Lean Startup and Customer Development basic concepts

1. Lean Startup Basics

2. Outcome
Test if your intuition is solid enough to build a business
around it
Test with experiments your assumptions.
Measure your progress
Make decisions based on numbers
Reduce uncertainty

3. What is Lean Startup?
“The Lean Startup method teaches
you how to drive a startup-how to
steer, when to turn, and when to
persevere-and grow a business
with maximum acceleration.”

4. Origins

5. Origins
• Lean Manufacturing (Toyota): Systematically eliminate waste,
continuously improve
• Agile Software Development: Deliver often, deliver early, rapid
iterations
• Customer Development: test & validate your assumptions

6. Why
• Eliminate uncertainty with tools that help you test
your vision continuously
• Human beings suck at predicting what customers
will buy

7. The right question
Can we build this product?
VS
Should we build this product?

8. End Game
• Find your market before you run out of resources
• Building a product is the easy part
• Don’t build a solution and then search for a
problem

9. Traditional Entrepreneurial
Process
Idea
Business Plan
Raise Money
Build
Launch
Market
Fail

10. Issues with Traditional Path
• Feedback from customers begins once product is
launched, making changes often impossible
• No way to track success

11. Forget the business plan
• They don’t survive the talk with the first customer
(S. Blank)
• projections based on nothing

12. Customer Development
Framework for:
• Discover & Validate right market for your idea
• Build right product features to solve customer
needs
• Test correct way to acquire and convert customers
• Deploy right organisation and resources to scale

13. Objectives
• Problem/Solution fit (Customer Discovery): Find a
problem big enough customers will pay for your solution
• Product/Market fit (Customer Validation): Build the
product with only features that deliver value to the customer
• Scale (Company Building): Increase exponentially your user/
customer base

14. Tools
• Business Model/Lean/Value Proposition Canvas
• Javelin Board
• Lean Stack
• Lean Launchpad

15. Test your assumptions:
Experiments
• Turn a hypothesis into a measurable outcome
• Identify riskiest assumption
• Define Success Metrics
• Run the Experiment
• Pivot or Persevere

16. Experiment Objective
• Make your build, measure, learn loop faster all the
time

17. Build
• MVP = Minimum Viable Product
• Easiest/Fastest way to deliver value to your
customer
• Not perfect
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. Reidd
Hoffman - Linkedin

18. MVP Types
• Discovery Interviews
• Landing Page
• Concierge
• Mockup

19. Measure
• Qualitative not quantitative
• Do things that don’t scale
• Focus on important metrics: AARRR (Lean
Marketing Funnel)

20. Learn
• Change hypothesis
• Proceed if hypothesis is validated
• Discover new problems to solve

21. Pivot
• Structured course correction to test new
fundamental hypothesis
• A change in your plan in the process of finding a
repeatable and scalable business model
• Based on data

22. Grow
• Do things that scale
• Use best performing tested channels
• Build infrastructure needed to scale

23. Get Out Of The Building
• Talk face to face with customers
• Best way to focus on qualitative data
• Avoid engineering approach

24. Case Studies

25. Books
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer
Development - Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits
• Running Lean - Ash Maurya
• Lean Customer Development - Cindy Alvarez
• Value Proposition Design - Alexander Osterwalder

26. stevenballiano.com
steven.balliano@gmail.com
@SJBalliano