Ash Maurya

The other day, I got an interesting question on why the call to action after Customer Discovery is “Signup Now” versus “Buy Now.” If you’ve got a problem and solution that resonates with a prospect, why not charge them immediately? First, there is a big difference between describing/demoing

The press loves to celebrate stories of visionaries that saw the future and charted a course to intersect it with a “revolutionary” new product offering. In a visionary product launch, there is no place for being too early or too late: While these make for great stories, behind every visionary

The first “Lean Startup” conference (Startup Lessons Learned) was a great success. Eric Ries and company put together a great lineup of presenters and executed the event very well. I got the most value from the case studies. While core principles were mostly the same (Customer first, Get out of

Validated learning about customers is the measure of progress in a Lean Startup — not lines of working code or achieving product development milestones. So let's take a look at where in the product development process we do this type of learning: Where we learn about customers While some

Based on encouragement from readers, I’ve decided to write a short book on applying bootstrapping, customer development, and lean startup techniques to web startups. The book will cover practical techniques for iterating a web application to product/market fit and (like my blog) will build on the works of

I covered the Customer Discovery flow for my web startup in Part 1. Here I’ll be covering the next step: Customer Validation. At the end of Customer Discovery, you should have identified a customer problem worth solving and started building your solution (MVP). During Customer Validation, you’ll test

Last year, Steve Blank challenged Lean Startup Circle members to update his customer development checklist (Appendix B in his book) for their specific business. His checklist is built for Enterprise Software which doesn’t readily translate to other types of startups, including web startups (especially when you get to Customer

What you charge for your product is simultaneously one of the most complicated and most important things to get right. Not only does your pricing model keep you in business, but it also signals your branding and positioning. Unlike with other elements, it is harder to iterate on pricing. Once

We had a great turnout for the first Austin Lean Startup Meetup. Eric Ries called in to kickoff the event, and there was a lot of entrepreneurial energy and ideas for how we can take Lean Startup theory to practice. I presented a high-level overview of building a lean startup