Lessons Learned: The Lean Startup Book is here

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2011/07/lean-startup-book-is-here.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+startup%2Flessons%2Flearned+%28Lessons+Learned%29&utm_content=Twitter

by tathagatadg • 15 years ago

122 57 15 years ago

startuplessonslearned.com

dangrossman• 15 years ago

I pre-ordered this from AppSumo's Lean Startup Bundle way back in October... I've been looking forward to this book for a long time!

eries8• 15 years ago

Thank you!

patio112• 15 years ago

I don't generally buy business books, but I've had this one pre-ordered for forever.

eries8• 15 years ago

Thanks!

colson04• 15 years ago

I've also had mine pre-ordered for several months now - looking forward to it! Will there be an epub format to download to my nook?

acangiano2• 15 years ago

Will AppSumo customers receive their copy via email, Eric? I pre-ordered via AppSumo back in October (I think).

beilabs• 15 years ago

Will there be an epub format if I get the hard copy? Shiny iPad needs some decent books on it.

eries8• 15 years ago

Yes, the book will launch on Kindle/iBooks at the same as hardcover. You can pre-order the Kindle version at http://bit.ly/LeanStartupBook

MartinCron3• 15 years ago

Thanks for making it available on Kindle right away. I just pre-ordered it.

econgeeker3• 15 years ago

You can currently pre-order it from the iBookstore.

Bonus: It is $5 cheaper there than it is on the Kindle!

staunch3• 15 years ago

I can't shake the huckster vibe I get from the "The Lean Startup movement" that Eric Ries so often reminds people he started.

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.

rmason• 15 years ago

You're welcome to your opinion but Eric has helped a lot of people like me that he has never even met.

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.

eries8• 15 years ago

Thanks for the kind words. It takes courage to admit that we don't know everything. (For the record, I certainly don't).

I look forward to learning from you, when you're ready to share your story.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

I can't think of anyone I respect on entrepreneurship that doesn't practice it themselves.

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.

staunch3• 15 years ago

IIRC he was at IMVU for only the first few years. Mostly before the company grew. Regardless I don't see how that single historical piece of entrepreneurial experience translates into a three item list.

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.

dshah• 15 years ago

I'm totally with you. I respect Eric Ries for the following reasons:

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.

blackboxxx• 15 years ago

"Exploded on impact with the market in spectacular fashion"? Leverage the "awesome psychological powers of branding and the publishing hype cycle"?

I suggest you switch to decaf ;)

jayzee• 15 years ago

Isn't good entrepreneurship all about profiting from doing good? I don't see anything wrong with that.

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.

davidw4• 15 years ago

Business books can be kind fun to read, but I have the same doubt. I think there are a couple metrics one can use to judge a bit more concretely:

* 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/ .

nateberkopec• 15 years ago

Speaking of self-promotion...

EDIT: Just fell out of my chair laughing, nevermind.

stevenp• 15 years ago

Speaking as someone who worked closely with Eric at IMVU in those early days, his message is simple but it's not always obvious to the people who start companies.

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.

davidw4• 15 years ago

> 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.

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?

danberger• 15 years ago

Eric has done so much for the startup community..... and so much for me in helping me understand how to build a better startup. The least I can do is pre-order his book. Done.

eries8• 15 years ago

thank you

aik2• 15 years ago

I am curious about this book, however unfortunately at the moment I'm sick of the marketing efforts. There's been a bit too much book related BUY ME NOW spam on Twitter for months and months on end.

mattcheney• 15 years ago

If you wrote a book about a topic you were deeply passionate about, how would you promote it?

MartinCron3• 15 years ago

Clearly by posting, "don't buy this book" on Twitter.

davidw4• 15 years ago

There are many ways to do that, but interestingly enough, John Locke, one of the big early winners from digital publishing on Amazon, suggests not promoting your book heavily on twitter, at least not directly.

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

aik2• 15 years ago

I'm no writer but have a number of passions I write about often -- just one idea: I would continue to promote the ideas of the book (after all, it's the ideas I would be passionate about, not the book itself), and include a passive mention of the book at the end.

truthseeker• 15 years ago

I agree with you.

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.

wtvanhest• 15 years ago

Pre-ordered.

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.

bsmith• 15 years ago

Pre-ordered. It's time to dilute all the Seth Godin on my bookshelf a little bit.

jechen• 15 years ago

Actually heard about Eric Ries and his lean startup movement from a VC on a booze cruise. He has a lecture series up on Udemy which I watched in one sitting and damn was it a good investment of time. Definitely preodering this book.

hammock• 15 years ago

I will probably go to the bookstore and read it one afternoon

dreamdu5t• 15 years ago

Best Advice: Stop listening to people selling advice. Stop buying their books.

Instead, go do it. Stop fucking talking about it. Just do it.

MartinCron3• 15 years ago

That's a false dichotomy, isn't it? Can't you just do it and take a moment to read books and listen to people who have done it and are determined to move the state of the art forward?

I "just do it" and read books, so I know it can be done.

econgeeker3• 15 years ago

This is really good advice, for those who aren't doing it.

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!

danielhodgins• 15 years ago

To do you need to understand. To do you need to know. This is where insightful teachers like Eric Ries and Steve Blank add value.

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.

grk• 15 years ago

Ugh. Why does the Kindle edition have to be more expensive? I've no interest in having the book on paper, and shipping to Europe takes way more time than Kindle delivery.

mfieldhouse• 15 years ago

I don't understand the negative response towards someone who is trying to make money by improving peoples lives on a site which is focused on just that.

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.

swaller• 15 years ago

Wait...so a self-proclaimed start-up guru dares to profit off of his own work?

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.

arturadib• 15 years ago

(This review is about the "lean methodology" in general, not the book).

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).

Lessons Learned: The Lean Startup Book is here

Related Stories