Lean entrepreneurship practice

To make good use of a systematic method, you must first thoroughly understand the "Tao" and "techniques" of this method, and distinguish the two from each other to tell you what to do, "techniques" tell you how to do it.

(1)ListAPlan;

(2)Find the most risky part in the plan;

(3)Perform a systematic test of the plan.

Step 1:APlan writing

Remove the ideal "self-composition"

Everyone will dream, but the way they dream is quite different. Those who dream at night will find everything is Phantom after they get up, but those who dream during the day are not irritating. They will open their eyes to do what they will do in their dreams, and turn the dream into reality step by step. -- T.e.What does Lawrence say in the movie "Lawrence of Arabia "?

Everyone will feel this way, that is, inspiration is always flashing inadvertently (such as in the shower, when driving, etc ). Most people will not pay attention to these inspirations, but entrepreneurs will turn them into reality.

If we want to discover all the potential of an inspiration, we must have passion and determination. But if we do not limit these two points, entrepreneurship will become a blind pursuit of faith.

Smart people are always confident in their own ideas, especially entrepreneurs.

Most entrepreneurs have special confidence in their own ideas at the beginning of their business. They also designed a so-called"APlan ". But unfortunately,MostAAll plans are doomed to fail.

Although strong belief can create a good entrepreneurial atmosphere and give a deeper meaning to entrepreneurial behaviors, a true "lean startup company "(Lean StartupInstead of relying on faith, we should use data to speak. You must accept the fact that the idea at the beginning of your business is mostly based on untested assumptions (or guesses). It is very important to understand this. This book will help you systematically test and improve your ideas at the beginning of your business.

Seize your business model

Many entrepreneurs have hidden their expected business models in their minds. Yes, it is convenient for them to reference at any time, but they have no choice but to strengthen their "reality distortion force field.

Therefore, the first step to start a business is to write down your original ideas and share them with at least one person.

Traditionally, business plans are used to do this. Writing a business plan is a good training opportunity for entrepreneurs, but it cannot achieve its true purpose-communicating with others is the significance of this step.

In additionAA plan is likely to fail, so you need something more flexible than a fixed business plan to describe your ideas. It takes weeks or even months to write an article60Pages, a business plan built on an untested vision is a waste.

"Waste" refers to any human activity that consumes resources but cannot create value. -- James ·P.Woma and Daniel· T.JonesIn lean thinking

My commonly used format is a single-page business model chart (I call it "Lean canvas"), as shown in.

The lean canvas was improved by the author based on Alexander osterwad's "business model canvas" method. This method is introduced in the new generation of business models.

I like this single-page canvas format for the following reasons.

• Quick Production

Compared to writing a business plan that may take weeks or even months, you only need one afternoon to roughly describe different business models on the canvas. Since creating these single-page business model charts won't take much time, I suggest you spend more time doing the preliminary work and use brainstorming to think about all the possibilities of your business model, then set the priority for them.

• Compact Content

Lean canvas reminds you to carefully wording and try to be concise. With this, you can practice how to extract the core competitiveness of your own products. You can assume that you and investors are taking the same elevator. You only have30Seconds to capture the attention of investors. Or the hypothetical customer clicks on your home page, you only have8Seconds to catch their attention.

• Easy to carry

The business model can be easily shared and discussed with others on a single page, which means its exposure will be higher and can be continuously modified and improved.

If you have written a business plan or made slides for investors, you should be familiar with most of the basic modules on the canvas. I will not introduce these concepts for the moment, because the second part of this book will provide a very detailed explanation of them.

Your product is not equal to the product of your startup company"

I intentionally did not get 1/9 of the size of the canvas for the "solution" column, because we entrepreneurs are always very enthusiastic about the "solution" column, it is also good at writing these things.

Silicon Valley incubator500 StartupsFounder Dave· Mcluer has participated in hundreds of entrepreneurship promotion sessions and will attend more in the future. At these promotions, he always repeatedly reminded entrepreneurs that they spend too much time talking about solutions, but less time introducing other elements of business models.

