Tokyo Startonomics: Eric Ries on Lean Startups

Eric’s blog:  startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com

Twitter: @ericries (tag with #leanstartup)

Presentation Notes:

• Most startups fail catastrophically
• How many startups have lived up to their employees, founders and investors?
• Most startups that succeed turn out to be something totally different from the initial vision of the company
• Difference between a successful startup and a failure is the number of iterations the company could afford before death / success
• Eric’s new company – IMVU – bring avatars and digital goods to the USA

IMVU:

• shipped in 6 months – a horribly buggy beta product
• charged from day 1
• Visionary Customers can be just as or more valuable to the business as the founders
  - must be in constant dialog with those visionary customers
  - those visionary customers live with the same pain that the founders did when they came up with the business idea
• Iterate constantly.  IMVU pushes to production 50x per day
• No PR, no launch
  - this way you only focus on what your customers think
• 2007 revenues of $10mm, still growing nicely

Lean Startups Go Faster

• Full-scale refactoring of how software is developed.
• Commodity technology stack – easy, cheap: EC2, grid, cloud, etc etc
• Customer Development (find out what customers want before you build it)
• Agile (lean) product development (fast iterations)
  - Principles drawn from Lean Manufacturing and Toyota Production System
  - Where problem is known but solution is not
  - Meetings are waste, revising code is progress
• Product development at a lean startup:
  - problem and solution both unknown
• get rid of departments.  2 teams:  problem team, solution team
• Problem team constantly asks what the problem is and is there a business here if we can solve it?
• Solution team constantly asks what the problem is and if the product is sufficiently solving it (constantly iterate)
• The biggest source of waste in any startup is building something nobody wants.

Disclaimer (AJ):  My notes don’t do Eric’s presentation or concepts justice.  Please watch Eric’s recorded presentations and look at his actual slides.