Lego bricks for quick cheap housing 

the designers had little interest in repeating the design aesthitic of typical off-grid sustainable houses.

Ravensbourne MSc Business and Innovation Unit PG03

The Lean Startup-by Eric Ries

Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup. 1st ed. London: Portfolio Penguin.

Book Review.

How do you build a successful business? How do you create the best of a product ?  The lean start-up gave me to understand that a successful business never goes as planned. Charles Darwin said it’s not the strongest of the species that survive but the most adaptable, the same thing applies within a business. A business that can adapt to the current trends and the customers is the one that is likely to excel and thrive.

The Lean Startup: how today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses by Eric Ries, challenges entrepreneurs and startup businesses to take a hard look at how they work to improve their success, the author applies what is called Lean Thinking to the process of innovation which also involves eliminating waste. The time energy and money lost in creating products and services that nobody wants or uses. Each part of this book Vision, Steer and Accelerate has several sections.

Part 1 Vision: The Lean Start-up asks you to measure productivity differently, Ries says the goal of a start-up is to figure out the right thing to build, the thing customers want and will pay for as quickly as possible. The Lean Start-up emphasizes customer insight and faster iteration within product development this method aims to teach you how to drive a start-up with agility rather than make big plans based on assumptions and rather than making constant adjustments at the steering wheel which Ries calls the build measure learn feedback loop. A start-up’s vision is to create a thriving business that can change the world. Achieving that goal requires a vision, a strategy and a product. Products change through optimization called turning the engine, this strategy may need to change but the vision not so much. To this end entrepreneurship is about management and demands managerial discipline.

Part 2 Steer: A business plan begins with a set of assumptions and quick testing of them should be an early priority. An entrepreneur begins with two challenges first to build a company that can test assumptions systematically and second to perform this testing without losing sight of the company’s vision these assumptions are called leaps of faith.

Part 3 Accelerate: Batching in lean manufacturing single-piece flow processes increases efficiency of repeat tasks, aim for small batches all the way down to single-piece flow along the whole supply chain. Large batches tend to result in additional work delays and interrupts growth. This one simple rule characterizes sustainable growth as new customers come from the action of past customers this is done in four ways: 1 word of mouth, 2 as side effect of product usage, 3 through paid advertising and 4 through repeat purchase or use. These sources power feedback loops that the author calls engines of growth the faster the loop turns the faster the company grows every engine of growth slows down sooner or later so companies must manage their engines of growth and develop new ones when the others start to run dry, adapt an adaptive processes forces you to slow down and invest in preventing problems that waste time as those efforts pay off you speed up again when confronted with a business problem. Putting the 80/20 principle in effect when you create a product, only try to put in the twenty percent of features that eighty percent of the customers will use.

When people first introduce products or services to the public it’s not perfect and it can’t be because even if your design team thinks it’s perfect or you think it’s perfect it’s not because the only person’s opinion that matters is your customers. So in order to create the best product or service you have to create something, anything that resembles your idea throw it out to your potential customers learn from their reactions and then create a better version that adapts to their needs.

The solution according to the lean start-up is to create the most basic version of our product called the Minimum Viable Product or MVP the purpose is to get feedback from customers as soon as possible the Minimum Viable Product has to be as basic as it can get because it’s only purpose is to see if people like it, any additional work beyond what’s required.  To start creating is a waste sometimes the MVP is just a video or a web page; for example video editing can make a product seem real without having to actually build it, the video could be launched to the public and we could measure it by the number of people who click purchase, a lot of crowd-funding sites these days like Kickstarter actually help start-ups by giving them the opportunity to showcase their product to a large audience.

When you are making a product for a market don’t wait for the perfect product create an MVP which create a product that does not have all this fancy gadgets and features and stuff on it gives the basics to something called “early adopters” there are people that try your product and they give you feedback on it. This tells you if people will actually even use the product before you put it in the market.

Once we have our minimum viable product we go through a process called build measure learn the idea is to have a product or service which measures its performance and then learn from it and then the cycle begins again where you build a better product the build measure learn cycle will continue as long as your business runs because you always want to be improving what you do. You might notice that all large successful companies use the build measure learn technique constantly so they always improve if you look at anything you own maybe your phone or your computer chances are it’s not the first of its kind there was a version before it and then a version before that as well at the end of each build measure learn cycle we come to a point where we decide whether to improve on the product to change direction or to abandon it completely a lot of times a change in direction is all that is required.

I would recommend the book to someone who is thinking of starting a company, as most companies fail within the first 5 years, this book gives insight into what people should do in order to have a successful company program which will lead it to keep growing and allow a steady income by following the steps outlined in the book.