Customers do not care about what your solution is. They only care about their own problems. -- Dave mcluer, 500 StartupsFounder

Investors, but more importantly, customers only agree with their own problems and do not care about what your solution is (at least not at present ). In stark contrast, entrepreneurs always like to explore solutions. However, if no one cares about your problem at all, why are you wasting your time and energy looking for a solution?

 

Therefore, your task is not just to provide the best solution, but to form a complete business model and ensure that all elements in the model can work together.

Taking the business model as a product can improve efficiency. This not only makes your business model complete, but also allows you to build a company using proven product development methods.

From a higher perspective, you will find that these basic laws are actually nothing more than "divide and conquer", but they are only used in entrepreneurship.

The lean canvas divides the business model into nine independent parts, and then we can perform system tests on them in sequence based on the risks.

Find the most risky part in the plan

A successfully built product is essentially how to control risks.

Customers must believe that you can solve their problems before they can buy your things. Similarly, investors must be confident that you can establish a business model with development potential before they can invest money in you.

Entrepreneurship is a high risk, and what entrepreneurs really want to do is to continuously and systematically reduce the risks of the company.

There is a product development method called "first solving the most risky part ". Entrepreneurship is similar to product creation. In most cases, the biggest risk is not a solution.

Aside from those extremely difficult technical problems (such as developing cancer-treated drugs and designing a new searchAlgorithmIn fact, as long as there is enough time, money and manpower, it is not difficult to make a product.

For most start-up companies, they are afraid that they will not want anything to do.

The product forms are different, and the most risky part is also different, but many of them exist in the specific stage of entrepreneurship. Next we will introduce the three stages of entrepreneurship.

Three stages of entrepreneurship

Match the problem with the solution

Core issue: Are there problems worth solving?

In the first stage, you must first determine whether the problem is worth solving. You cannot launch a solution several months or even several years before you are sure.

It takes a lot of manpower and material resources to develop an idea.

To determine whether a problem is worth solving, you can start with the following three problems:

• Is your solution what the customer wants? (Necessity)
• Are they willing to pay for your solution? If you don't want to, who will pay? (Development)
• Can your solution actually solve the problem? (Feasibility)

After this stage, you should be able to understand the real problems and come up with a set of solutions that can solve these problems but are the most streamlined, we call this solution "the simplest and most feasible product "(Minimum viable product,MVP).

Match the product with the market

Core Question: Do people want what I make?

Once a problem is found and designedMVPThe next step is to test whether your solution can effectively solve the problem. In other words, you must check whether something is madeWhat people want.

In the fourth part of this book, we will learn how to evaluate products./Various qualitative and quantitative indicators of market matching.

Matching products with the market (or making products attractive) is the first milestone achievement on the road to entrepreneurship. At this stage, your plan is gradually implemented: you start to have customers, and you can keep customers and make them pay for the money.

Expansion

Core question: how can we accelerate development and growth?

If you can match the product with the market, it will basically be half done. At this stage, you will focus on the company's development, and the company's development is actually the expansion of the business model.

Transformation-product and market matching-Optimization

Product and Market matching is the first milestone achievement on the road to entrepreneurship. It will have a profound impact on the company's future strategy and tactics. Therefore, we can also divide entrepreneurship into two parts: "Before Product and Market match" and "after product and market match.

Prior to matching products and markets, start-ups are focused on learning and transformation. After a match is reached, the focus is on Growth and optimization.

Transformation (Bytes) Is by Eric· A term proposed by Les refers to the change in the development direction of a start-up company in the validation learning stage. The biggest difference between transformation and optimization is that the goal of transformation is to find a feasible solution, and the goal of optimization is to accelerate the implementation of this solution.

Transformation experiments need to verify all aspects of the business model in order to find a feasible solution. Optimizing experiments requires Improving all aspects of the business model to accelerate the implementation of the current scheme. The purpose of the former is to adjust the direction (that is, to complete a transformation), and the latter aims to improve efficiency (or expand the scale ).

