EP #263 - Ash Maurya: The Lean Startup Methodology

Timestamps:

4:20 - Reading business books in engineering school

11:50 - The lean startup methodology

19:30 - The lean canvas

39:52 - The entrepreneurial renaissance

51:54 - The lean workshop

About Ash Maurya:

Ash Maurya is the founder and CEO at Leanstack, a leading provider of Lean Startup and Lean Business Modeling tools, content, and coaching resources. He is also the author of the book Running Lean. Prior to Leanstack, he worked at companies like telecom technologies and Sonus Networks and founded the startup Wired Reach in 2002, which enabled the creation of simple peer to web applications that blurred the boundaries between the desktop and web. He holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The Lean Canvas came about as a way to combat the preconceived notion of business ideas as overnight successes. It helps aspiring founders take their idea and deconstruct it to learn what needs to be tackled first and how to chronicle the process. It helps you get specific (because if you try to build a product for everyone, you end up building a product for no one) and helps you find out whether the problem you’re looking to solve is big enough.

The Lean Startup Methodology can also help you figure out things like pricing. Founders tend to want to price their product in terms of solution (meaning, based on how much it costs to produce the product/solution) instead of pricing it according to the problem (figuring out how big of a pain the problem is, and how much people are willing to pay to fix it).

It can also help founders find paths to customers, whether that be through paid advertising or through posting original content, or through being featured on other people’s original content, like Ash just did with Swisspreneur.

Memorable Quotes:

"Being too early to market is almost as bad as being too late."

"When we try to build a product for everyone, we end up building a product for no one."

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