Lean it out

Have you ever considered the people behind some of the biggest consumer ideas and products? Who are they, and what prompted them to come up with their idea? Did they spend months, even years, perfecting their concept? You might think that until you read Eric Ries book The Lean Startup. 

As Ries explains in his book, there are too many novice entrepreneurs launching startups only to fail because they build something no one wants. Before you jump into the fire, be sure to ask the all-important question: Will anybody buy this? And once you’ve asked, ask the same question over and over again for everything you do.

Startups need what Ries calls “validated learning.” Instead of learning through failure – a very expensive and wasteful process – they learn through “build-measure-learn.” By obtaining continuous customer feedback, entrepreneurs learn whether to continue on their current path or to “pivot” (take a new approach) in a different direction.

Success isn’t (just) about being in the right place at the right time. Successful startups use “lean startup methodology” to build and improve the product or services customers want using customer feedback and the least amount of effort. Consider the story of Zappos, the world’s largest online shoe store.

In 1999, Nick Swinmurn decided to test his belief that there were people out there ready and willing to buy shoes online. He started by talking to local shoe stores. He asked permission to take pictures of their inventory. He posted these pictures online. Once a customer bought a pair of shoes from his website, he purchased the same pair from the store. Knowing what shoes customers bought helped Swinmurn understand where there was demand.

Launching a successful lean startup means knowing your market – what consumers want. If you have a great idea and are ready to launch your lean startup, contact us. We can help you get the funding and support you need!

At UFOstart, we always have the lean startup concept in mind. We are dedicated to a constant product development and are currently improving the usibility and UX of our platform. What we are working on:

• complete revision of our visual design 
• reduction of entry barriers through development of a new landing page
• improved contact import and project creation process
• seamless integration of social networks
• leverage of social media data to connect community and place users in a social context (contacts, skills, forme companies etc) 
• Bug fixing, performance bottleneck reduction
• improvement of the technical foundation of our app (testing and new CSS framework) 

As explained above, customer feedback is of high importance. We would love to hear your thoughts on the usibility of UFOstart! Please leave us a comment or send us any feedback - we are dedicated to a continuous improvment of the user experience of our platform. Thank you!