Afterpage · week card
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
Key ideas
- Build, measure, learn.
- Leap-of-faith assumptions.
- The minimum viable product.
- Actionable metrics, not vanity metrics.
- Pivot or persevere.
The week
| Day 1 | Read the summary. Five key ideas and where the book overreaches. |
| Day 2 | List your leap-of-faith assumptions. Write down the assumptions that must be true for your product or project to succeed, and mark the riskiest. Bad day: Write the one assumption that, if wrong, would end the project. |
| Day 3 | Design the smallest test. Describe the cheapest experiment that could test your riskiest assumption within a week. Bad day: Write one sentence: “If at least __ of __ people do __, the assumption holds.” |
| Day 4 | Build the MVP. Spend your session building the test you designed yesterday, and get it in front of at least one real person. Bad day: Send a description of your idea to one potential customer and ask if they'd want to try it. |
| Day 5 | Pick one actionable metric. Choose one metric that would show whether your test is working, and drop one vanity metric you've been watching. Bad day: Write down one number you check often that doesn't help you decide anything. |
| Day 6 | Ask five whys. Take one recent problem or failure in your project and ask “why?” five times to find the root cause. Bad day: Ask “why?” three times about one recent problem and write the answers. |
| Day 7 | Hold a pivot-or-persevere meeting. Review what your experiment taught you and decide, in writing, whether to persevere, pivot, or run a new test. Bad day: Write one sentence: “Based on what I learned, I will...” |
Free week by email at getafterpage.com/books/the-lean-startup