Startup: Why leave to chance what you can control?
You may be an entrepreneur who has a good idea and wants to pursue it. Where do you start? What are your risks? Or you may be a business owner who sees that your company is not only not growing, but seems headed for failure. But your product is good! Why am I failing?
by Eric Ries is what you need to rethink how to make your business work, how to sell your product, and how to learn to get the most out of it.
When we talk about startups , we can all think of companies like Facebook , list of canada cell phone numbers Google , Twitter , Twenty or Privalia . Business giants that started as startups . Spanish companies like Chicfy , Jobandtalent or Wallapop are also examples of them. Even Instagram , a startup without a business model, was bought by Mark Zuckerberg because he saw the growth possibilities.
A startup is a newly created company, a new product or service with great potential for growth, but under conditions of extreme uncertainty . Startups are no longer the preserve of young people and more and more experienced professionals are launching their own. Teams made up of partners with different and complementary skills believe in the potential that their idea will have.
There are more than 7,500 startups in Spain , but we must not forget that many of them disappear after a few months or years of life. Their survival rate is much lower than that of SMEs . But the ambition of each is completely different from the moment of their creation. Startups take risks: “all or nothing” .
One of the first sentences of the book shows you how you should approach entrepreneurship: “ associating two ideas that have always been understood as divergent, entrepreneurial spirit and management .”
Eric Ries , through his own experience at his company IMVU, explains how they built a minimum viable product (MVP) , shipped it to customers and charged for it, and then updated it through customer feedback. This approach promoted a school of business thinking based on management , product development, lean manufacturing , and design thinking, among others. This method is called Lean Startup .
Entrepreneurship is creating new products in conditions of uncertainty with management oriented to it and learning to create sustainable businesses. And all this can be supported by a scientific method. “ We are facing the creation of the management of the second century .”
The book is organized into three parts: See , Direct and Accelerate, where you will define who an entrepreneur is, what a startup is , how to define the appropriate strategy, avoid waste in advance, how to find that synthesis between your vision of the product and the one that customers accept, the importance of feedback and the “ Create-Measure-Learn ” circuit, where to invest energy, time and money, among many other concepts.
Through its chapters you will learn to recognize when to pivot from the initial strategy or persevere with it. Identify if we are progressing and face the reality of discovering where we may have gone wrong. That is, understand if the company is simply correctly executing a senseless plan. Your doubts about how to achieve sustainable growth are resolved by understanding the drivers of growth so that customers know your product and remain loyal to it.
It is a fashionable methodology that simplifies and exemplifies concepts, moving away from the first mistake associated with startups : the idea of writing a stable and solid business plan and a thorough market research. How am I going to make a business plan if I still don't know who my consumers are or which of my products will be suitable? The important thing is to define the strategy before launching, and to continually innovate on it. With the Lean Startup method you have the keys to do it.