Ash Maurya

To recap the story so far: I have been an entrepreneur for the last 8+ years — self-funded the first two years and bootstrapped the last 6+ years. Throughout that time, I’ve been searching for a better way to build *successful* products. I’ve tried building in stealth, release-early-release-often, open

A basic Lean Startup technique is doing the smallest thing possible to learn from customers. Applied to the product, this often translates to a visual mockup of some sort to stand in place of the actual product. Mockups are a great way to qualitatively test that you have a problem

It’s no secret that I have been writing a book — Running Lean. While this blog is a near-realtime account of my lessons learned applying Customer Development and Lean Startup techniques, the book benefits from retrospective learning, reordering, and refining of steps for a more optimal workflow. If I could

I gave a talk at the Capital Factory Demo Day event to a group of investors and entrepreneurs last week. The key message from the talk was: Lean Startup is a rigorous process for iterating from Plan A to a plan that works. I started by outlining the key behaviors

In the course of applying lean startup techniques to my other products, I’ve stumbled across a recurring problem of finding better ways to track and improve engagement with my users. This not only applies to early users when lots of things can and do go wrong but also to

The validated learning loop is the fundamental feedback loop that drives a lean startup: Even though this diagram shows “CODE” as the artifact of BUILD, I subscribe to a much looser interpretation of BUILD that applies to anything you create to learn from customers. So, a problem presentation, landing page,

First, what is an actionable metric? An actionable metric ties specific and repeatable actions to observed results. The opposite of actionable metrics is vanity metrics (like web hits or several downloads), which only document the product's current state but offer no insight into how we got here or

“Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate enough times before running out of resources” -Eric Ries Even though an iteration (in Lean Startup) is defined as a Build/Measure/Learn experiment, the iteration loop can be applied equally well to optimization and pivot experiments which have often led

Last week, I re-watched Kathy Sierra’s talk from the 2009 Business of Software conference. As usual, it was filled with gems of wisdom about creating passionate users. But one of her old memes particularly stuck out for me: Don’t make a better [X], make a better [user of