ESYB2 102 - The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries
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[00:00:00] In this video, I want to introduce another core fundamental entrepreneurship book, which is the Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and it's for continuous innovation and improving your product and continuously staying one head of the curve. Now, this theory is essentially industry standard. You should not not follow it.

So let me tell you a little bit about this book. Eric was Steve Blank's student at Stanford. And when you look at their methodologies, their methodologies work very well together. If you recall, Steve's is about gathering feedback upfront before you build. Eric's is for after you build, it's built on top of Steve's feedback model.

And it helps with continuous innovation. It's essentially very good for new innovative startups, but I recommend it for all companies because whatever I do, I do exactly this model, whether it's improving my books or whether it's [00:01:00] improving my courses or whether it's improving some apps that I built or whether it's anything else.

I always follow this model. Let me explain to you what this model is. It's predicated on this minimum viable product. It means that when you release the product, you don't overthink it and you don't release some gigantic version of the product unless you're extremely sure it's going to be great. But in almost no case, that's the case.

overthink and you don't overdo and you release the smaller, smallest viable version of the product to. a small group. And sometimes people call that the alpha testing group, the beta testing, doesn't matter. It's unofficial, but you collect feedback and then you gather that feedback and you make your next relatively small iteration.

And because it's small, it's going to be rapid, small and rapid changes. And then you give it to the same group back for more feedback. And maybe you expand the group. [00:02:00] Add some more people to the group, give it to a bigger audience, gather more feedback. And because you'll get more feedback quickly, you'll be able to make the next set of changes quickly.

And you'll be able to give that next set of changes to that same group again, and expand the group. So your product will have this iterative quick changes that improve the product. Based not on theory, but specifically on customer feedback who are using it. And of course, you don't want to take their feedback word for word.

You want to think about it. So you want to synthesize your own ideas with the feedback and be really open to the feedback. This way, you're going to have a really good roadmap. Almost like a real time roadmap that will be made available to you. through that feedback. And so you're not going to make any mistakes and you're going to innovate in the right direction.

And you want to continue this cycle forever during the lifetime of your product or business. The only difference is the rate of iterations will slow down a little bit [00:03:00] during the maturity phase. In the beginning, companies and startups. It's not unheard of that. They make changes all the time. Every day when I released my app on Android, I literally made three updates a day because I needed to go really fast, but then I slowed down to once a day.

Then I slowed down to once a week. Then I slowed down even more and even more. So that's the standard way to iterate over your product rapidly and improve it rapidly, which is going to continue to always keep you one step ahead of your competitor.

