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The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Eric Ries (Narrator, Author), Random House Audio (Publisher)

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

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Previous slide of product details
  1. Listening Length
    8 hours and 38 minutes
  2. Author
    Eric Ries
  3. Narrator
    Eric Ries
  4. Audible release date
    September 13, 2011
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Random House Audio
  7. ASIN
    B005MM7HY8
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length 8 hours and 38 minutes
Author Eric Ries
Narrator Eric Ries
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date September 13, 2011
Publisher Random House Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B005MM7HY8
Best Sellers Rank

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
17,535 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find this book highly recommended for entrepreneurs, praising its clear explanations and practical examples throughout. The book introduces fresh ideas and offers a highly pragmatic approach, making it a valuable resource for start-ups. Customers appreciate its ground-breaking methodology for entrepreneurs, with one noting how it helps grow businesses without wasting time or effort.

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ReadabilityInsightEffectivenessUseInnovationEase of readEntrepreneurshipClarity
357 customers mention "Readability"345 positive12 negative

Customers find the book highly readable, describing it as a must-read for entrepreneurs and startups, with one customer mentioning they read it every night.

"...A great read on world were a lot of products are being commoditized and fast innovation with great customer feedback is required." Read more

"My sister recommended this. Good read and you have to keep reading and reading this book just because of all the tips and important information in it" Read more

"...book quite repetitive, I did geain a couple of nuggets making it worth reading and specifically recommeding" Read more

"...Gets a little boring in last few pages. Overall a must read for entrepreneurs before starting their venture." Read more

294 customers mention "Insight"279 positive15 negative

Customers find the book very informative, providing practical guidance and valuable lessons, with one customer noting it offers a good mix of theory and practice.

"Ries really knows about startups. Invaluable and insightful are his ideas about the use of scientific methodology to test minimum viable products..." Read more

"...lots of examples and practical advice. I am sure that I will be applying his principles." Read more

"Very well written and informative book...." Read more

"...and found that his experiences when working on that service, were very insightful...." Read more

119 customers mention "Effectiveness"108 positive11 negative

Customers find the book highly effective, appreciating its practical examples and pitfalls, with one customer specifically mentioning the 5 Whys method as promising.

"Love love love this book. Original ideas (so rare these days) and lots of examples (but not just a collection of stories)...." Read more

"...well written, with thought-provoking well chosen use cases and examples, it will profoundly affect the way you think about taking an enterprise to..." Read more

"...Comprehensive and a pleasure to read. 2) Real world examples (case studies) from tech startups to the non-profit industry...." Read more

"Using an effective process to create a high value company has never been so important in these rapid changing times...." Read more

113 customers mention "Use"106 positive7 negative

Customers find the book practical and valuable, particularly for start-ups and product development groups, with one customer noting its usefulness for all business sectors.

"...It's practical and it's easy to remember if we think of it as if we are driving to a destination, we first will envision where it is, then steering..." Read more

"No complaints. Totally engaging and useful, not just for business, but life in general. Experimenting is, after all, how we learn." Read more

"...It was their way of introducing me to the system. I found dozens of helpful, actionable, road-tested strategies in the book to just be more..." Read more

"As one who is starting up a company, I found this book to be very helpful and that it shifted my approach to how to launch and what metrics I should..." Read more

105 customers mention "Innovation"94 positive11 negative

Customers appreciate the book's innovative approach, highlighting its many great ideas and excellent concepts, with one customer noting how it makes growth the focus of startup projects.

"This is a book that helps those with great ideas to understand the best way to implement them to keep their passion, creativity, and environments..." Read more

"Some really good ideas in here! A quick read with lots of good ideas on how to start-up a company with minimal wasted resources and continuous..." Read more

"Great Concepts from the Toyota Guy..." Read more

"Great roadmap for how to implement and excellent ideas for how to improve your own operation...." Read more

85 customers mention "Ease of read"71 positive14 negative

Customers find the book easy to read and comprehend, appreciating its simplicity and clear breakdown of concepts.

