Carlos-barraza-logo-50

What is a Lean Startup and why are they popular?

Do you know what a Lean Startup is and why they are popular? It is an entrepreneurship strategy widely used today, you will see many benefits if you learn how to use it.

It will also serve as a great idea that you can implement to improve your projects both as a businessman or as an entrepreneur, discover below everything you need to know.

What is a Lean Startup and why are they popular
Written by
Table of Contents

The Lean Startup methodology & origin

Lean Startup means “executed startup” which means that we apply the necessary corrections while the project is underway.

It may sound a bit risky, but as you will see in the following points, it is an entrepreneurial strategy widely used by companies with very good results.

Steve Blank was the first known person to name the Lean Startup method, where he formulated this customer development methodology while asking if it covered the needs or how he could make it more useful. Eric Ries popularized these methodology.

The project in Silicon Valley obtained incredible results and soon became famous around the world, where many entrepreneurs applied this strategy, commenting on the very good results in various projects.

Lean Startup Eric Ries
Brainstorming startup ideas on a window

Why are they popular?

The popularity of the Lean Startup goes hand in hand with the users’ opinion, being of great help to modify, reinvent or even launch a product or service more strongly to the market depending on the results.

Users or people interested in your service or product will always be willing to leave their feedback after using it, emphasizing the weak points and also the strong points.

In addition to leaving their valuable opinion if they would be willing to buy it or not or completely switch to this product leaving aside their usual service.

To do this they can make use of digital surveys such as social networks, being a more enjoyable place for the potential buyer to leave their experience with the product.

Undoubtedly, one of the best methodologies of entrepreneurship and marketing that you will find today and that we will continue to see in a long time.

How to apply the Lean Startup methodology?

First of all, we want to say that applying the Lean Startup methodology is not easy, but it is a good strategy to measure results and product quality.

Keep in mind that:

  • The objective of the Lean Startup is to capture the opinions of potential customers and reformulate the service or product through these “ratings”.
  • After obtaining a large number of opinions, the statistics must be measured. For example: “40 percent of people indicate that the product is too expensive or a certain feature is not very useful”.
  • In turn, you can apply the Lean Startup through 3 ways that we will discuss below.

Canvas Method

The Canvas method is the easiest to use, it is based on developing a business model that is attractive to potential consumers, so that they can understand everything intuitively and visually

The business mode Canvas can be implemented for different types of projects involving services and products in general.

Customer development method

Through surveys, forms or other means you can ask customers or potential buyers about the product or their needs.

By knowing their needs (which have not been covered by other products) we can find a new niche where we can position ourselves or gain an advantage over our competitors.

In this way, you can make your service or product meet the need of a group of people and get regular customers.

Scrum

Scrum has long been part of the methodology of research and social communication.

It is about capturing proposals from users or potential buyers and implementing them quickly, so customers can feel heard and improve our product to its final form to obtain benefits.

Phases of Lean Startup

The phases could also help us to make a kind of step-by-step so that you can use it in a simpler way.

Problem statement

Having a hypothesis refers to a strategy, which allows you to have a vision about the problems you want to solve in a group of people or a population. To do this, you can conduct a survey of their main concerns.

Validate the problem or hypothesis

At this point having an initial project or prototype will be essential to know if customers would buy the product, even in its most basic phase. This way, if your product or service actually solves a problem, then we move on to the next phase of a Lean Startup.

Start measuring

Without measurement we can't get anywhere, this means knowing how many weekly or monthly sales we have, what they think about our initial product, suppliers, stakeholders and much more.

Repetitive cycle

It's time to launch your product to the market with the new bases or recommendations! But it does not end here, this is a cycle, this final phase can be the beginning to continue collecting information that can be useful for our product.

Lean Startup examples

There are many examples you can find today of successful companies (and also failures, it’s not about the magic formula) and entrepreneurs, here are some with amazing results.

This is a company with a very clear idea that you will surely feel identified with. Have you ever had problems choosing the next color for a room? It can be solved more easily with a rendering with different colors of your house and without the need to actually paint it.

It was a company with the great idea of booking an airline ticket at a specific time, the customer only had to go to the ticket office and pick up his ticket. For a long time, it had to reinvent itself until it found the perfect model.

The well known cloud storage company since its beginnings had popularity that rapidly found growth world wide.

More about Business Planning.