The Lean Startup Summary & key ideas explained

Picture a team that does everything right. They write a careful plan, hire great engineers, ship on schedule and launch with a party. Then almost nobody shows up. The product works perfectly. It just solves a problem no one has.

This is how most new ventures die: not from laziness or bad code, but from building the wrong thing very well.

Eric Ries knows that ending from the inside. Before he became one of Silicon Valley's best-known voices on startups, he watched his own early companies stumble, and he spent months writing software that customers didn't want. Out of those failures came The Lean Startup, published in 2011. It borrows ideas from Toyota's factory floors and from Steve Blank's work on customer development, and it turns them into a method for anyone building something new under deep uncertainty.

That covers more people than you'd think. A founder in a garage, yes, but also a team inside a giant company, a nonprofit trying a new program, or a government office testing a new service.

The big promise is simple: you can find out whether your idea works long before you've spent everything on it. You'll learn why learning is the only progress that counts, how to test an idea with a fraction of a product, which numbers lie to you, and how to know when to change course.

But first, you need to see what a startup really is, because it's probably not what you think.