Lean Methodology - The Blueprint for Maximum Success in Minimal Time
The best thing you can do before actually getting to work on your business is to plan how you're going to work on your business. One of the best methods I've found for this so far is called lean methodology. This methodology is derived originally from Toyota's production system and it's most popular with companies who want to penetrate the market fast and test if their ideas are viable businesseslG.
Lean methodology follows some very basic principles:
Create an MVP
An MVP is a Minimal Viable Product. It's the most basic form of your product which focuses on doing only one thing that adds value to your customer and doing it well. Anything that doesn't add value to your customer is considered waste and you shouldn't focus on it. Examples for waste are features that aren't the core of your product, unneeded bureaucracy, website pages that don't support your actual business model and so on.
For example, when I first started out with 99Bitcoins it didn't have hundreds of pages like it does today. Can you guess how many pages it had ?
Only one.
The one page that was supposed to make me money. The reason? I didn't see any point in putting up a whole website just to find out if the concept will work.
Test as soon as possible
If you want to succeed quickly you need to fail often and learn from it. This means to test everything you put out on the market and as quickly as possible. Once you have the Minimal
Viable Product (MVP), ship it to your customers and start testing it. Your product doesn't need to be perfect, heck it never will be. It just needs to do what it's supposed to in an acceptable manner in order for you to get some feedback.
Track everything
Since you're building a product that does only one thing, you need to make sure you track everything about it so you'll know how to analyze the results. In Chapter 6, I'll show you exactly how I track every step of my product from registration to purchase and also what tools I use.
Learn from your mistakes
You need to work in what is known as iteration cycles - each cycle is a new MVPt built by feedback from the old version. And each cycle ends with user feedback from users who actually used the MVP (and not by just asking them questions about it). Once the testing is over you'll need to decide if you have a "go" or "no-go".
In case it's a "go", you continue on to refining your product and continue down the road (basically repeat the whole process according to user feedback). If it's a "no-go", it means you're going to have to pivot and choose a different idea to work on since this one didn't make the cut.
So to sum it up, lean methodology tell us to build an MVP, test and measure it, and learn from our mistakes. Simply put it's:
Build - measure - learn
However I've added an additional step to this blueprint which is to plan your actions. This means that you should test your ideas in theory and have some sort of a road map before actually building anything in a lean way. Only after testing our idea in theory will we decide if we're actually going to build it or not.
So our new blueprint will look like this:
Plan (theory) - Build (execute) - measure (test and track) - learn (analyze)
And this is exactly how this part of the book is constructed. Each of the steps in the blueprint has its own chapter so you'll know exactly how to put this blueprint to good use. One good way to describe lean methodology is that, "You want to be as lazy as possible but not any lazier." Meaning don't work hard, to work smart.
Follow these guidelines and your road to success will accelerate without proportion to the time you spend on it.
Our first step would be to plan our course of action. So many people just get right down to actually building their product without thinking beforehand what they want to do. Our planning will be constructed from crafting three assumptions.
