I’ve heard such great things about this book—how it changed people’s perspectives on starting a company and gave them a framework to build off of.
I don’t feel that way at all. I feel like I’m reading a bunch of disjointed thoughts and ideas that often negate one another. Admittedly, I’m only 80 of 269 pages in, but still, I keep expecting to get to the good part and I’m just not.
Ries (the author) will say things like “don’t do market research” and then in the paragraph talk about the importance of talking to your customers, which is market research. He also talks about how important management is while simultaneously preaching about a “just do it” mentality. Lastly, he mentions how few customers his company (IMVU) had and then follows it up by mentioning that they were simultaneously really successful. There are other examples I could list, these are just top of mind right now.
Am I missing something? Can someone who liked this book give me their perspective?
I was planning to read the lean start up book, then I knew that this book was inspired by another one called The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
I’m not sure if I should start with The Four Steps to the Epiphany instead, or just go with the Lean startup.
I’m willing to better understand the “customer development” methodologies.
Thanks all.
Lean Startup is a powerful process to assist innovators to achieve product-market-fit. Two key components are customer discovery and iteration. While iteration is ideal in the design-build-test cycle, it is not ideal during customer discovery.
Why? Because customers know what their needs are, if you ask them correctly. Thus, there is a optimal path to find this information prior to ideation and development. So instead of iterating to find a market, the best way is to select a market and then find the unmet needs within. This has saved me months or years of pivot and failure.
Recently, I proposed the idea to Steve & Tony that we should integrate one piece of JTBD & ODI with Lean Startup. The first piece of the puzzle that was missing from Lean Startup was a solid market definition. As of today, that has been added to Steve Blank's Blog.
So it's not Jobs-to-be-Done VS Lean Startup - it is now Jobs-to-be-Done + Lean Startup!
