Too many startups spend months, even years, perfecting a product without ever showing it to the potential customer. When they finally do it and customers communicate, through their indifference, that they don’t care about the idea, the startup fails.

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can invert this trend testing their business vision continuously.

The Lean Startup is a theoretical methodology for developing businesses and products first proposed in 2011 by Eric Ries. It claims that every startup is a grand experiment that can shorten their product development cycles by adopting a build-measure-learn feedback loop approach. The first step of the process is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and then developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the testing and learning as quickly as possible. Once the MVP is established, a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect question.

When this process of measuring and learning is done correctly, it will be clear if a company is either moving the drivers of the business model or not. If not, it is a sign that it is time to change the direction and to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and engine of growth. With the Lean Startup, by the time a product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers, solved real problems and offer detailed specifications for what needs to be built.

The Lean Startup is transforming how new products are built and launched. It has become an essential for the survival of business.

If you want to know more about it and how to apply it to your startup, don’t miss the in depth article here and the guide below:

http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/lean-launchpad-educators-guide-june-2013?ref=http://buzzeratbiz.com/2013/06/19/ideate/