This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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What is lean experimentation in a startup? How do you run lean experiments to learn more for your company? Learn the tips from Lean Startup.
Introduction to Lean Experimentation
Lean Startup methodology treats building a startup as science:
- Create a hypothesis. What do you believe that’s important to your business?
- Design an experiment to directly test that hypothesis. Run the experiment and gather data.
- Reflect on the data – can you validate or reject your hypothesis?
Your hypotheses should revolve around the most important problem of a startup – how to build a sustainable business around your vision.
Principles of Lean Experiments
Later we’ll cover more tactics around how to actually design and test hypotheses in lean experimentation, but here are important principles to remember throughout.
In lean expreiments, the best way to understand human preferences is to track behavior of real people, not ask for opinions. People often can’t verbalize what they actually want – cue the classic apocryphal Henry Ford quote, “If you asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.” But when they click a button or pull out their wallets, you know they really want something.
Think about the cheapest, fastest lean experiment you can run to validate the hypothesis. Simplify the product to the core essentials needed to run the experiment. Resist the urge to build more than is absolutely necessary – as you’ll learn, sometimes you can fake it ‘til you make it without a real product.
Launching early gives you more customer information earlier. You learn earlier if customers actually want what you’re building. You also discover customer concerns you couldn’t have predicted in a vacuum.
This is in strict contrast to the usual market research/strategic planning process. Traditionally, you would try to research everything possible about your core user, then build your product to polished perfection, then release with a big launch party. As you saw with IMVU, this invites failure when you build something customers don’t even want.
We’re going to run through a few examples of lean experimentation showing these principles at work. Notice how the same underlying principles apply to vastly different companies and scenarios.
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