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Why We Love The Lean Startup Method (And You Should Too!)

The Lean Startup method lets you answer the important question: “Should it be built?” instead of “Can it be built?”

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Photo: Daisy de Vries, Marketing Professional at Equidam; Source: Courtesy Photo
Photo: Daisy de Vries, Marketing Professional at Equidam; Source: Courtesy Photo

As we’ve encountered at Equidam, starting a business is hard … and fantastic, time-consuming—even frustrating at times.

Once you know how to plan for starting a business and how to successfully market your product it’s important to look at smart business approaches—methods that enable you, as an entrepreneur, to get your product in customers’ hands quicker and obtain instant feedback.

 

Lean Startups

Let’s be honest. How often did you test the demand for your product or service before you started selling?

Many founders begin with an idea for a product or service they think people want. They spend months fine-tuning their product, without researching whether people actually want and need it. Then when they actually bring their product to market, they find out there is no, or not enough, demand with failure as an impending consequence.

At Equidam, we’re adapting the Lean Startup approach, or at least we try as much as possible. Here’s a look at the lean startup methodology and why every entrepreneur should apply it to his or her own business.

 

What Is A Lean Startup?

The Lean Startup is a business model based on an ongoing learning process. It basically suggests that instead of perfecting your product for ages, bring it to the market faster to get immediate feedback from customers. You apply a ‘just do it’ approach, while staying organized and testing your vision continuously. The Lean Startup works according to the build-measure-learn approach.

A key term in this methodology, initially coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries, is MVP or Minimum Viable Product. This is the basic version of your final product. It lacks the final adjustments, but has the core features it needs to be used by early adopters. By introducing your MVP to the market, early adopters can try it out and give you feedback, which you can take into account when further developing your product.

This business approach, developed by Ries (who also wrote the book The Lean Startup) and Steve Blank, is often applied to technology and online businesses, but can be practiced across a wide range of industries. It is still a young methodology as it was only introduced in 2011, but has become a well-known term in the startup space. Some think lean referred to cheap, but that is not the core of the idea.

 

Why Lean Startups Work

The lean startup method works for us. And we think it will work for you too. Here’s why:

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