Lessons Learned: The Lean Startup Book is here
startuplessonslearned.com
startuplessonslearned.com
He seems determined to profit (through this book and his conference) by rebranding some principles that have been popular in the valley for a long time.
I can't think of anyone I respect on entrepreneurship that doesn't practice it themselves. Writing books and doing conferences doesn't count in my book.
Sorry, I think I have a bit off an allergic reaction to things that feel even vaguely like Tony Robbins.
Reading the four steps to the epiphany helped me knit together what I'd learned and helped me understand why my last startup didn't succeed.
But it was the lean startup movement (along with Ash Maurya's book) that gave me a game plan to go forward. As a result of the lean startup movement fewer startups will fail and that's a pretty fine legacy.
I look forward to learning from you, when you're ready to share your story.
Me neither, but perhaps you were asleep during the part of the program where Eric Ries:
A) worked at at least one startup that exploded on impact with the market in spectacular fashion,
B) learned some lessons from that,
C) co-founded IMVU and made a bunch of money?
Ries may have faults, but a complete lack of practice does not appear to be among them.
As for your allergy to salesmanship: Reticence sells nothing.
I wish Ries luck in leveraging the awesome psychological powers of branding and the publishing hype cycle to get his ideas in front of more people. I know I've lost years of my time to management who had apparently never heard of these ideas.
I don't think it's his relative lack of experience that I have a problem with so much as the conscious effort he's making to become a "guru" that sells picks to the miners.
Want a concrete example? He had a post, years ago, on why A/B testing needs to be a one-liner or you will never do it. That resonated with me, strongly, and that became the design brief for A/Bingo. I prioritized that feature over pretty much everything else in my implementation, and it is a major part of the reason why it works for me. Some years later I'm considered somewhat of an authority on the subject (funny how that works), and when I go in to companies to work with them on A/B testing, the best single process improvement we get -- and we get it virtually without fail -- is going from "A/B testing takes a bunch of work with logging into a product from a large multinational advertising agency, filling out a few forms, and copy/pasting up the wazoo -- and as a consequence we did three A/B tests a year ago and haven't done anything since" to "our engineers put in the A/B tests themselves automatically because it is easier than not doing it."
By the way, as it regards picks and miners: it takes a special kind of mind to see publishing a book as a route to fame and fortune on the backs of the little guy if one is also capable of, say, consulting on A/B testing.
They probably both offer some value by packaging existing ideas in more palatable ways. If you don't mind the motivations and style (like I do) you can probably extract some benefit. It's just not for me.
Reply to your edit: You must not be aware of how much money conferences can make to not see the profit motive there. Even moderately successful tech conferences can generate millions per year. Far better than a consulting business. It takes time to build up to that of course. Publishing a book is Conference Building 101.
I have no clue what Eric looks like. I find Eric makes suggestions that are far less obvious than Ferris. I find that Eric promotes his ideas over himself.
The accusation that this is all just "existing ideas" is kinda silly, given how infrequently this perspective existed even in cutting edge circles like "Hacker News" even a couple years ago.
It has started getting traction, this is true, but 5 years ago, it was a radical idea, and 3 years ago, there were very few practitioners and 2 years ago it wasn't even a movement.
In fact, I strongly suspect that Reis is the source of the ideas that Ferris used in his book.
Here you go: http://www.google.com/search?q=eric+ries&tbm=isch
It's easy to discount Eric's influence, saying "he was only there for the first few years", but it's wrong.
Will Harvey, the original CEO, had the "vision" for what the product would be.
But Eric (and Steve Blank) provided the vision for how the business should operate. This has turned out to be much more important, for basically all the reasons that Lean Startup people advocate (pivoting, testing assumptions rather than "executing one guy's vision", etc).
You know how people stress how important it is to establish company culture, especially when the company is small? "The original Lean Startup" is Eric's legacy at IMVU. Split testing, continuous deployment, 5 whys, etc... These all still define IMVU's company culture.
The current executive team are good, competent people. And it's true that the company crossed the line into profitability (a watershed moment for any startup) under their watch. But, despite this, IMVU has been impacted far more by Eric than by any other individual.
