Creating a Lean Startup: Best Tips
Did you know that nine out of ten startups fail? No matter what kind of business you’re building, you’re most likely to face setbacks, challenges, and roadblocks of all kinds. But if you’re building a lean startup, it helps to shorten the product development cycles, allocate time, money, and effort most effectively.
Here are some tips for creating a lean startup:
Stay in touch with your users
Before running any product, you should conduct research that will help you to find out the requirements and preferences of your customers. The main goal is to get a positive experience from the customer and leave them satisfied with your product. Interaction with your clients will help you to avoid the unnecessary use of resources in product creation and development.
Build an MVP
As an entrepreneur, you can be inspired by a great idea to create something. However, how will the market respond to it? How will you know if your product is eventually purchased by many people? The answer lies in validating your idea through the MVP development process.
MVP is an essential element of a lean startup business model. MVP development process helps to quickly kick-start your idea toward reality and with smaller costs. This approach is highly beneficial if you want to garner feedback from your potential users as well as incorporate it into your product’s future iterations. Through it, you will be able to find the right target audience and save time.
Always measure
A metric is a quantifiable measure that lets businesspeople define the success of a product or activity and track changes. Almost every successful product today is data-driven and determined by financial, marketing, and product performance metrics. The key metrics for startups revolve around customer acquisition, customer retention, and finally, monetization.
Invest in your team
Invest in team training. You should focus on professional development at an individual level. Team members should bring a diversity of skills and/or represent different departments within a company.
The lean startup methodology is a way for you to use a feedback loop to test your business idea. All in all, if you create your startup to use the lean methodology, it means that you need to center your business around the customer. If you have an idea for a product or service, you won’t start by creating a business plan for your company. Instead, first you will create a minimum viable product. Keep in mind that you should focus on customers’ feedback, which can then be used to make changes to the product, and also focus on the key metrics for your startup.
