Three years of rigorous testing, thousands of iterations, and hundreds of product case studies later…
My new book, Scaling Lean, is finally here.
Why Another Book?
Since publishing, Running Lean, I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide through my monthly workshops and bootcamps. Through these conversations, I observed that while Running Lean provided a tactical roadmap for navigating the uncertain terrain of bringing an idea to life, there were still many unanswered questions.
These were the top three:
1. While Lean Canvas does a good job of capturing the business model story, it doesn’t adequately address business model sizing. How do you size a business model without drowning in a sea of spreadsheets?
2. While validated learning is critical for testing our riskiest assumptions, investors (or other stakeholders) don’t care about learning — they want results. How do you balance this dichotomy?
3. While identifying starting risks was somewhat obvious (customer/problem assumptions), things got a lot murkier after launching an MVP. How do you ensure you stay focused on what’s riskiest?
And there were more…
- How do you search for good ideas?
- How do you run good experiments?
- How do you deal with failure?
- How do you apply business modeling to multi-sided and marketplace models?
- How do you measure qualitative learning like customer interviews?
- How do you avoid drowning in metrics?
- How do you practice lean in a growing company?
This book addresses all these questions.
Here’s the back cover description:
Is your “big idea” worth pursuing?
You’ve probably “gotten outside the building” and talked to customers. You’ve identified problems that need solving and maybe even built a Minimum Viable Product. But how do you tell whether your idea represents a viable business? Do you have to go through the whole development cycle, failure, iteration, tweak, and repeat?
What if you could test your business model earlier in the process — before you’ve expended valuable time and resources?
Scaling Lean offers an invaluable blueprint for modeling startup success. You’ll learn the essential metrics that measure the output of a working business model, give you the pulse of your company, communicate its health to investors, and enable you to make precise interventions when things go wrong.
You’ll also learn how to:
- Ballpark the viability of a business model using a simple five-minute back-of-the-envelope estimation that could save you five months (courtesy of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi).
- Stop using current revenue as a measure of progress — which forces you to fly blind and, often, to overpromise to your shareholders — and instead embrace the metric of traction — which helps you to identify the leading indicators for future business model growth and make better decisions.
- Set progressive goals that set you up for exponential long-term success by implementing a staged 10X rollout strategy like the one employed by Facebook and Tesla Motors.
- Stop burying your breakthrough insights in failed experiments, but rather illuminate them using two-week LEAN sprints to quickly source, rank, and test ideas.
My Personal Why
I wrote Running Lean for myself.
Scaling Lean is for you — the entrepreneur.
Running Lean started as a series of blog posts that I used to clarify my thinking and search for answers. Along the way, I realized that the problems I was tackling weren’t just limited to me or just to my type of product (software). They were universal.
To me, this represented a big problem worth pursuing — one worthy of dedicating the next ten years. I decided to sell my previous company and start a new one whose mission is helping entrepreneurs everywhere succeed.
I believe that we will create more successful entrepreneurs in the next ten years than at any other time in history…And they won’t just be limited to Silicon Valley.
We are already starting to see this happen. Hundreds of universities, accelerators, and other organizations worldwide are starting to train the next generation of entrepreneurs using lean thinking and tools like the Lean Canvas.
But we still have a long way to go, and I need your help.
The Ask
If this book and mission sound interesting to you, please take a moment to order the book today.
Even though the book is content-complete, Scaling Lean won’t officially launch until June 14th, 2016. I know it’s a long time to wait (especially if you’re dealing with these challenges today), but here’s why you should preorder it now.
1. You’ll get an advance copy immediately (while supplies last)
I convinced my publisher (Penguin Random House) to make a limited number of advance copies available to early readers. If you preorder today, you’ll get an advance copy immediately so you can start applying the concepts immediately. The final packaged version will be shipped to your doorstep in June.
2. You’ll get an insiders to view on applying the concepts in the book
Launching a book is no different from launching any other product. I am writing, marketing, and launching Scaling Lean using much the same process as my last book — by using every idea in the book.
As an early access reader, you’ll get backstage access to every strategy and experiment we test toward achieving our stretch goal of selling 100,000 copies. I will be rolling all this learning into a standalone e-book: “Journey to 100,000 copies,” that you’ll also receive as a bonus.
3. Finally, your preorder will have a huge impact
Preorders drive how much support retailers give a book. This in turn, helps drive the reach and impact of a book. If you have benefitted from my work in the last seven years, I would greatly appreciate your help.
You can pre-order Scaling Lean here.
Thank you for the last seven years (yes, time flies).
Ash
