Running Lean

Inhaltsverzeichnis des Buches

• Introduction:
• A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs
• One Year Ago…
• A Traction-First Approach Is the New Way Forward
• What Determines Success Isn’t Differing Skill Sets But Differing Mindsets
• The Stakes Are Much Higher This Time
• Speed of Learning Is the New Unfair Advantage
• Succeeding in the New World Requires New Mindsets
• You Can’t Afford to Wait for an Idea Whose Time Has Come
• Steve Learns About Minimum Viable Products
• Don’t Start with an MVP
• There Is a Systematic Approach to Entrepreneurship
• About Me
• How This Book Is Organized
• Is This Book for You?
• Does It Work for Services and Physical Products?
• Practice Trumps Theory
• Part 1: Design
• 1. Deconstruct Your Idea on a Lean Canvas
• Sketching Your First Lean Canvas
• Customer Segments
• Distinguish between customers and users
• Model multiple perspectives
• Home in on early adopters
• Problem
• List the top one to three problems
• List existing alternatives
• Steve tackles the Customer Segment/Problem quadrant
• Unique Value Proposition
• Connect to your customer’s number one problem
• Target early adopters
• Focus on outcomes
• Keep it short
• Answer what, who, and why
• Create a high-concept pitch
• Steve crafts his UVP
• Solution
• Steve defines a solution
• Channels
• Steve outlines some possible paths to customers
• Revenue Streams and Cost Structure
• Revenue streams
• Cost structure
• Steve thinks through his cost structure and revenue streams
• Key Metrics
• List three to five key metrics
• Prefer outcome metrics versus output metrics
• Prioritize leading indicator metrics versus trailing indicator metrics
• Study analogs
• Steve identifies a few key metrics
• Unfair Advantage
• What do you do if you don’t have an unfair advantage on day one?
• Leave the unfair advantage blank
• Embrace obscurity
• Steve ponders his unfair advantage story
• Refining Your Lean Canvas
• So, How Do You Avoid the Goldilocks Problem?
• How Do You Know When to Split Your Lean Canvas?
• Steve Splits His Big Idea Canvas into Specific Variants
• What's Next?
• 2. Stress Test Your Idea for Desirability
• Defining Better
• Our Innovator’s Bias Gets in the Way
• Meet the Innovator’s Gift
• Unpacking the Innovator’s Gift
• All jobs start with a trigger
• Habits define what we do most of the time…
• …Until we encounter a switching trigger
• Therein lies the opportunity
• Causing a switch starts with a promise of better
• Emotionally better versus functionally better
• Emotionally better lives in the bigger context
• Getting hired is only the first battle
• Steve Challenges the Innovator’s Gift
• Using the Innovator’s Gift to Stress Test Your Idea for Desirability
• Customer Segments: Keep It Simple
• Early Adopters: Forget Personas
• Existing Alternatives: Transcend Category
• Problems: What’s Broken with the Old Way?
• UVP: How Will You Cause a Switch?
• Steve Realizes He Has a Hammer Problem
• 3. Stress Test Your Idea for Viability
• Don’t Create a Financial Forecast; Use a Fermi Estimate Instead
• What Is Traction?
• Welcome to the Customer Factory
• Step 1. Acquisition
• Step 2. Activation
• Step 3. Retention
• Step 4. Revenue
• Step 5. Referral
• Testing the Viability of Your Idea Using a Fermi Estimate
• Define a Target Throughput Goal
• Set your minimum success criteria independently from your idea
• Frame your goal in terms of annual recurring revenue (ARR)
• Focus on systems, not goals
• Your minimum success criteria are determined by your operating environment
• Don’t chase three-digit precision
• Don’t go outside the building without minimum success criteria
• Steve sets his minimum success criteria
• Test Whether Your Idea Can Deliver Your Target Throughput Goal
• Estimate the required number of active customers
• Steve estimates how many active customers he’ll need
• Estimate the required minimum customer acquisition rate
• Steve estimates his minimum customer acquisition rate
• Estimate the required number of leads
• Steve estimates the number of leads he’ll need to attract
• Use your referral assumptions to lessen the burden of customer acquisition
• Steve tries to save his business model
• Revise Your Goal or Fix Your Business Model
• Fixing your business model
• Revisit your pricing
• Revisit your problems
• Consider a different customer segment
• Revising your goal
• Steve fixes his business model
• Isn’t this just funny math?
