Welcome to Bring Your Ideas To Life!

In this ongoing series, in each essay, we explore one different method that helps you to bring your idea to life.

Bringing your ideas to life is a holistic and iterative process from ideating, strategizing, validating, implementing, launching and growing your (business) ideas.

🔁 The Lean Startup

🗒️ What is it?

Many startups fail for various reasons.

These could include no market need, a flawed business model, pricing issues, lack of product-market-fit, etc. But the real question is: How can we increase our chance to succeed with our business model? How can we decrease the risk of failure?

That's where the Lean Startup steps in!

It was developed by Eric Ries based on the preliminary work by Steve Blank. The goal of this iterative method is to develop companies and products while at the same time reducing risk, eliminating waste and increasing innovation, speed, learning and the chance of success.

✔️ How to use it?

• Internalise the 5 principles of Lean Startup

  • Entrepreneurs are everywhere: Lean Startup can be used for any kind of organization, whether you are a solopreneur or a huge enterprise.

  • Entrepreneurship is management: Your startup is not only a product but also an organization and therefore requires some kind of management.

  • Validated learning: To create a sustainable business model, the underlying assumptions need to be tested by continuous validated learning processes.

  • Innovation accounting: Select and measure continuously actionable and appropriate metrics to measure your progress.

  • Build-Measure-Learn: This is the core process of the Lean Startup which is about building MVPs (see below) for your ideas, measuring the feedback of your customers and learning whether the path is correct or needs adjustments.

• Focus on Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)

  • An MVP is a minimal iteration of your idea or product that creates some kind of value and thus allows you to test your hypotheses and collect feedback as fast as possible.

  • It could be a paper prototype, a mockup, a design prototype, a coding prototype, a landing page, an explainer video, etc.

• Use the Build-Measure-Learn cycle

  • Build a minimum viable product to test your identified hypothesis.

  • Measure the feedback and results when testing your MVPs.

  • Learn and analyze the measured feedback and decide, whether your hypothesis is validated or not and if you need to make adjustments or pivot.

  • Repeat this cycle to continuously improve and validate your product.

🤔 Why does it help to bring your ideas to life?

Basic principles (such as using MVPs or focusing on validated learning) can be applied to many stages of the process, such as validating, implementing or growing.

However, the main stage where the Lean Startup shines is the validation phase. The underlying principles, the MVP ideas and the Build-Measure-Learn cycle make a strong foundation to validate your ideas.

👍 Pros & Cons

• ➕ Helps us to escape the "build trap" and instead focus on progress.

• ➕ Enforces customer-centric development and therefore helps to prevent some of the biggest risks of failure.

• ➕ Focus on short, fast and iterative cycles with continuous progress.

• ➖ It's valuable at many stages, but especially at later stages, you will get to the point where you need to decide whether to build or not. Lean Startup can sometimes promote procrastination when taken too "religiously".

• ➖ It offers a great base but practically it needs to be combined with other meta-methods (e. g. Design Thinking) to holistically build a company.

• ➖ In certain scenarios it might not be appropriate (Validation takes longer than actually building the product? Disruptive scenarios? Very special markets?)

💡 Tips

• Start treating everything as an assumption and hypothesis and make them explicit - your price, your customer group, your value propositions, etc.

• Include your users and customers into your cycles and put them in the centre of your processes.

• Metrics are very important, especially when creating experiments for your MVP. Take enough time to pick the right metrics and measure them correctly.

• Remember that MVP has two dimensions for the product: "Minimum" and "Viable".

• Focus on learning and going as fast as possible through the Build-Measure-Learn cycles.