The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. This requires a new kind of accounting, specific to startups. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes, and to hold entrepreneurs accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to setup milestones, how to prioritize work. This learning can be validated scientifically, by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.

Startups exist not to make stuff, make money, or serve customers. Read MoreĪ startup is an institution, not just a product, so it requires management, a new kind of management specifically geared to its context. You don't have to work in a garage to be in a startup. It will have solved real problems and offer detailed specifications for what needs to be built. By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers. If it is successful, it allows a manager to get started with his or her campaign: enlisting early adopters, adding employees to each further experiment or iteration, and eventually starting to build a product. The question is not 'Can this product be built?' Instead, the questions are 'Should this product be built?' and 'Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?' This experiment is more than just theoretical inquiry it is a first product. The Lean Startup methodology has as a premise that every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question. It is about putting a process, a methodology around the development of a product. Lean isn't just about failing fast, failing cheap.

Lean isn't simply about spending less money. Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously. They take a 'just do it' approach that avoids all forms of management. The lack of a tailored management process has led many a start-up or, as Ries terms them, 'a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty', to abandon all process.

The lean startup sparknotes