The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Startups don’t starve; they drown.” There are always a zillion new ideas about how to make the product better floating around, but the hard truth is that most of those ideas make a difference only at the margins. They are mere optimizations. Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning. The engines of growth framew

If learning has taken place in one iteration cycle, let us demonstrate it by turning it into validated learning in the next cycle.

learning milestones,

In other words, which of our efforts are value-creating and which are wasteful?

These sources of sustainable growth power feedback loops that I have termed engines of growth. Each is like a combustion engine, turning over and over. The faster the loop turns, the faster the company will grow. Each engine has an intrinsic set of metrics that determine how fast a company can grow when using it.

Thus, both businesses rely on having a high customer retention rate. They have an expectation that once you start using their product, you will continue to do so. This is the same dynamic as a mobile telephone service provider: when a customer cancels his or her service, it generally means that he or she is extremely dissatisfied or is switching to

spread the word about the innovation far and wide.

Thus, it is not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions.

Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects.