Discover the Lean Startup method

Concept

The method Lean Start-up is the system used for move from project to company focusing everything on customer needs, counting on his feedback to modify the service or product offered, until the final version is achieved.

The idea of this method is to go adapting the product to what the market demands and not to our own vision, being the most successful when launching something new. It is a key concept in entrepreneurship.

The origin of the concept is located in Silicon Valley at the hands of Steve Blank, an entrepreneur who developed a product validation methodology based on the customer development, to find out if the product meets customer needs or wants.

What does it consist of?

The method Lean Start-up it's based on check all hypotheses prior to having the final product or project. From there we can scale the business.

there are three techniques:

• customer development (customer development)

Does our product meet customer needs? We must ask what would be our potential customers, letting them try it, experience it. This is how we achieve opinions with real value, giving prominence to customer evaluations.

• Business model read (Canvas)

Its objective is to visualize and design a dynamic and visual business model, using the well-known Canvas grid model. In them, ideas are continually added and removed, until a final version is reached.

• agile techniques or scrum

They are a set of dynamic and fast communication techniques to propose ideas, improvements and obtain the final project.

fundamental steps

The fundamental steps are:

• hypothesize

We start from a problem to solve and justify why the client would pay for our project, product or service.

• Validate the hypothesis

We check if the product is what the market wants and we demonstrate its functionalities. The goal is to find out if people would want it and buy it.

In validation, the first users will be the so-called “early adopters”.

• measure hypothesis

It is essential to identify the quality indicators or KPIs of a product. The objectives and results must be measurable to continuously improve the product.

• Generate validated learning

It will include adjustments and changes both in the product or service and, also, in the market and suppliers. It is necessary to thoroughly understand the entire environment of the product and its possible conditions.

• repetitive cycle

This last step involves going back to the first step repeatedly to achieve continuous improvement.

The result

The application of the previous steps should lead us to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or prototype, understood as a basic product to test, with the essential functionalities.

With the feedback obtained, we improved the product and released a new version, the MVP2, and we test again. This operation will be repeated until the final product is reached.