Lean concepts can ensure your startup succeeds

By David Ronald

You may have had a great idea for a game-changing product and started your own business. And you may have launched your product and experienced some early success.

Before long, however, cracks began to appear and the numbers started heading in the wrong direction. Things aren’t working out quite the way you had expected.

Don’t panic. Many founders think that the first version of their product will also be the final one—in reality, however, significant refinement is almost always necessary.

Here are some suggestions for how you can use lean startup concepts, popularized by Eric Reis (http://theleanstartup.com/), to improve your business:

1. Use evidence to unlock success
Lean startup concepts move beyond favourable opinions and towards gathering valuable, usable evidence. Adopting it enables you truly observe the effects of a product, seeing it in action and recording exactly how it is received externally—it allows you to measure what works and what doesn’t. As many businesses are now adept with using analytical tools and measurement systems this shouldn’t be daunting. Think of lean as a scientific method, with change grounded in data from behavior, not whims.

2. Reprogram your attitude to failure
While I’m a fan of Ries, I also share the success story of inventor Dr Norm Larsen (http://www.wd40company.com/about/history/) to help others understand why we chose to go lean. Although he may not have realized it at the time, Larsen implemented a lean approach when he devised his most famous product: WD-40. Viewing his work as an experiment, he constantly adjusted and refined the product until satisfied, which is exactly what we do. You know why Larsen’s product is called WD-40? Because versions one to 39 all had failings.

We can learn a lot from Larsen’s persistence and approach. It shows how rethinking our attitude to failure can enable us to learn and adjust quickly, bringing us closer to success.

3. Climb aboard
The lean approach involves your entire company, not just management. For it to work, everyone needs to be invested. I’ve found that once staff are signed up and have a sense of ownership and involvement, they will work with you to achieve tangible goals. It’s all about empowerment; Team members will work towards collective success based on their individual performance, not distant corporate objectives.

I strive to create an environment where people aren’t scared to try new things or speak up when they feel adjustments should be made. This approach has helped me create a culture of collaboration and innovation, which has invigorated the company across all departments and levels.

4. Take a practical and philosophical approach
You may wonder how to maintain momentum when the business flourishes beyond the startup stage. Positive or negative, all business changes must be consistently addressed and managed. A key consideration of lean is that ultimately it’s a mindset. With the right care, attention and with the senior management team leading from the front, a lean culture can be maintained with scale and with confidence.

5. Take as much (or as little) from it as you want
Remember, when it comes to going lean you can be a fan without being fanatical. With the Ries model, we take from it what we need and tailor it to our business. Like all business approaches, nothing is set in stone. That’s the beauty of lean: It encourages constant analysis, adaptation and refinement.

It’s within the capabilities of your business to achieve success. If you value business or product development as a constant work in progress, the lean startup approach can give you the framework to help your business flourish.

Thanks for reading.

Leave us a comment if you found this information useful.

7 ways to prove your startup using lean concepts

By David Ronald

Although opinions differ about the merits of the lean startup philosophy, originally championed by Eric Reis, there can be little doubt that any entrepreneur will benefit from acquainting herself with its concepts.

The key principle behind this approach is to view your startup as a scientific experiment in search of a business model. This concept began as a new idea and then became so popular people now consider it common sense.

The lean method moves beyond favorable opinions and towards gathering valuable, usable evidence. Using it enables an entrepreneur to measure what works and what doesn’t. Think of lean as a scientific method, with change grounded in data from behavior, not whims.

Here are seven experiments, inspired by an article by David Teten, partner at ff Venture Capital, that you can conduct to test your business hypotheses.

Step I: Explore the market

1. Create surveys. Sending a questionnaire to your customer base is a great way to elicit feedback and discover needs. For instance, try evaluating response an incentive like: “$100 off our product when it first hits the market.” If people are eager to apply that discount to a product that doesn't even exist yet, it’s further validation of customer demand.

2. Collect pre-orders. Crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter have made it much easier to measure market demand for a product or service. By describing the product's features and offering it to the masses, entrepreneurs can get an idea of how the market outside of the crowdfunding platform would respond.

3. Run test ads. Utilize Google AdWords, Yahoo!, Bing and other platforms by creating ads that take viewers to a page soliciting email signups and possibly pre-orders. Test which ads are most effective and, instead of simply collecting emails, try to also collect data in the form of a mini survey. I suggest checking out QuickMVP, an all-in-one tool for building launch pages, driving traffic through Google AdWords and analyzing customer demand.

Step II: Explore the solution

4. Test multiple iterations of your website. Design and user experience definitely play a role in how the prospect views your startup and its offerings. So experiment with it. Launchrock is a great site for building launch pages and analyzing user data. Or try experimenting with different A/B testing campaigns using Optimizely.

5. Talk with real users of your beta product. Beta testers can potentially be your lifeline when launching a new product. To get people interested in testing out your startup, check out websites like Betali.st, Erli Bird and StartupLi.st.

Step III: Explore the marketing 

6. Analyze which campaigns get the most traction. Just as you need to understand your end users, it’s also important to understand the behavior of the influencers who touch your end users. There are several social-media analysis tools out there that can help you with this, including Copromote and Bottlenose.

7. Analyze website usage. Testing what words get the most hits can give you insight into the target market. Drill down in Google Analytics, taking advantage of goal tracking, demographic information, interest segmentation and cohort analytics.

Remember, when it comes to going lean you can be a fan without being fanatical. Like all business approaches, nothing is set in stone. That’s the beauty of lean—it encourages constant analysis, adaptation and refinement.

Take as much or as little from it as you want.