How to Create a Lean Startup?

Organizations aim to initiate the process to create a lean startup to analyze the team capabilities, project viability, business goals, company resources, and customer feedback — all in expedited time — in order to build a user-centric product. The business goal that this startup model runs on is to shorten the product development lifecycle while improving its overall quality according to user feedback, needs, and preferences.

According to a survey by Statista, 35% of startups fail due to a lack of demand for their products/services, and a lot more fail because of not being able to adapt to change. A lean startup helps identify essential and nonessential factors in the development process and then goes on to focus on the creation of MVP for easy conduct of UAT and gathering in-time valuable end-user feedback. On that end, several parallels can be drawn between Agile and lean startup methodology in a way that they can accelerate the development process and help create a product/service that provides real value to target users.

Lean startup methodology prevents goals and tasks that serve neither the end user nor the business. It helps the teams identify a development direction that leads to a user-centric product. The methodology can significantly reduce development costs and ensure that every penny spent on the project creates something of value.

Three Steps or Principles of a Lean Startup

Just like agile brings the effectiveness of scrum in software development, the lean startup methodology also has a few of its methods or principles that ensure its success during project research, planning, and management.

Build

If you are building a sailing boat, the best and only way to know if it works is by testing it in the river or sea. Only then will you know whether the design of the base and sails has what it takes to survive in the water. The same applies when you need to build a product like a fintech mobile application or a service like ride-hailing. You need to actually make the software and test it on the target users to determine if it provides value. That is why the lean startup includes MVP product development (costs less to develop) to test the product on a selected group of target users.

Measure

The measure is a stage where you gather feedback on your MVP from all groups of target users. It is also when you have to separate the helpful user feedback from ones that provide no real insight.

For example, if the end-user feedback on a video streaming service is like- Pages load too slowly, or Searching for movies or tv shows takes too long, then you get some insightful feedback that you can use to improve the platform. But if the users on the same platform provide feedback like- Did not like the streaming platform or Do not use this platform, then you do not get the feedback you can use to improve the platform.

The Measure stage requires you to gather all the feedback and separate that which provides end-user perspective on your products/services. It also includes a step where you must count the number of honest reviews from target users and determine whether they are enough to move the process to the next stage. For example, if you test a social media app on ten groups of teenagers and only four groups provide their feedback, you have to keep testing on the same or other groups until you get enough feedback for the next step.

Why? To explain the matter in this context, the primary target user base of social media apps is teenagers. And if you do not get feedback from a good number of them, you are likely to miss out on many flaws or potential strong points your app has or could have. In short, ensure that you get insightful feedback on your product/services from multiple target users, and you will have done this stage right.

Learn

The Learn stage is where your team determines the demand and chances of success of the product by analyzing the received feedback on the MVP. You can get answers to many questions like:

1. Does the product/service solve a problem for end users?
2. Do they like the user experience of your product/service?
3. Does your product/service have flaws that could lead your target users toward your competitors?
4. If you improve your product/service based on feedback, do its chances of success and survival increase in the market?

These are only a few questions that you should try to answer by analyzing user feedback. However, you should create a long list of questions according to your business requirements to benefit your project and business with the received feedback.

The Learn stage should make it easy for you to understand what you did wrong, what you are still doing wrong, what you can do better, what you have to do in a completely different or new way, and whether all of this can help your business and budget. Once these things are clear, you can create a development plan with increased chances of success.

Conclusion

Creating a lean startup is all about focusing on user needs to determine how you can use that to benefit your business. Whether you are building a website or app, always analyze and test user needs if you want the lean startup methodology to work for your project. Talk to some lean startup or Agile-driven industry experts to guide your business idea toward the most lucrative direction.