Lean Startup Methodology
The Lean Startup treats a new venture as a set of testable hypotheses, run through a Build-Measure-Learn loop, so you find out what customers actually want before you've spent the runway building the wrong thing.
Three arrows chase each other round a circle, Build into Measure into Learn, then back to Build again.
Reach for this when…
- You are about to spend six months building a feature nobody has asked to pay for.
- You have a strong opinion about what customers want and no evidence either way.
- The team keeps debating the roadmap instead of testing it.
How to run it
- State the riskiest assumption behind the business as a testable hypothesis.
- Build the smallest version of the product that can test it, the MVP.
- Put it in front of real customers and measure what they actually do.
- Learn from the data: validated, or not.
- Persevere on what's working, pivot on what isn't, and run the loop again.
A worked example
Situation. Rania Khoury was building Ardak, an agri-tech app in Beirut, Lebanon, on the assumption that smallholder farmers wanted detailed soil-moisture data.
Applied. Instead of building the full sensor platform, she ran a Build-Measure-Learn loop with a paper-thin MVP: a WhatsApp number farmers could text for a daily watering recommendation.
Result. The Measure step showed farmers barely opened the sensor data but replied constantly to the WhatsApp messages. She pivoted the whole product around the messaging interface before writing a line of sensor firmware.
The catch
The MVP concept gets abused into 'ship it broken and call it lean'; a genuinely minimum product still has to test something real. It also favours ventures where you can iterate fast and cheaply, and fits badly with a capital-intensive build like a factory or a hospital.
If you can't say what the MVP was supposed to prove or disprove, it wasn't an experiment, it was just a small launch.
Origin: Eric Ries