Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Eric Ries - Page 2

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.

New Customers come from the action of past customers

If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.

Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.

The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.

All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.

If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed - at seeing what happens - but won't necessarily gain validated learning - If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.

Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.

The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.

The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

Reading is good, action is better.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.

Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.

The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.

A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty

A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y,' so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?

A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.

Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.