I’m interviewing Eric Ries, author of the just released The Lean Startup at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle this Thursday.
As a developer, entrepreneur and startup mentor, I’ve seen many startups (and many large companies) fail by building products based on vague market research, unexamined assumptions and wishful thinking. It’s no wonder that nine out of ten startups fail. The Lean Startup methodology helps entrepreneurs better those odds by giving them the tools to clarify their assumptions, run the right experiments to validate them and use the results to avoid the costly missteps that lead to most new product failures.
I was initially inspired by Eric Ries’ blog Startup Lessons Learned, which got me reading Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany, Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits’ Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, Ash Maurya’s Running Lean, and lots of great blog posts and presentations on Lean Startup thinking from folks like Dave McClure, Dan Martel and Hiten Shah.
I’ve been mentoring startups with this approach for a few years now, and I can see a big difference between those that follow the approach and those that don’t: Those that follow the approach learn faster, make fewer missteps, have a better understanding of their customers and how to solve their problems, and ultimately create better odds of success.
If you’re running a startup or involved in innovation at any size company in the Chicago area, you should join us this Thursday!
You can RSVP here, and get a copy of the book when you get there.
