling out from under you. You realize youve been duped. The stories in the magazines are lies: hard work and perseverance dont lead to success. Even worse, the many, many, many promises youve made to employees, friends, and family are not going to come true. Everyone who thought you were foolish for stepping out on your own will be proven right.