THE LEAN ENTREPRENEUR

Hasan Hüseyin Topçu

How visionaries create products, innovate with new ventures, and disrupt markets

OUTLINE • Overview of the book • What is Lean Entrepreneur? • Vision of a Startup • All the Fish in the sea • Viability Experiments • Why Data is so important?

Overview of the Book

• New York Times best seller • Goal is to help entrepreneurs to apply lean startup • Actionable Case Studies •  http://leanentrepreneur.co/ (video classes, audio

interviews)

What is lean entrepreneur? The Lean Entrepreneur is about

•  navigating big change in the face of market uncertainty.

•  hyperfocus on creating value for customers • moving at the speed of the Internet

It’s becoming easier to launch a product and to get customers

Business is as the web gets bigger, the world is getting smaller

Access to capital for tech startups is getting easier as well

Vision vs. Driving Force

Most successful endeavors start with a big Vision. The end success rarely matches the initial vision exactly, and sometimes the end result is hardly recognizable at all. The vision is not as important as the drive to achieve it

Elements for Driving Force

•  Segment

•  Problem

•  Product

•  Technology

•  Sales Channel

Your driving force isn’t necessarily the most important part of your business, or what you need to focus all your energy on. Its a way to understand how you’re attempting to shape your business

Startup Culture

There is no defined lean startup culture.

•  It’s the culture that will dictate success

•  a few core philosophies ...

Be a LEARNING organization A learning organization puts

ü  data before rhetoric, ü  testing before executing, ü  customers before business plan.

Use Data • Use data to resolve conflicts, measure progress, and

inform decisions. • An organization drowning in data is little better off than

one without data. Those who fear the overhead of implementing data systems are missing the point.

• Data is used to inform decisions, not make them. • Data tracked must be actionable

All Fish in the Sea

Value Stream •  The value stream in a lean enterprise

includes both value-added activities (for example, assembling part of a car) and non-value-added activities (for example, forklifting parts across a warehouse floor)

•  The objective of lean is to eliminate as many of the non-value-added processes as possible (some are necessary) and to optimize the efficiency of the value-added activities, while maintaining the established value to the customer.

Value Stream in Lean Startup • You don’t truly know either the value being created or for

whom its being created. • So our job is to discover the value, for whom its being

created, and whether there’s a large enough market to support the business you envision.

Value Stream in Lean Startup

Value Stream in Lean Startup

Value Stream in Lean Startup

The goal is to measure the changes between customer states.

Should we believe customers? •  1. If you’re talking to customers about improving a product they know

and love, you can believe them

•  2. If you’re talking about introducing new product and through interaction with them get the feeling they get it, you can believe some of what they say

•  3. If you ask existing customers if they want something radically new, their response should be treated with skepticism

•  4. If you ask prospective customers if they’re willing to pay for your great idea, you shouldn’t bank on their response either way (yes or no)

•  5. If your great-uncle loves your idea, that’s wonderful, but not actionable advice (unless, perhaps, he’s in your target segment)

VIABILITY EXPERIMENTS

• Crowd-Funding Test

•  The landing page test

• Prototyping

Data = Sword • Data is the weapon of modern

businesses. To an entrepreneur, finding patterns in the data is nirvana

• Keep in mind that 1.  Focus on what moves the needle of your

business 2.  Actionable knowledge pulled from data

makes your resources more efficient 3.  Not all metrics need to be technically

produced and analyzed

From Large Organizations to Local Groups

Final Words •  The most pervasive reasons we hear for not acting as a

lean startup are mutually exclusive •  •  1. Its unproven; show me a lean startup big win. •  2. Whatever, there’s nothing new here; entrepreneurs

have been doing this for ages

Ultimate Lean Startup

Thanks for Listening Q & A