Ash Maurya Running Lean Pdf Files
Ash Maurya, 'Running Lean' Ash Maurya? Running Lean is a workflow for building web based software that was developed by rigorously applying. Erectile dysfunction (ED), commonly known as impotence, is defined as the inability to achieve or maintain an erection for sexual intercourse. Is Entrepreneurship for You? Starting a business is an exciting proposition, but it's also an incredibly challenging undertaking if you do it the right way. The Small Business Administration (SBA) resources in this section will help you learn about what it takes to start a business. Click each section to read more to discover. Ash Maurya describes his book as follows: Running Lean is a handbook for practicing entrepreneurs who want to increase their odds of success. Which, for me, was originally off-putting. When I was reading the blurb, I focused in on the words innovate and iterate and blocked out venture and bootstrapping.I came at this book as an engineer, not as an entrepreneur.
What Is Running Lean? We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. With the advent of the Internet, cloud computing, and open source software, the cost of building products is at an all-time low. Yet, the odds of building successful startups haven’t improved much. Most startups still fail. But the more interesting fact is that, of those startups that succeed, two-thirds report having drastically changed their plans along the way. So, what separates successful startups from unsuccessful ones is not necessarily the fact that successful startups began with a better initial plan (or Plan A), but rather that they find a plan that works before running out of resources.
Up until now, finding this better Plan B or C or Z has been based more on gut, intuition, and luck. There has been no systematic process for rigorously stress-testing a Plan A.
That is what Running Lean is about. Running Lean is a systematic process for iterating from Plan A to a plan that works, before running out of resources. Why Are Startups Hard? First, there is a misconception around how successful products get built. The media loves stories of visionaries who see the future and chart a perfect course to intersect it.
The reality, however, rarely plays out quite as simply. Even the unveiling of the visionary computer, the iPad, in Steve Jobs’ words was years in the making, built on several incremental innovations (and failures) of software and hardware.
Second, the classic product-centric approach front-loads some customer involvement during the requirements-gathering phase but leaves most of the customer validation until after the software is released. There is a large “middle” when the startup disengages from customers for weeks or months while they build and test their solution. During this time, it’s quite possible for the startup to either build too much or be led astray from building what customers want. This is the fundamental dilemma described by Steve Blank in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, in which he offers a process for building a continuous customer feedback loop throughout the product development cycle that he terms. And finally, even though customers hold all the answers, you simply cannot ask them what they want. Lean Startup Lean Startup is a term trademarked by Eric Ries and represents a synthesis of Customer Development, Agile Software Development methodologies, and Lean (as in the Toyota Production System) practices.
The term Lean is often misunderstood as “being cheap.” While “being Lean” is fundamentally about eliminating waste or being efficient with resources, that interpretation is not completely misguided because money happens to be one of those resources. However, in a Lean Startup, we strive to optimize utilization of our scarcest resource, which is time. Specifically, our objective is maximizing learning (about customers) per unit time. The key takeaway from Lean Startup can best be summed up around the concept of using smaller, faster iterations for testing a vision. How Is This Book Organized? This book is organized into four parts.
Ash Maurya Running Lean Pdf Files Free
The parts are meant to be read in order, as they outline the chronological steps required to apply Running Lean to your product—from ideation to product/market fit. Even if you already have a product launched, I recommend starting from the beginning. You will not have to spend as much time going through the stages, and this exercise will help you baseline where you currently are and formulate your next actions. Each part ends with gating criteria that will help you decide if you’re ready to move on to the next one.
About Me I bootstrapped my most recent company, WiredReach, in 2002, and sold it in late 2010. Throughout that time, I built products in stealth, attempted building a platform, dabbled with open sourcing, practiced “release early, release often,” embraced “less is more,” and even tried “more is more.” The first realization early on was that building in stealth is a really bad idea. There is a fear, especially common among first-time entrepreneurs, that their great idea will be stolen by someone else. The truth is twofold: first, most people are not able to visualize the potential of an idea at such an early stage, and second (and more importantly), they won’t care. The second realization was that startups can consume years of your life. I started WiredReach with just a spark of an idea, and before I knew it, years had passed. While I’ve had varying levels of success with the products I built, I realized that I needed a better, faster way to vet new product ideas.
Life’s too short to build something nobody wants. And finally, I learned that while listening to customers is important, you have to know how to do it. I used a “release early, release often” methodology for one of my products, BoxCloud, and launched a fairly minimal file-sharing product built on a new peer-to-web model we had developed in 2006. After we launched, we got covered by a few prominent blogs and dumped some serious cash into advertising on the DECK network (primarily targeted at designers and developers).
We started getting a lot of feedback from users, but it was all over the place. We didn’t have a clear definition of our target customer and didn’t know how to prioritize this feedback. We started listening to the most popular (vocal) requests and ended up with a bloated application and lots of one-time-use features. Around that time, I ran into Steve Blank’s lectures on Customer Development, from which I followed the trail to Eric Ries’s early ideas of the Lean Startup. I had dreamt the big vision, rationalized it in my head, and built it and refined it the long, hard way. I knew customers held the answers but didn’t know when or how to fully engage them.
That’s exactly what Customer Development and Lean Startup were attempting to address. Why This Book?
I was determined to test these techniques on my next product (CloudFire) but ran into many early challenges when trying to take these concepts to practice. For one, Steve Blank’s book was written for a specific type of business, enterprise software, which made it hard to carry over many of the tactics to my products. Also, while Eric Ries was sharing his retrospective lessons learned from working at IMVU, IMVU was no longer a startup.
With a technical staff of 40 people and more than $40 million in revenue, what you saw was a fully realized Lean Startup machine, which was at times daunting. I had more questions than answers, which prompted my two-year journey in search of a better methodology for building successful products.
Ash Maurya
The product of that journey is Running Lean, which is based on my firsthand experiential learning building products and the pioneering work of Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Dave McClure, Sean Ellis, Sean Murphy, Jason Cohen, Alex Osterwalder, and many others who I reference throughout the book. I am thankful to the thousands of readers who subscribed to my blog, left comments week after week, sent me notes of encouragement to keep on writing, and subjected their products to my testing. This book was really “pulled” out of me by them. Field-Tested As a way to test the content for this book, I started speaking and teaching Running Lean workshops. I have shared this methodology with hundreds of startups and worked closely with many of them to test and refine it.
Whereas my blog is a near-real-time account of my lessons learned, this book benefits from retrospective learning and from reordering and refining steps for a more optimal workflow. I am applying this new workflow to my next startup, which is also a by-product of my blogging and learning over the past year. As of this writing, I have sold WiredReach and am in the process of building and launching a new startup, Spark59. Practice Trumps Theory You get a gold star not for following a process, but for achieving results. One of the things that particularly drew me to the Lean Startup methodology is that it is a meta-process from which more specific processes and practices can be formulated. The same principles used to test your product can and should be applied to test your tactics when taking these principles to practice. Everything in this book is based on first-hand experiential learning and experimentation on my own products.
I encourage you to rigorously test and adapt these principles for yourself. The legal, financial, and accounting aspects of launching a company are outside the scope of the book. When the time comes, it is important to get competent professional advice about financing and structuring your company and its intellectual property assets.