• Running a Fermi Estimate on Your Idea
• Steve Reviews His Business Models with Mary
• 4. Stress Test Your Idea for Feasibility
• Charting a Traction Ramp
• Steve Charts His Traction Roadmap
• Formulating a Now-Next-Later Rollout Plan
• Stage 1: Now—Problem/Solution Fit
• Stage 2: Next—Product/Market Fit
• Stage 3: Later—Scale
• Steve Gets a Lesson on Right Action, Right Time
• Steve Learns About Wizard-of-Oz MVPs
• Steve Formulates His Now-Next-Later Rollout Plan
• 5. Communicate Your Idea Clearly and Concisely
• What’s Your Elevator Pitch?
• Outlining Your Elevator Pitch
• The Different Worldviews of an Idea
• The Investor Worldview
• The Customer Worldview
• The Advisor Worldview
• The Customer Worldview
• Delivering Your Business Model Pitch
• The 10-Slide Business Model Pitch Deck
• Desirability
• Viability
• Feasibility
• Steve Shares His Business Model Pitch with Others
• Part 2: Validation
• Focus on Your Weakest Link
• Avoid the Curse of Specialization
• Identify Problems
• Generate a Diverse Set of Possible Solutions
• Make Bets on Your Most Promising Proposals
• Test, Test, Test
• Decide on Next Actions
• 6. Validate Your Idea Using 90-Day Cycles
• The 90-Day Cycle
• A Typical 90-Day Cycle
• Modeling
• Prioritizing
• Testing
• Getting Ready for Your First 90-Day Cycle
• Assemble the Right Team
• Forget traditional departments
• Start with a minimum viable team
• Good teams are complete
• Good teams overlap on superpowers
• Be wary of outsourcing your key skill sets
• Good teams hold themselves externally accountable
• Good teams utilize good coaches
• Establish a Regular Reporting Cadence
• Seven Habits for Highly Effective Experiments
• 1. Declare Your Expected Outcomes Upfront
• 2. Make Declaring Outcomes a Team Sport
• 3. Emphasize Estimation, Not Precision
• Search for analogs
• Use your traction roadmap and customer factory model
• Start with ranges instead of absolute predictions
• 4. Measure Actions, Not Words
• 5. Turn Your Assumptions into Falsifiable Hypotheses
• 6. Time-Box Your Experiments
• 7. Always Use a Control Group
• Steve Establishes an External Accountability Structure
• 7. Kick Off Your First 90-Day Cycle
• Steve Calls a 90-Day Cycle Kickoff Meeting
• The Problem/Solution Fit Playbook
• Customers Don’t Buy Products, They Buy a Promise of Something Better
• How to Make a Promise of Better
• When Are You Done with Problem/Solution Fit?
• Steve Calls a 90-Day Cycle Planning Meeting
• The Mafia Offer Campaign
• Building a Mafia Offer
• 1. Problem discovery
• 2. Solution design
• 3. Offer delivery
• Running a Mafia Offer Campaign
• When to Use a Mafia Offer Campaign
• Steve Tries Taking a Shortcut
• Mary Bursts Steve’s Bubble (Again)
• No Surveys or Focus Groups, Please
• Are Surveys Good for Anything?
• Preemptive Strikes and Other Objections (or Why I Don’t Need to Interview Customers)
• 8. Understand Your Customers Better Than They Do
• The Problem with Problems
• Case Study: Using Problem Discovery Interviews to Drive New Home Sales
• Focus on the Bigger Context: The Job-to-be-Done
• Case Study: Using Problem Discovery Interviews to Build Better Drill Bits
• Finding the Bigger Context
• Scoping the Bigger Context
• Diving Deeper into a Bigger, More Specific Context
• Running a Problem Discovery Sprint
• Broad-Match Versus Narrow-Match Problem Discovery Sprints
• Finding Prospects
• Steve Kicks Off the First Problem Discovery Sprint
• Conducting Interviews
• Steve Creates a Meta-Script for His Interviews
• Capturing Insights
• Steve Reviews the Results of the Broad-Match Problem Discovery Sprint
• When Are You Done with Problem Discovery?
