The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

We would dedicate ourselves to the creation of new institutions with a long-term mission to build sustainable value and change the world for the better.
Most of all, we would stop wasting people’s time.

Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem

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

Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule:
New customers come from the actions of past customers.

“Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”

Only by building a model of customer behavior and then showing our ability to use our product or service to change it over time can we establish real facts about the validity of our vision.

On the flip side, I know an extremely high-profile technology company that has a reputation for having an innovative culture, yet its track record of producing new products is disappointing. The company boasts an internal reward system that is based on large financial and status awards to teams that do something extraordinary, but those awards are handed out by senior management on the basis of—no one knows what.

Unfortunately, “learning” is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution.

A consequence of this is that many viral products do not charge customers directly but rely on indirect sources of revenue such as advertising. This is the case because viral products cannot afford to have any friction impede the process of signing customers up and recruiting their friends. This can make testing the value hypothesis for viral products especially challenging.

when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs.