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pdfLean Business Model
Why the Lean Start-Up Changes
Everything
by Steve Blank
From the Magazine (May 2013)
Download, 2005, Acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m, Wallace Trust Collection; Photography: Courtesy of the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery Sara
Hughes
In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies,
called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a
venture’s founders would write a business plan, complete with a ve-year forecast,
use it to raise money, and then go into...
Launching a new enterprisewhether it’s a tech start- up, a small
business, or an initiative within a large corporation has always
been a hit- or- miss proposition. According to the decades- old
formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble
a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can.
And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer
more
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Sketch Out Your Hypothesis
This business model canvas lets
you look at all nine building
blocks of your company on one
page. Alexander Osterwalder
shows how its done, using
Nespresso as a case study.
a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by
Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 7 5 % of all start-
ups fail.
But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one
that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It’s a
methodology called the “ lean start- up,” and it favors
experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over
intuition, and iterative design over traditional “ big design up
front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years
old, its concepts such as “ minimum viable product” and
“ pivoting” have quickly taken root in the start- up world, and
business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to
teach them.
The lean start- up movement
hasn’t gone totally mainstream,
however, and we have yet to feel
its full impact. In many ways it is
roughly where the big data
movement was five years ago
consisting mainly of a buzzword
that’s not yet widely understood,
whose implications companies
are just beginning to grasp. But
as its practices spread, they’re
turning the conventional
wisdom about entrepreneurship
on its head. New ventures of all
kinds are attempting to improve
their chances of success by
following its principles of failing
fast and continually learning.
And despite the methodology’s
name, in the long term some of
its biggest payoffs may be gained by the large companies that
embrace it.
In this article I’ll offer a brief overview of lean start- up techniques
and how they’ve evolved. Most important, I’ll explain how, in
combination with other business trends, they could ignite a new
entrepreneurial economy.
The Fallacy of the Perfect Business Plan
According to conventional wisdom, the first thing every founder
must do is create a business plan a static document that
describes the size of an opportunity, the problem to be solved, and
the solution that the new venture will provide. Typically it
includes a five- year forecast for income, profits, and cash flow. A
business plan is essentially a research exercise written in isolation
at a desk before an entrepreneur has even begun to build a
product. The assumption is that it’s possible to figure out most of
the unknowns of a business in advance, before you raise money
and actually execute the idea.
Once an entrepreneur with a convincing business plan obtains
money from investors, he or she begins developing the product in
a similarly insular fashion. Developers invest thousands of man-
hours to get it ready for launch, with little if any customer input.
Only after building and launching the product does the venture
get substantial feedback from customers when the sales force
attempts to sell it. And too often, after months or even years of
development, entrepreneurs learn the hard way that customers
do not need or want most of the product’s features.
Sketch Out Your Hypotheses
The business model canvas lets you look at all nine
building blocks of your business on one page. Each
component of the business model contains a series of
hypotheses that you need to test.
Source: www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas. Canvas
concept developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves
Pigneur.
After decades of watching thousands of start- ups follow this
standard regimen, we’ve now learned at least three things:
B . Business plans rarely survive first contact with customers. As
the boxer Mike Tyson once said about his opponents’ prefight
strategies: “ Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the
mouth.”
a . No one besides venture capitalists and the late Soviet Union
requires five- year plans to forecast complete unknowns. These
plans are generally fiction, and dreaming them up is almost
always a waste of time.
a . Start- ups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do
not unfold in accordance with mas
