The Magic Bike Company

The Lean Startup

One of Taiich Ohno's Ten precepts to thinking and acting to win.

Quote mark Do anything immediately. Starting something right now is the only way to win. Quote mark
The Lean startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight. I was having coffee with the CEO of a new startup, listening to her puzzle through how to communicate to potential customers. She was an academic on leave from Stanford now selling SAAS software to large companies, but was being inundated with marketing communications advice. “My engineers say our website is old school, and we need to be on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, my VP of Sales says we’re wasting our marketing dollars not targeting the right people and my board keeps giving me their opinions of how we should describe our product and company. How do I sort out what to do?”
A classic example of a MVP is what was done by Zappos Founder Nick Swinmurn: “My Dad told me, you know I think the one you should focus on is the shoe thing. That’s a real business that makes sense. So I said okay, focused on the shoe thing, went to a couple of stores, took some pictures of the shoes, made a website, put them up and told the shoe store, if I sell anything, I’ll come here and pay full price. They said okay, knock yourself out. So I did that, made a couple of sales. ” If you can validate your thesis without paying to create lots of code that approach is like found gold. As another example, the MVP for AngelList mostly took the form of making introductions by email. The Virgin Airlines MVP was just a single plane flying back and forth between two cities. The less money spent on proving the hypothesis, the more money that is left to pivot or execute on the idea.