The Lean Startup
I met someone at a London entrepreneurial event near Old Street – London Silicon Roundabout a couple of weeks back and this other entrepreneur recommended that I read the following book – The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I bought it off Amazon here and finished reading this book in less than 1 week. I have to admit that I am impressed by the ideas presented in this book. If there is one book that I would say any entrepreneur must read, this must be the book. Reading this book has made me realise that I have made several mistakes while launching SexyFoodie.
To keep things simple, I will write about the main idea that is presented in the book. Basically, every startup idea is based on a list of assumptions. The main objective of the founding team with a startup full of uncertainties is to test out these assumptions as quickly as possible so that a scalable business model can be built. To test out this assumptions, entrepreneurs must build a minimum viable product as quickly as possible with very limited features and test things out in the market. Do not spend months building a full feature product that potentially nobody will use – it is simply building castles on thin air if the product later on proves to not be in much demand (main assumption to be disproved with a minimum viable product). Also entrepreneurship must take a scientific approach to see which methods works best such as using an A/B testing method to see which webpage has the best conversion rate for customers etc.
This is just a very short summary on what I found most useful in this book. Go grab a copy and read it if you are thinking of starting a business. I am more convinced with this since I subscribe to the Just-Do-It style of entrepreneurship and this book help me very much in reducing my failure rate from ideas.
