The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup offers both entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs a semi-scientific, real-world approach to building a business by using validation, finding a profitable business model and creating a growth engine.

One word is mentioned again and again throughout this summary, and it actually represents the whole book quite well: semi-scientific.

It stuck with me and perfectly fits this lesson as well. Always validate your sh*t.

Alright, I might be paraphrasing here, but the gist of it is that in order to find a sustainable business model (i.e. one that you can roll with for at least 5 years), you have to (like a scientist) create a hypothesis.

For example, Amazon’s hypothesis was that people would buy books online, while Zappos thought people would do the same with shoes.

Now that was the easy part. And this is usually where scientists start building huge theories, researching, calling colleagues, and a whole bunch of other things, which won’t get them closer to finding out if the hypothesis is valid.

That’s why you have to be only semi-scientific, because now you just throw your hypothesis out into the real world.

What does that look like? For Amazon it was a very rudimentary website, and for Zappos, the founder just set up a website with shoe pictures and let people buy. Once they bought, he went to a shoe store, got the actual shoes and shipped them.

Noah Kagan from Appsumo also used a ghetto website where people should just PayPal him $60 to get started.

The important part is to get people to pay as early as possible, because when people say “great idea” or “I’d buy that” that doesn’t put a cent in your pocket.

So get out there and instead of calling friends, researching and getting feedback, find people and ask them to buy.

Another semi-scientific approach to then developing your product is split testing. Nowadays often called A/B-testing, this means you create 2 versions of your product, show both of them to the same amount of people, and in this way figure out which one people like more. This allows you to tell the difference between features your customers value, and those they don’t want or need. Imagine how hard this was a few years ago, where the only way to do this was to create physically different products. For example if Domino’s wanted to change the design of their pizza boxes, they would’ve had to create 2 different designs, use them to ship pizzas to 1,000 customers each, and ask each customer for feedback on the box. What a nightmare! Now, in the world of the interwebs, they could just come up with 2 designs in photoshop and hold a…