Eric Ries Quotes

If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can. If that’s true, it makes no difference what the competition knows. If it’s not true, a startup has much bigger problems, and secrecy won’t fix them. Sooner or later, a successful startup will face competition from fast followers.

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.

The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are what I call the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

Em diversas jurisdições, espanta a quantidade de passos requeridos para constituir uma nova empresa: licenças comerciais, registros de empregos, cobrança de impostos, treinamento obrigatório etc. Além do custo do cumprimento dessas normas, há o ônus psicológico de: 1) ter de aprender quais são todas elas; e 2) se preocupar com a possibilidade de ter deixado escapar uma delas e ser responsabilizado por isso. Na maioria dos lugares, a ignorância sobre as leis não é uma defesa válida, mas as leis atuais se tornaram tão abstratas e complexas que o pleno conhecimento delas é um trabalho de tempo integral

From the point of view of individual efficiency, working in large batches makes sense. It also has other benefits: it promotes skill building, makes it easier to hold individual contributors accountable, and, most important, allows experts to work without interruption. At least that’s the theory. Unfortunately, reality seldom works out that way.

We had gotten really good at optimizing, tuning, and iterating, but in the process we had lost sight of the purpose of those activities: testing a clear hypothesis in the service of the company’s vision. Instead, we were chasing growth, revenue, and profits wherever we could find them.

dot-com flameouts that erroneously believed that they could lose money on each customer but, as the old joke goes, make it up in volume.

I consoled myself that if we hadn’t built this first product — mistakes and all — we never would have learned these important insights about customers. We never would have learned that our strategy was flawed. There is truth in this excuse: what we learned during those critical early months set IMVU on a path that would lead to our eventual breakout success. For a time, this “learning” consolation made me feel better, but my relief was short-lived. Here’s the question that bothered me most of all: if the goal of those months was to learn these important insights about customers, why did it take so long? How much of our effort contributed to the essential lessons we needed to learn? Could we have learned those lessons earlier if I hadn’t been so focused on making the product “better” by adding features and fixing bugs?

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 other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

HYPERGROWTH FOR A COMPANY ALSO REQUIRES HYPERGROWTH OF THE PEOPLE INSIDE IT.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

This led to some frustrating board meetings at which we could show great product “progress” but not much in the way of business results.

I was finally ready to turn to the last resort: talking to customers.

Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.