The Lean Startup

This book is almost too much a classic that I didn’t know whether it’d be worth picking it up or whether I knew most of what it’s about from talking to people who’ve read it already. Turns out it’s the former. Cutting aside all of the fluffy business-talk, the “validated learning”, the “engine of growth” and buzzwords, the book offered some really sound and practical ways to operate consistently and efficiently. Whereas other books in the genre teach practices on how to succeed given some plan, this one starts out with the a priori assumption that the plan is probably bad and teaches how to improve. Ries is a great storyteller and the most edifying snippets of the book have been through the stories he’s told, about his time at IMVU or of his friends’ stories at their respective companies.

One of Ries’ stories is about the early IMVU, and it is terrifying. His team spent 6 months building a first prototype for the product, and launched it. The product attracted no one, and they repeatedly investigated why their product that they spent so much time building was failing to attract customers. The point was, they executed on their initial plan efficiently, working hard to build the prototype, but the entire plan and assumptions were wrong. When efficient work goes into building a completely wrong plan, it results in efficient waste which is not any better than inefficient waste. I don’t know how many projects fail in this way, where some untested plan goes unchallenged and everyone toils only to create some nothing in the end; I sometimes feel the same regarding some past work I’ve done. Ries’ horror story about the early IMVU is seared into my mind as the greatest reason to always A/B test assumptions before committing.