I get sometimes asked for recommendation on what to read after the Lean Startup. Here are a few resources I found useful:
- The 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank – or watch Steve Blank class on Udacity which covers some of those topics. Eric Ries followed Steve Blank class at Stanford and Lean Startup was inspired by some of Steve work. It introduces the notion of Customer Development. Put simply, it’s the exact opposite of what Jean de La Fontaine said wheh he said: “Never sell the bear’s skin before one has killed the beast”.
Customer development is the exact opposite: Here you sell the skin first. This book is about how to customers before you even start building a product.
- Running Lean by Ash Maurya, is a very practical how to guide that will tell you, step by step how to validate / invalidate your business hypotheses. It intrudes the Lean Canvas explaining how to use with loads of examples – or get started with your own lean canvas and here is a great manual on how to do just that.
- Lean Analytics – by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz focus on the metrics and what to track and what stage, depending an your business model. I recommend would following their enlightening talk / class on Udemy. Very smart guys.
- How to conduct customer interviews, sound simple, but it’s actually very hard. This is a list of 20+ resources on how to find customers to interview and how to interview them and Customer Interview Templates and Resources from The Lean Startup Circle Wiki. Always useful.
But the best thing to done, once you have read the lean startup, is to find a project of yours, and apply everything you have read / learned. This is really the best way to ancor the knowledge. Putting it to practice. And when you do, please let me know, I would love to know what else you have learned.