Lean Startup

I've been following Eric Ries' development of his ideas about lean for about seven years now. My first encounter with him was an online O'Reilly event back in 2009. I'm kind of amazed how much of the lean ideology I internalized back then. It was after the collosal failure of TheWineRater.com and I was busy trying to justify my value to Experian in a shrinking economy. I built a targeted twitter ad program (my first foray into professional PHP) and shopped it around the company to anyone who would talk to me, eventually getting it integrated into Cheetahmail. Intraprenuership!

Encountering the lean startup idea coming from a science background it made perfect sense to experiment! The hardest part for me though was the idea that these experiments involved building so many things to just throw away when they didn't work. I am still something of a packrat. As I expressed at the time,

Profit is the supreme metric from which all other metrics are derived. Once I'd learned that and exited the big company I re-entered the startup game as a participant. I was spoiled by a plethora of data at PatientFocus that allowed for really robust testing of the machine learning system we affectionately called "Mike" after the AI in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Automated testing and rebuilding of the models on a daily cycle really allowed me to hone my lean skills, although I'd internalized them to the point where I wasn't always using the terminology in a way the business totally understood.

Fast forward to today when I'm working on building my second SaaS startup in much less data-rich environment. The founders, Gary & Robbie, are really well read and recommended that I finally go read Eric Ries' book. Gary often has the same read-a-book-about-it approach to learning that suits me as well. I was not disappointed revisiting Reis' ideas with more startup experience under my belt.