The Lean Startup

299 pages

English language

Published Sept. 13, 2011

ISBN:
978-0-307-88789-4
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Goodreads:
10127019

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3 stars (3 reviews)

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a book by Eric Ries describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies.Eric Ries applies science to entrepreneurship. He tells businesses, and especially startups, how to start small and simple, then grow through learning, testing, measuring, and rapidly innovating. And he advocates “just-in-time scalability”: conducting product experiments without massive up-front investments in planning and design. The book shows the value of actionable metrics for decision-making, and the importance of pivoting (changing course) when necessary.Ries developed the idea for the lean startup from his experiences as a startup advisor, employee, and founder. Ries attributes the failure of his first startup, Catalyst Recruiting, to not understanding the wants of their target customers and focusing too much time and energy on the initial product launch.After Catalyst, Ries was a senior software engineer with There, Inc., which had …

3 editions

Five star book on the first read, three star book on the second

3 stars

That's what you get when you try to build an activity philosophy on unsubstantiated analogies from unrelated fields. Less dumb than the whole agile nonsense, but non-representative and privileged at its core.

Review of 'The Lean Startup' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

If you want to read this, you already know everything Ries has to say. His example of creating a time-sink video game demonstrates precisely what is wrong with the industry as meaning, value, and ethics are tossed to the side or contorted until they are simply unrecognizable.

Ries isn't wrong about anything he says in the book. But most of what he says is a waste of your time.