• The Altverse Team Uncovers Several Additional Jobs-to-be-Done
• 9. Design Your Solution to Cause a Switch
• Steve Learns About the Concierge MVP
• Running a Solution Design Sprint
• Addressing Desirability
• Step 1: Identify the primary struggle
• Step 2: Craft a compelling promise
• Addressing Viability
• Step 1: Set a fair price
• Step 2: Identify your ideal early adopters
• Addressing Feasibility
• The 5 P’s of MVP
• Steve Takes a Stab at the 5 P’s of MVP
• 10. Deliver a Mafia Offer Your Customers Cannot Refuse
• Case Study: The iPad Mafia Offer
• Running an Offer Delivery Sprint
• Assembling Your Offer
• Define the Characters in Your Customer Story Pitch
• Outline the Structure of Your Customer Story Pitch
• Act 1: Setup (share the bigger context)
• Act 2: Confrontation (break the old way)
• Act 3: Resolution (demo your new, better way)
• Act 4: Call-to-action (ask for the switch)
• Steve Shares His Customer Story Pitch Outline with the Team
• Delivering Your Offer
• Optimizing Your Offer
• Measure Your Customer Factory Metrics Weekly
• Identify Your Key Constraint
• Formulate Ways of Breaking the Constraint
• Steve Meets with the Team to Review the Results of ##Their First Offer Delivery Sprint
• When Are You Done with Offer Delivery?
• 11. Run a 90-Day Cycle Review
• Steve Calls a Pre-Review Meeting Just with Mary
• Preparing for the Meeting
• Collect/Update Artifacts
• Elevator pitch
• Lean Canvas
• Traction roadmap
• Assemble a Progress Report Pitch Deck
• Set context
• What we thought
• What we did
• What we learned
• What’s next
• Running the Meeting
• Steve Calls a 90-Day Cycle Review Meeting
• Part 3: Growth
• The Journey Ahead
• MVP Launch
• Solution/Customer Fit
• Product/Market Fit
• 12. Get Ready to Launch
• The Altverse Team Prepare for Launch
• Keep Your Customer Factory Running
• Look for Ways to Automate Your Customer Factory
• Race to Value Delivery
• Extend Your Customer Factory Metrics Dashboard
• Roll Out Your MVP in Batches
• The Altverse Team Launch Their Concierge MVP
• 13. Make Happy Customers
• The Altverse Team Learns About Behavior Design
• The Happy Customer Loop
• Don’t Be a Feature Pusher
• Implement an 80/20 Rule
• Prevent a Switch
• Outlearn the Competition
• Reduce Friction
• There’s more to reducing friction than improving your product’s UX
• Learn the Science of Habits
• Going from the habit loop to behavior design
• The Customer Forces Model is a behavior model
• Chart a Customer Progress Roadmap
• Trigger Your Customers
• Help Your Customers Make Progress
• Reinforce Progress
• The Altverse Team Calls a 90-Day Cycle Review Meeting
• 14. Find Your Growth Rocket
• The Altverse Team Learns About Growth Rockets
• The Rocket Ship Growth Model
• Launching Rocket Ships
• Part 1: Design (Mission Design)
• Part 2: Validation (Ignition)
• Part 3: Growth
• The Three Types of Growth Loops
• The Revenue Growth Loop
• The Retention Growth Loop
• The Referral Growth Loop
• Can You Have Multiple Growth Rockets?
• Finding Your Primary Growth Rocket
• Short-Listing Growth Rocket Candidates
• Validating Your Growth Rocket
• Optimizing Your Growth Rocket
• Steve Makes Mary an Offer She Can’t Refuse
• 15. Epilogue
• The BOOTSTART Manifesto
• 1. Entrepreneurs Are Everywhere
• 2. The Persona of the Garage Entrepreneur Has Changed
• 3. There Is No Better Time to Start
• 4. Most Products Still Fail
• 5. A Dozen Reasons Why Products Fail
• 6. The Number One Reason Why Products Fail
• 7. The Number Two Reason Why Products Fail
• 8. You Don’t Need Permission to Start
• 9. Love the Problem, Not Your Solution
• 10. Don’t Write a Business Plan
• 11. Your Business Model Is the Product
• 12. Focus on Time, Not Timing
• 13. Not Acceleration, but Deceleration
• 14. Not Faux Validation, but Traction
• 15. Remove Failure from Your Vocabulary
• 16. It’s Time to Act on Your Big Idea
• References and Further Reading