The tone of testing everything, revalidating assumptions, and relentlessly refining process after mistakes stayed with the company well after Eric left, and is going strong to this day.
Just because he self-promotes doesn't invalidate the fact that he has keen insights worth learning. After practicing these "lean startup" habits for the past four years, I can't imagine working without them.
(Was going to respond to the grandparent message before I saw Dusty's response, figured I'd chime in anyway after seeing it.)
1. He's on the path of truth and justice (i.e. the concept of the lean startup is "right" -- the more people follow it, the less entrepreneurial energy is wasted).
2. He's smart.
3. He's articulate and knows how to market/sell.
And, hucksters generally sell something that is not fundamentally attainable by most of those being sold to. The lean startup model does not fall into that bucket.
I suggest you switch to decaf ;)
Besides Eric and Steve have been expounding on this idea for a while and while it now seems like second-nature, it wasn't obvious back when.
I think that it is remarkable what they have done. Encapsulating that in a book so that people who are not in SV but are instead in Beijing and Bangalore can read and apply can only be a good thing.
* How compressible is it? In other words, how succinctly can the main ideas be summed up? Even some quite interesting books such as The Innovator's Dilemma, are fairly easy to sum up in a few pages. This is because there is one core idea and a lot of stories, statistics, and other extra supporting material.
* How much actionable advice is there? For instance, one thing I liked a lot about Rob Walling's "Start Small, Stay Small" is that he comes out and suggests some price numbers for online products, rather than a wishy-washy "figure out what your market will pay" or something equally non-committal. As another example, "do less" is sort of a handwavy guideline that is harder to do anything with, although we do live by it at http://73primenumbers.com/ .
EDIT: Just fell out of my chair laughing, nevermind.
How many times have you heard about entrepreneurs that think they have some grand vision for something that they're certain will change the world, so they go away and spend tons of VC money building something, and then it fails because no one actually wants it? It happens a LOT. Vision clouds judgment VERY often.
Eric taught me that ego gets in the way of finding out what will actually work as a viable business, and that I should question all of my assumptions (and those of the people working around me) about what's right and what's not. The metrics speak for themselves. It doesn't matter how good I think my landing page headline is -- the market will validate that through A/B testing. The trick to figuring out what will be successful is first realizing that your idea is only a hypothesis and has no merit until you validate it with customers.
Eric's and the IMVU team's willingness to let go of assumptions and try different things is the reason why IMVU today isn't a plugin that runs on top of AIM. Even though that was the original idea, it became clear really quickly that it wasn't going to work. Where many entrepreneurs would cling to an unworkable idea until the company burns through all its capital, the team decided that the idea was a failure and moved on to build something that has turned into a business that now makes more than $50mm per year.
I can totally understand the uncomfortable reaction you have, but that's kind of the point. When someone comes around and says "Hey, maybe the way that the establishment thinks things should be done is actually completely wrong," some people are excited and intrigued by the possibilities, and some have an visceral, negative response. Tim Ferriss and Dr. Atkins have both sold a ton of books exploring ideas that sound new and "out there".
I think it's unfair to classify Eric as someone who only has a reputation for "writing books and doing conferences". The "Lean Startup movement" is about keeping companies alive through the perils of infancy that usually lead to early destruction. Ask anyone who worked with Eric at IMVU and they will tell you that his passion for experimentation and validation of ideas, and his framework for building a scalable continuous deployment shop are still very much alive even after his departure. If you want to know more about the culture at IMVU, I'd be happy to comment on it.
He (staunch) is not 'scared of the new ideas' - quite the contrary, he says they're pretty standard for anyone with a clue.
Perhaps the point of this book, if you read all the way down, where he talks about why he went the traditional publishing route, is that it's to spread his message to people outside sites like this, to people who are not so attuned to the latest goings on in the world of startups.
Which, paradoxically, might mean that it's not a good buy for most of us in that perhaps he's just repeating stuff we've already read?
As to whether the book is a good buy for insiders, I say it is. My introduction to startups was when Eric hired me at IMVU, so I was 'brought up' the Lean way before it was cool (ha!)
Ever since IMVU I have seen company after company think they get it when they don't. They understand the ideas but don't practice them while thinking they do. It's easy to say you'll start measuring and experimenting once you're done with the Really Important Stuff.