It seems that the difference between the two is not obvious, but this difference will have a huge impact on the overall strategic planning and the specific implementation process. Before the product meets market requirements, start-ups must "Learn More ".

When the expected result is possible50%You will learn the most. In other words, when you cannot predict the results, you will get the maximum.

If you want to learn more, you must make bold changes, rather than using progressive small improvements. That is to say, instead of modifying the color of the action button, it is better to change the entire page. Instead of modifying the value proposition for a specific customer group, it is better to try different value propositions for Multiple customer groups.

Later, we will give you some examples to show you how to learn with a specific purpose.

When should I start looking for investment?

Interestingly, I found that37 SignalsIn their recent two books, the Founder has changed a lot towards external investment. In the getting real book, they say, "attracting external investment isBPlan ", in" coming back"In this book, attracting external investment becomes"ZPlan ".When you have already made a profit, it may not be inappropriate to come to this conclusion. However, in many cases, external investment is undoubtedly the best solution.

 

Although you can find some seed investment in the early stages of entrepreneurship, the best time to seek a large investment is still after the product and market fit, because at that point in time, the goal of you and investors is to make the company expand as much as possible.

The attractiveness of products to customers depends on the degree of fit between products and the market. What investors are most concerned about is the attractiveness of products. -- NiviAndNaval,Venture hacks

Many entrepreneurs think that the first step to start a business is to develop a business plan or make a bunch of slides, and then look for investment. This is especially true for first-time entrepreneurs. However, the time for entrepreneurs is very valuable. It is unwise to spend several months writing business plans or making recommendations, because you have nothing at this time.

Have a good vision and a bunch of untested assumptions. It is a waste of effort to promote these things to investors without any verification.

Therefore, your primary goal should be to create a company that just works, as long as you can test and verify your business model.

Although lean entrepreneurship is not equal to a white-handed startup, the two companies can complement each other and both need to maximize the use of existing resources rather than seeking external resources to reduce waste, in this way, we established a low-loss startup company.

Step 3: systematically test the plan

Now, yourAThe plan has been written down, and various risks are listed in sequence. The next step is to systematically test the plan. A lean startup company conducts a series of experiments.

Lean entrepreneurship is a set of scientific and rigorous entrepreneurial methodologies. Therefore, experiments are very important. In the third part, we will explain in detail how to make the best experiment. Now, let's clarify what the experiment is.

Lab Definition

This cycle is called a "verified learning loop" or a "Create-evaluate-learning" loop, pioneered by Eric les, describes the process of learning from customer feedback in a lean startup company.

This process starts from the "Create" stage. At this stage, we will propose a series of ideas or hypotheses, and embody these abstract things to form simulated things (such as models,CodeTo test these assumptions. Then, we took the simulation to the customer and used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to "evaluate" their response. We can derive a specific "Cognition" from the data to verify or reject a hypothesis, and these results will determine the direction of our next round of action.

Basic iteration Mode

Experiments can help you verify or reject a business model hypothesis, while iteration (Iteration) Is to achieve a specific goal (such as matching the product with the market) and conduct multiple experiments consecutively.

Basic iteration Mode

The first two steps (identifying the problem and determining the solution) are mainly to match the problem with the solution. In other words, find a problem that is worth solving.

Then, enter the matching product and market, and then test your product from both qualitative (micro level) and quantitative (macro level, check whether it is really what the user needs.

Author ash Maurya, founder of spark59. He has established many companies, including very successful wiredreach. Ash held several practical seminars on lean entrepreneurship and worked closely with entrepreneurs to help them adjust their targets. Ash is also a mentor to entrepreneurial accelerators around the world, such as the Mozilla Foundation, Year One labs, and capital factory.

Zhang Yu, translator, a bachelor's degree in computer science, Wolong University, Australia. Focus on the IT industry and the electronic game industry (especially for Nintendo), and have many years of experience in web and user experience. I love reading, designing, training, and translation.

this article is based on the book Lean entrepreneurship practice, written by ash Maurya, and translated by Zhang Yu, published by the People's post and telecommunications Publishing House Turing Corporation.