Lean Startup Quotes

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.

In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.

The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

The Lean Startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business, it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question: How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?

I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.

I take a lean-startup approach: creating agile, interdisciplinary teams that get the minimum viable product to market as soon as possible. It's my job to be entrepreneur-in-residence, an internal change agent.

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.

Essentials of how to do a startup do not include writing a business plan

Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

I started Shutterstock without any outside funding; I believe in creating a lean startup. By not taking outside investors early, I was forced to use every dollar I had as efficiently as possible. And I was able to keep a large part of the company.

That culture of frugality and discipline is really important for the Y Combinator mindset.

If you think you have a good idea, get into the marketplace as quickly as you can, using as little money as possible, and see what happens.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.

Not only is it possible to do lean startup in federal government, but it's the most effective way to drive change in the federal government.

HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.

Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

If you are ready to put a product or service on the market, look at that product or service and see how you can test it inexpensively. Keep in mind, you'll only need one; you don't need 1,000 to get the answer.

Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

Startups are often very undercapitalised, but I found that to be very beneficial because it forces you not to throw money at problems. Instead, you learn all the nuts and bolts of what you're doing and become an expert.

Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.