The Lean Startup: A Toolbox Without a Manual

What Eric Ries gets right, what’s missing, and what insights I nevertheless can use for my start-up

Photo by Karl Solano on Unsplash

Running a start-up is an experiment in itself. I can definitely relate to that as a new entrepreneur and what it means to be the CEO, CFO, marketing specialist, and salesperson all rolled into one. While tackling different tasks simultaneously, it offers me an interesting opportunity to view the entire founding process from the very beginning, and to figure out the best way on how to bring my idea and product into the market.

Unfortunately, even with the best product, entering the market doesn’t always go entirely smoothly. Fortunately, there are a few guides from the start-up literature available that can help you navigate entering the makret and to mitigate any obstacles along the way.

In this context, Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup” is one of the standard guides that is recommended, especially to new founders. In conversations with my peers, as well as based on multiple promotions at start-up events, I decided to take a look into this book.

So I read the book, page by page, carefully trying to map the concepts to my own start-up context. And although the book is widely regarded as a must-read in the start-up community, I found myself increasingly asking: Why does it all feel so…scattered?

My honest, objective assessment

Let’s start with the book’s key concepts: the Build-Measure-Learn loop and the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that form the backbone of the Lean Startup methodology (see pages 75 and 93). Regarding the latter, it is emphasized that the design phase should be kept as short as possible and that the MVP should be brought to market quickly, in order to test and validate the business hypothesis.

As soon as these concepts were introduced, I hoped to gain an insight into how the start-ups, that had achieved success, had actually applied them, particularly regarding the development process from the MVP to the finished product. Such insight would have been quite important in order to infer what these start-ups made different compared to the vast majority of about 90%, that commonly fails within the first two years.

As I kept reading, I realized that this would likely remain just a hope, particularly because the Build-Measure-Learn loop and the MVP were presented across 300 pages within various examples that in my opinion had little to do with each other.

I am aware that, given the complexity of the start-up ecosystem and the vast variety of products and services available, there is no one-size-fits-all rule to describe the pathway of each start-up. Nevertheless, it would have been helpful to apply the concepts outlined above to specific questions that founders typically face during the development phase, such as:

• What are some proven approaches to attracting potential customers? How does this differ for a B2B or B2C solution?
• After a (pre-)seed funding round, how is the amount typically allocated to product development, staff costs, and marketing and sales? How does this allocation further evolve in the subsequent funding rounds?
• What are the key metrics or performance indicators to track progress?
• What marketing approaches are feasible? Which ones are considered to be most effective?

Apart from these questions, there is a further equally important concept to the MVP that was only briefly mentioned at a later stage in the book: the sales or distribution channel.

In every start-up event and webinar I attended, the importance of the sales channel was repeatedly emphasized, and we were encouraged to expand it as much as possible, even if we didn’t yet have a finished product. What’s more, we were advised to keep expanding this channel rather than focusing on marketing.

My conclusion: I would recommend this book as a starting point for anyone venturing into the startup community for the first time and looking to explore the basic concepts of the MVP and the Build-Learn-Measure loop from a rather theoretical viewpoint. However, anyone looking for specific examples and key metrics would be better off reading a different book. Despite that, there are a few things that I find helpful and that I consider implementing for my startup, which I will address in the section below.

What does this mean for my start-up?

The idea for my startup, EVoyage, came to me about two years ago. Out of a personal interest in sustainability and electromobility, I started to think about potential business ideas in this field. What struck me was that nowadays, when planning a trip, electric vehicle (EV) drivers have to gather all relevant information from various apps scattered all over the web. Although established competitors (such as A Better Routeplanner and PlugShare) offer individual features, there is currently no single tool that can cover all aspects — route planning, charging stations, and hotel booking — of a journey.

To determine whether my hypothesis is correct, I wrote to some EV associations in Europe and overseas. Out of 20 inquiries, I received 4 responses, which led to a call. This allowed me to gain insight into the main pain points and to customize the first version of the MVP accordingly. Because, however, these pain points mainly reflect the opinions of the associations’ leadership, I am now looking for further ways to identify them by reaching out to individual EV travelers. At next, this involves creating an email list and conducting targeted searches through established social media channels.

Finally, I am still at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, but the foundation has already been laid. Although there is still a long way to go before I land my first paying customer, I hope that the approaches outlined above will yield measurable results as part of the Build-Measure-Learning loop and help to refine EVoyage accordingly.

Edited for Word Garden by Wandering Mind