(This is a great case study on the “big middle” by Garrett Moon, TodayMade. I often talk about how most customer learning happens at the tail-ends of the product development cycle — while you’re gathering requirements and after you release your product. There is a “big middle” where the temptation

I introduced Lean Stack in my last 2 posts — Part 1 and Part 2. This is a follow-up on how we use Lean Stack today as our Innovation Accounting framework. What is Innovation Accounting? Innovation Accounting is a term Eric Ries described in his book, The Lean Startup: To improve

This is a guest post from Robert Graham — a solo bootstrapper who blogs about the experience. Robert has been working in software since 2005. He is a Ph.D. dropout who spent time working for Google. Someday he‘d like to work for himself. You can learn more about his

(This is a guest post by Lukas Fittl — a fellow Lean practitioner and Spark59er.) Enjoy… -Ash) When new entrepreneurs are introduced to Lean Startup, I can often sense their confusion: What is Lean Startup? Structured approach? Set of principles? Cargo cult? It sure is a good marketing buzzword. And from

I often get asked why I created a different adaptation from the original Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder. Lately, this question has bubbled up in frequency which is why I decided to take the time to outline the thought process that went into creating Lean Canvas. First, a quick

In his book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries describes the constant challenge entrepreneurs face between “Pivoting and Persevering”, but he doesn’t describe the even harder challenge of deciding when to hit the reset button. (Maybe Eric views “reset” as a “hard pivot”?) With my last company, WiredReach, while I

I just submitted my final revisions to O’Reilly for the printed version of Running Lean, which will come out in March 2012. While I had originally intended to “tidy up” the PDF version for print, I realized earlier this year that a complete rewrite might be necessary, which is

How Yoga Made Me a Better Entrepreneur I’ve been practicing Bikram Yoga for five years now. For those that aren’t familiar with this form of yoga: Bikram Yoga is a system of yoga that Bikram Choudhury synthesized from traditional hatha yoga techniques and popularized beginning in the early

Apparently, many people become entrepreneurs for the wrong reasons — to be cool, to make a lot of money, to be the next [fill_in_blanks]. This was a common theme covered at Startup School 2011 and the topic of a talk I’ve seen Dave McClure deliver in a way