So let's start with some general thoughts and ideas.
So big misconception that people have is that they think start-ups are just smaller versions of large companies and this is not true.
Their main difference is between Start-ups and large companies, and this is what makes the Start-Up Environment unique.
So Start-ups search for business models or as Steve Blythe put it, a Start-Up is an temporary organisation designed to search for a business model.
So while start-ups. Search.
Large companies execute. They execute on an established business plan and usually five year financial forecast.
They have an established range of products.
They have an established customer base and they have established revenue.
And that makes them very different from a Start-Up from the Start-Up World.
While start-ups search for for a business model, how can we help them?
What can they use that would be useful for their six?
Well, let's let's go back a little bit, take a back, take a step backwards.
So it used to be that people think in order to launch a business, you needed to write a long business plan, then fit your ideas to investors,
put a team together, develop a product or a service, and then introduce that product or service to the market and start selling.
Well, somewhere along all those steps. Most start-ups suffer fatal setbacks.
And they were wondering why. Why things didn't work quite as well as they were expecting them to work.
Well, Harvard Research, it's Harvard Business School research shows that 75% of all start-ups fail.
And that's a big a big percentage. While other sources report even higher percentages.
But why? What can you, as a founder do that will mitigate the risk, the risk of failing with your start-up?
Well, to begin with, we'll go back to the top.
So for Start-ups, writing a business plan is a research exercise that happens in isolation.
So usually the founder or founders sit in a room and write a business plan.
Most of the times, without even building a product or without even talking to a real customer.
And this is fundamentally wrong. This is where the problems begin.
So the process of starting a company in the last decades has changed dramatically.
So instead of Start-ups, instead of writing a business plan and working in isolation based on the new way they have to experiment,
instead of relying in your intuition as a founder, you need to go out there and talk to real customers and get customer feedback.
And instead of putting all your resources, your time, your energy,
sometimes your money into developing a product with every possible feature you can imagine,
what you need to be doing is actually developing the simplest version of the product you can
develop and then add features as you go and as you learn from your customers and this process.
This new way of doing things is May is making the process of starting a company less risky.
And this is all about the Lean Start-Up. This is what it was developed for to help you mitigate the risk of failing in your business.
So you're out here, you probably have an idea of your own. You're very excited and you're wondering what's next?
What do you do with a cider and how can you make.
How can you work towards not a failure, but a success for your idea?
Well, I bet it feels kind of like this.
Like you're sitting at the edge of a cliff, and in order to get your start-up to be a success, you need to take a leap of faith a while.
You don't even know. How deep is that gap? Well, it looks a bit daunting, doesn't it?
So what do you do if you do make it to the other side?
You can be the next success story. You can be the next Facebook.
And that's exciting, isn't it? But how can you ensure that you can make it all the way there?
Do you just jump and hoping that you'll make it to the other side?
Or do you wish you had something like that, some stepping stones along the way?
That looks a little bit easier to me. So how do you take your idea and you go from this to this?
How do you build the stepping stones along the way?
So this is what the lean methodologies about. The goal is for you to develop the skills you need and get the information that you
need that will help you make informed decisions and get you a step closer to success.
So you can think about it like this. It's like driving at night in the fog.
You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can still make it the whole way.
And the process for each Start-Up will be different.
So your path might look like this. All might look like this.
There's no right or wrong process, and it will be different for every every Start-Up.
So starting from the beginning, you have to be you have to think about your start up as a pile of assumptions.
You start here with your idea. You don't know if it's going to work, if there is a market for your product.
So the first thing you have to do is bounce.
It's bounce. Your idea is volunteer idea from the market.
And the faster you will do that, the quicker you're going to progress.
And that's the tricky part. What is progress and how do you know that you move your idea forward?
So progress is learning from the customers. It's not building stuff and planning it in isolation.
You might be building a perfect product with every single feature you can imagine.
And then you realise that nobody wants to buy it.
That's not good. So what is the number one thing that you need in order to have a business?
Just about anybody. Customer. Customers, exactly.
If you don't have customers, you don't have a business.
So that's the most important part. But how do you get your customers?
So you started with your idea and everything is uncertain.
And because you can't plan and there's uncertainty, you need to find a way to acquire that data.
You need to find a way to search. If your idea is going anywhere.
So the methodology is all about that. So the idea is to build the simplest version of your product to launch fast and iterate.
And what does that mean? That means that you build a product and then you launch it and get real customer feedback and you learn from that.
From this feedback, what works for your costs for your customers?
What doesn't work? What else they would like to see?
And as you learn through this, you go back to your product and you modify it or you add features or you reshape it, and then you launch it again.
And you go through this cycle as many times as you need to until you have a customer base and you have people that would like to buy your product,
and then you have a business. So as Reid Hoffman said, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you launch too late.
So there are many tools and methods that you can use that will help you go through this cycle and guide you through this process.
And the business model canvas is one of them. The business model canvas is a framework that can help you summarise your hypothesis,
and then you need to test this hypothesis through customer development.
You need to understand what your customers need, what they want.
And as a Start-Up, you're agile. You need to use that.
You need to launch fast and change direction fast.
So learn from the customer feedback and go back and rebuild, modify, improve your product and get to the market fast.