The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

by Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits, Eric Ries (Foreword by)

Overview

Leverage the framework of visionaries to innovate, disrupt, and ultimately succeed as an entrepreneur

The Lean Entrepreneur, Second Edition banishes the "Myth of the Visionary" and shows you how you can implement proven, actionable techniques to create products and disrupt existing markets on your way to entrepreneurial success. The follow-up to the New York Times bestseller, this great guide combines the concepts of customer insight, rapid experimentation, and actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to allow individuals, teams, or even entire companies to solve problems, create value, and ramp up their vision quickly and efficiently.

The belief that innovative outliers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have some super-human ability to envision the future and build innovative products to meet needs that have yet to arise is a fallacy that too many fall prey to. This 'Myth of the Visionary' does nothing but get in the way of talented managers, investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Taking a proven, measured approach, The Lean Entrepreneur will have you engaging customers, reducing time to market and budgets, and stressing your organization's focus on the power of loyal customers to build powerhouse new products and companies. This guide will show you how to:

• Apply actionable tips and tricks from successful lean entrepreneurs with proven track records
• Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt markets and create altogether new markets
• Use minimum viable products to drive strategy and conduct efficient market testing
• Quickly develop cross-functional innovation teams to overcome typical startup roadblocks

The Lean Entrepreneur is your complete guide to getting your startup moving in the right direction quickly and hyper-efficiently.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781119094999
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	02/19/2016
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Brant Cooper helps kickstart innovation. He helps organizations big and small move the needle. Coming from the startup world, his career includes Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, inCode, and many others. He has experienced IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and miserable failure. Prior to the New York Times bestselling The Lean Entrepreneur, Brant authored The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, the first purpose-written book to discuss lean startup and customer development concepts, earning a distribution of over 50,000 copies. Through Market By Numbers, he helped develop and publish the bestselling The Lean Brand, bringing lean innovation practices to the marketing side of the house. Brant is Co-Founder and CEO of Moves the Needle, which has worked with hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs across the globe. He is an internationally sought-after keynote speaker, startup mentor, and corporate advisor, and has presented to and worked with leading companies such as Google, Qualcomm, Intuit, Capital One, GE, and Transamerica. Brant tweets at @brantcooper. He lives with (and continuously learns from) his two daughters, Riva and Eliza, near Swami's in Encinitas, California.

Patrick Vlaskovits is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and entrepreneur. His writing has been featured on the Harvard Business Review blog, the Wall Street Journal blog, and The Browser. Patrick routinely speaks at technology conferences nationally and internationally, including SXSW, GROW Conference, the Turing Festival, and the Lean Startup Conference. The Lean Entrepreneur is his second book. The first, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, is a required course text for MBA and undergrad students at universities such as the University of Chicago Booth School and Berkeley. He has also guest-lectured at Stanford and UCLA. Patrick advises multiple technology startups, and serves as a mentor for 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup accelerator. As a speaker and consultant, he counts Fortune 100 companies in his client list. For some unknown reason, Patrick holds a master's in economics from UC Santa Barbara. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family. Tweet at him @Pv.

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Table of Contents

Special Thanks ix

Foreword xv

Introduction xvii

Chapter 1: Startup Revolution 1

Bytes Eating the World 2

Connectivity 4

The Value-Creation Economy 4

Cue the Lean Startup 8

Meet the Lean Entrepreneur 9

Lean Startup and Disruption 11

Notes 11

Chapter 2: Lean into Change 13

Vision 13

Enterprise Note 18

Values 19

Culture 20

Data 20

Experimentation 22

Customer Focus 22

Organizational Structures 24

The Team 25

Big, Old, and . . . Lean? 26

Over the Horizon: A Framework 28

Work to Do 33

Notes 33

Chapter 3: All the Fish in the Sea 35

Business Models 37

Know Your Audience: Why Segmentation Matters 39

Market Segment 40

Personas: Create a Real Customer 42

Choosing a Market Segment 44

Work to Do 51

Notes 54

Chapter 4: Wading in the Value Stream 55

Articulating the Value Stream 55

About Value Streams 57

Value Stream Discovery 60

Work to Do 79

Notes 82

Chapter 5: Core Lean Entrepreneur 83

The 3 Es: Empathy, Experiments, Evidence 83

Empathy 83

Experiments 94

Evidence 110

Work to Do 116

Notes 116

Chapter 6: The Lean Journey 117

From Here to Eternity: Growth Phases 119

Phase 1: Idea Phase: This Is Gonna Be Big! 120

Phase 2: MVP for a Few: I’ve Proven That a Few People Care! 122

Phase 3: A Funnel of Many: I’ve Proven That a Lot of Similar People Care, and Some Are Gaga! 131

Phase 4: Multiple Funnels: Holy Wow, We’re Growing Like Crazy with a Bunch of Different Groups of People! 139

Phase 5: Scaling a Profitable Business Model: Shampoo, Rinse, Repeat 145

Finally, Enterprise: Large and Successful; Slow and Bureaucratic 146

Notes 148

Chapter 7: The Final Word 149

Work to Do 152

Appendix: Case Studies 155

Acknowledgments 183

Acknowledgments (1st Edition) 185

About the Authors 188

Index 193