I'm not saying those companies should buy Eric's book, although obviously they should. I'm saying I'm buying it too so I can have something to point to when I have to drag someone kicking and screaming to the realizatiom that they're doing it wrong even though they preach Lean the whole time.
I'm sorry for saying 'Lean' so much. I know the word is overused. The practice itself is not overused.
Instead, go do it. Stop fucking talking about it. Just do it.
I "just do it" and read books, so I know it can be done.
For those of us who are doing it, however, books such as this one can be very valuable for improving how we're doing it.
I've found that some books pay for themselves thousands of times over!
I understand your point, but it's also inefficient to put the pedal to the medal and spin your tires endlessly without having any strategy behind your activity.
The whole point of lean startup is to achieve order of magnitude gains of efficiency by focusing on finding out what customers want sooner rather than later.
For those that aren't 'doing'- that's their problem. Eric's work is for doers.
I would like to echo and add to some of the criticisms here.
I've attended a few lean startup conferences and read several articles by Mr. Ries as well as Mr. Blank's book. While I believe there are some interesting ideas here and there and also generally a lot of societal value in encouraging entrepreneurs to mitigate risks early on, I think these guys are trying too hard to create a "methodology" out of thin air.
Once you get past the few interesting ideas you can borrow for your business, the whole thing just sounds like wishful thinking peppered with pseudo-science.
(The difference between pseudo-science and science is rigor and empirical evidence; many things in life "make sense", but don't stand against scrutiny or empirical validation).
For example, while it sure sounds reasonable to quantify feature/product usage and quickly respond with rapid product iterations or maybe even a "pivot", in practice you can never determine if the reason people are not using your feature/product is because its execution sucks, or because people don't care about it in general. In scientific terms, correlation isn't causation, and it's really tough to resolve the two. Get these mixed up and you might kill a potentially big product/feature because you didn't try hard enough in the execution.
More importantly, to the best of my knowledge none of the giants in the tech world followed anything close to the lean methodology. That includes the founders of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Great entrepreneurs have and probably will always be fueled by their beliefs, period. It's hard to imagine Steve Jobs being lean about iPods, iPads, etc. He's failed before, sure, but he's also pushed forward at full steam some of the most awesome and successful products I've ever seen.
Perhaps after young Mr. Ries runs an Apple or an Amazon, or after he can back his distracting jargons with empirical evidence I'll pay closer attention to the movement as a general methodology. Until then, I'm perfectly happy with simpler, more down-to-earth precedents like Greg Gianforte's "Bootstrapping your business" (incidentally, Mr. Gianforte has founded and run a billion-dollar company).
I'm going to write a post on the book soon, as I thought it quite interesting in its own right, and of course it's very relevant to LiberWriter. It's worth a read if you're at all interested in books: http://t.co/L9XOQ6U
I totally believe Eric Ries knows what he is talking about, I love his presentation style and he seems like a really genuine guy.
I follow him on twitter and find the sales pitch for the past several months way too much to deal with.
Also the constant self-promotion of the ignite/simulcast/whatever conference they are hosting really annoying.
May be I am missing some marketing secret Eric Ries et. al have figured out but it doesn't seem to work on me.
I find there are lessons to be learned from everyone, even the most scammy looking of internet marketers. The hard part is to control ourselves from having the knee-jerk reaction of rejecting the person, and just taking from the material what we think will be useful. Or in other words, take everything with a pinch of salt and keep an open mind.
Reading a book like this on Kindle is more fun than reading blogs. I hope it is as well written as your post.
<$14 is nothing if I get a single good piece of information.
Bonus: It is $5 cheaper there than it is on the Kindle!
If you run a company (and Eric Ries does too, don't forget) and you don't spend a significant portion of your time self-promoting, if you aren't telling everyone you know about what you're working on, and if you don't take credit for your product being the best thing since the iPod, then you're probably not going to do very well.
I am looking forward to reading his book and excited for it, but he's not an magic oracle or a god. Your own success will still come from how well you do (or don't) you apply his (and every other author's) lessons to your own business.
Keep up the good work, Eric.