Presented at the 1st Lean Startup Circle Karachi Meetup, introducing the Lean Startup Pakistan Initiative along with an overview of the principles in the Lean Startup Methodology
17. THE FEARS OF
AN MVP
The common worry is that you’d release
“crapware” too soon, of low quality,
potential customers won’t like it and you’d
give up!
19. 3 LEARNING
MILESTONES
1. Use MVP to establish real data on where the company is
2. Tune the “engine” from baseline to ideal : decision point
3. Pivot or Persevere?
My name is faizanlaghari and I’ve been jobless for over 11 years now! I’ve taken my chances, made loads of mistakes along the way but all lead to me understanding how things should not be done and how, some should be as well. To tell you why we’ve arranged this meetup, let me tell you a story!
I swear will make it under 15 minutes… Here’s how the story usually goes: A group of amazing and intelligent entrepreneurs have a great idea, and they say to themselves “lets do it!”. So they spend weeks, months and at times years even developing a product which they think will be an amazing hit! Eventually they put it out there and get a luke warm response from some, and an all-out negative response from others. They try to understand why, ask their customers what they want and turns out its something totally different from what they THOUGHT the customer wants. So they try to adapt but by then it’s too much time and money spent on it already… and the startup folds.
That’s the sort of problems that Eric Ries was facing with his own startup and so, he went out to find a solution. He started to look into management practices that had been in place since a while but somehow they didn’t directly apply to the situation a startups have to face. So when he came across the “Lean manufacturing” process which was in place at Toyota in Japan, and start applying it with some tweaks to his own startup and that eventually evolved into “the Lean Startup”.. The book
The Lean Startup Pakistan initiative aims at bringing the Lean Startup movement to Pakistan in more than just one way! Our goal is to not only arrange & support meetups, we are the driving force behind anything "lean" in Pakistan!
The Lean Startup Pakistan initiative aims at bringing the Lean Startup movement to Pakistan in more than just one way! Our goal is to not only arrange & support meetups, we are the driving force behind anything "lean" in Pakistan!
You don’t have to be In a garage to be a startup.
This means whether youre in a garage, any size of a company or even an large enterprise, the lean startup approach can work and in any sector and industry
Building a startup is an exercise in “institution building” thus is necessarily involves… management!
A startup is an institution, not just a product, so it requires management, a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme certainty. Since usually we try to fit the square peg of this unique problem in a triangle of general management. And more often than not, it simply doesn’t work! So many entrepreneurs will take a “just do it” attitude which avoids all types of management, and end up create more chaos than success.
Startups don’t exist just to make stuff! They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically, by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision.
Lean defines value as anything that contributes to your learning, everything else, is waste!- demonstrated by positive improvements in the startup’s core metrics - and backed up by empirical (experienced not theoretic) data collected from real customers. - Its not “can this product be built”, its “should this product be built” and can we build a sustainable business around this set of prod / serv?
The fundamental activity of a startup: turn ideas into products, measure customer response, learn whether to pivot or persevere. This is the loop that should be accelerated in all successful startups!The issue is that people always want perfection in their products, and don’t stop till it’s all 100% (or atleast they think so)The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning with the least effort.
The fears of releasing an MVP involve us thinking that we’d release “crapware”Notice how many hypotheses in this simple scenario:we have already solved the distribution problem for our product (or else how could customers try it?)We already know who to distribute the product to (or else why would we care what they think?)Naturally, we already know the standard of quality that they will use to judge our product. In fact, we know so much that we already know what they will care enough about (namely, the product’s quality – as opposed to, say, missing features).Minimum does not mean that you should ship just anything at the nearest possible date. It means to ship as soon as it is possible to learn what you need to learn.The 2nd: you’d give up. Keep in mind, no press, limited early adopters testing it with knowledge it’s an MVP
To improve entrepreneurial outcomes, and to hold entrepreneurs accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to setup milestones, how to prioritize work.
We work towards making this meetup a monthly one, getting discussions and learning underway, and help people get lean!We take the meetups to other cities and also conduct workshops under Lean Startup Machine and otherwise as well to get practical hands-on approaches
We work towards making this meetup a monthly one, getting discussions and learning underway, and help people get lean!We take the meetups to other cities and also conduct workshops under Lean Startup Machine and otherwise as well to get practical hands-on approaches
We work towards making this meetup a monthly one, getting discussions and learning underway, and help people get lean!We take the meetups to other cities and also conduct workshops under Lean Startup Machine and otherwise as well to get practical hands-on approaches
We work towards making this meetup a monthly one, getting discussions and learning underway, and help people get lean!We take the meetups to other cities and also conduct workshops under Lean Startup Machine and otherwise as well to get practical hands-on approaches