The Lean Startup opens with the author, Eric Ries, recounting the painful memories of a startup failure several years ago. He describes the moment from back then—the moment when I realised my company was going to fail. My cofounder and I were at our wits’ end. The dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money. It was like a breakup scene from a Hollywood movie…
Having gone on to found several startups later, Ries notes that, despite having a promising idea, they were doomed right from the start. The reason, he explains: we did not know the process we would need to use to turn our product insights into a great company.
Ries—an American entrepreneur, writer, start-up adviser, speaker, and creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned—goes on to dispel the mythmaking around successful entrepreneurs and their success mantras, genius, hard work, and great product ideas. He says it won’t lead to success; what matters is the “mundane details, the boring stuff”—the process.
Therefore, the book revolves around the theme that entrepreneurship is a process that can be learnt and managed. Ries proposes a scientific approach to setting up and managing startups. His Lean Startup methodology offers a practical framework to help new businesses innovate quickly and efficiently and be successful and sustainable. Through diagrams, tables, and engaging stories of entrepreneurs and startups, he drives home the point that continuous learning, experimentation, and adaptation are the foundations of building successful, sustainable businesses.
The volume is organised into three parts—‘Vision’, ‘Steer’, ‘Accelerate’.
In the ‘Vision’ part, Ries explains the foundational ideas of the Lean Startup approach and defines what it means to be an entrepreneur, drawing from his first-hand experience as CTO at IMVU, his third startup. He describes a startup as any human institution designed to create new products or services under conditions of extreme uncertainty—a startup’s chief enemy. Startups, for that matter, he points out, can exist not only in garages but also within large companies.
The key to success, he notes, is validated learning—identifying through experimentation if a startup is moving in the right direction. Instead of relying on guesswork or elaborate business plans, entrepreneurs should test their assumptions about what customers want and make decisions based on data. Ries suggests using scientific experimentation to build a sustainable business. He also discusses the difference between traditional management and entrepreneurial management. A section is dedicated to discussing the interesting entrepreneurial case study of Akshay Mehra’s Village Laundry Services (VLS).
In the ‘Steer’ part, Ries explains how startups can focus on minimising the total time through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop discussed in part one. To demonstrate how to achieve this, he delves deeper into the feedback loop—the foundation of the Lean Startup method. Startups begin by building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—the simplest version of a product that allows them to start learning. Then they measure how customers respond. Finally, they decide whether to continue improving the product (persevere) or change direction (pivot).
This section explains how, by rigorously testing leap-of-faith assumptions, a Minimum Viable Product can be built. It discusses the concept of innovation accounting as a way to gauge if product development efforts are bearing fruit; creating learning milestones as an alternative to the traditional business and product milestones; and the dangers of vanity metrics versus the usefulness of actionable metrics.
After discussing steering in Part Two, Ries moves to the next stage of building a startup: to race—that is, Accelerate, which is also the section’s title. Here, he explains how lean startups can speed up and quickly scale. He introduces concepts such as small batches, continuous deployment, and adaptive organisations. The idea is to release products and updates quickly, get feedback immediately, and use that data to make rapid improvements. Working in small batches allows teams to detect problems earlier, respond faster, and avoid large-scale failures. Ries also talks about the importance of building a culture of innovation within organisations. He says even established companies can apply Lean Startup principles to stay agile and competitive.
As a reviewer notes, The Lean Startup is a cookbook for entrepreneurs in organisations of all sizes.
Pradeep Nair is Senior Editor, PIC.