The Ultimate Lean Startup Quiz

Overview:

• Lean startup is a methodology that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable.
• Customer feedback is emphasized over intuition and flexibility over planning.
• Lean startup reduces market risks and sidesteps the need for large amounts of initial project funding and expensive product launches.
• The methodology is based on the customer development methodology of Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur-turned-academic Steve Blank.
• The lean startup methodology asserts that "lean" has nothing to do with how much money a company raises.
• Lean manufacturing and customer development are precursors to lean startup.

Principles:

• Minimum viable product (MVP) is the "version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort".
• Continuous deployment is a process whereby all code that is written for an application is immediately deployed into production.
• Split or A/B testing is an experiment in which different versions of a product are offered to customers at the same time.
• Actionable metrics can lead to informed business decisions and subsequent action.
• A pivot is a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.
• Innovation accounting focuses on how entrepreneurs can maintain accountability and maximize outcomes by measuring progress, planning milestones, and prioritizing.
• The Build–Measure–Learn loop emphasizes speed as a critical ingredient to customer development.
• The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template invented by Alexander Osterwalder around 2008 for developing new business models or documenting existing ones.

The movement:

• Prominent high-tech companies have begun to publicly employ the lean startup methodology, including Intuit, Dropbox, Wealthfront, Votizen, Aardvark, and Grockit.

• The lean startup principles are also taught in classes at Harvard Business School and UC Berkeley.

• Academic researchers in Finland have applied the lean startup methodology to accelerating research innovation.

• The United States Government has employed lean startup ideas.

• Hacking for Defense is a program in which university students solve problems that the Department of Defense, the United States Armed Forces, and the United States Intelligence Community submit to participating universities.

• Lean startup principles have been applied to specific competencies within typical startups and larger organizations.The Lean Startup Methodology:

• Developed by Eric Ries in 2008 to apply lean management and customer development principles to startups.

• Expanded to apply to any individual, team or company looking to develop new products, services or systems without unlimited resources.

• Ries' first company, Catalyst Recruiting, failed due to lack of understanding of customers' wants and focusing too much on the initial product launch.

• Ries' second company, There, Inc., failed due to the company's "vision was almost too concrete" and the inability to see that their product did not represent consumer demand.

• Ries concluded that the failures shared a similar origin of working forward from technology instead of backward from business results.

• Ries later co-founded IMVU Inc. and integrated Blank's customer development methodology with lean software development to form the lean startup methodology.

• Ben Horowitz criticized the lean startup method in 2010 for overemphasizing "running lean" as an end rather than a means to winning the market without running out of cash.

• Horowitz gave an example of his startup, Loudcloud, which by "running fat" was able to outperform 20 direct competitors.

• Advocates of lean methods point out that "running lean" does not mean cost-cutting.

• Trey Griffith stated in 2012 that the majority of backing for the lean startup methodology was anecdotal and had not been rigorously validated when first presented.

• However, the method was better supported by a 2011 analysis of the factors of success in growth companies.

• The lean startup methodology gained its reputation due to the success of Ries' bestselling book, The Lean Startup, published in September 2011.