Lean startup: where to start

Lean startup is an approach to building a product when you do not yet know what customers want. Most startups fail, and most of them fail because they built something nobody uses. Lean startup turns this around: find the customer first, prove the demand, then build.

Start with the basics: what lean startup is, in French, and what The Lean Startup by Eric Ries says and why it is worth reading. Five quotes from the book capture its main ideas, and an Eric Ries talk at Stanford, given in 2009 before the book, shows him evangelizing for it. A French decoder of the jargon, from bootstrap to product/market fit, closes the section.

Then the lessons of people who applied it. A founder of Spook Studio shares ten things he learnt, David Bland shares seven after five years of advising startups, and Ash Maurya spoke in Paris about customers, assumptions and why there is no launch date. Principles are universal and tactics are specific. Business ideas are worth little next to the vision and the persistence behind them. A French article from Forbes sets lean startup next to agile and design thinking.

Last, what to read after the book: Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, Lean Analytics and a list of resources on customer interviews, with Running Lean as the book I recommend the most. Two notes show the limits, a Harvard Business Review study of 250 teams in an American cleantech accelerator, and a tongue-in-cheek look at the opposite: the waterfall startup.