"...It is an easy read, well written, with an even tone without being too technical. I really enjoyed reading this book." Read more

"It's a great book, easy to read and understand. It present many great ideas on how to innovate and change the way we do our work...." Read more

"This is a quick read that uses some case examples to make the point that it is better to get into the market with an imperfect product than to wait..." Read more

"...like it is "Lean Startup for Dummies" because it is so easy to follow especially for me and I have zero prior knowledge in this field...." Read more

80 customers mention "Entrepreneurship"76 positive4 negative

Customers praise the book's ground-breaking methodology for entrepreneurs, with one customer highlighting its actionable guidance on building new businesses and another noting how it changes business growth strategies.

"Excellent perspective for both new and experienced entrepreneurs. This book is a must read for any startup...." Read more

"The methodology that changed how teams work. It's changed my approach to teams as well...." Read more

"...Highly recommend for motivated and business-minded people." Read more

"Great book, must read for anyone working in tech or aspiring entrepreneurs. But physical book arrived damaged; top of spine was ripped up." Read more

70 customers mention "Clarity"50 positive20 negative

Customers find the book's explanations clear and easy to understand, with one customer noting it provides lean guidelines to follow.

"Learned a lot. Short and clear with just enough supporting cases from different angles. A must read for any entrepreneur" Read more

"...I would recommend it to anyone looking to begin a true start up. Clear definitions and actionable items." Read more

"A great set of ideas, but too abstract And theoretical to really be used by most people...." Read more

"Really simple and clear framework on how to develop products in uncertain conditions...." Read more

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Camryn
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Read for Anyone Interested in Building or Growing a Business
    Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2025
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    The Lean Startup completely changed the way I think about entrepreneurship and innovation. Eric Ries breaks down complex business concepts into clear, practical steps that can be applied to startups, small businesses, or even large organizations. What I loved most is how the book focuses on testing ideas quickly, learning from real feedback, and adapting fast instead of wasting time and money on unproven plans.

    The examples and case studies make the ideas feel real and achievable, not just theory. It’s packed with valuable lessons on product development, decision-making, and efficiency — especially the concept of “build, measure, learn,” which I’ve already started using in my own projects.

    Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or just want to understand how successful companies innovate, this book is an absolute game-changer. Highly recommend!
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  • Jon Kovach Jr.
    5.0 out of 5 stars I highly recommend this book
    Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2025
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    Practical. Applicable. Easy to follow. This is a modern toolkit and playbook for the startups who need to keep their budget skinny and are looking a streamlined way to accomplish launch and business growth. I highly recommend this book.
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  • P Dudek
    4.0 out of 5 stars Deep Insights into Startup Best Practices
    Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2014
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    If you work for a startup in any sense, or have entrepreneurial visions of grandeur, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries will make an excellent addition to your bookshelf. Eric Ries, a seasoned entrepreneur and co-founder of IMVU (an 3D avatar based chat room), has crafted an excellent introduction to startup best practices. From inception to maturity, any startup, whether a seedling or an The Lean Startupoffshoot from a well established business sequoia, can gain valuable information on how to use lean startup methodologies to help eliminate wasteful activities and instead focus on the projects and techniques to help break through the bonds of linear growth and achieve the exponential.

    What I found most interesting about these best practices was the initial focus on a minimal viable product to test customer interaction and appreciation of a particular business idea. By building a rough draft of a product or feature, and unleashing it into the wild (even in perhaps an imperfect state), a company can gain valuable insights into whether or not the feature will gain traction with customers. Through the use of real life startup stories, Ries demonstrates how spending many months of careful planning, only to release a product that is ‘not quite’ what the customer is looking for, can cost a great deal of unnecessary time and energy. If instead, products and features are built to be ‘just good enough’, valuable customer data can be gathered, and utilized to either enhance the minimal viable product to make it more production worthy, or pivot onto something else that may be more valuable to the customer.

    This customer-centric approach permeated the entirety of the book, which, coming from a developer’s standpoint, is not something I feel we generally think about enough. Developers are often extremely code-centric in their thinking. This is certainly important (don’t want to build complete junk, even if it is only the minimal viable product), but we also should not be oblivious to the business needs of our customers. Ries emphasizes that in a startup, all employees and stake-holders, regardless of roles, should be in constant communication with each other to ensure the system being built is indeed for the customer. And while participating in business thought and discussion, developers can gain deeper insight into customer needs, helping them avoid rabbit trails and design the most appropriate system for any particular feature. At Within3, the startup I currently work for, company and product managers, business development, and customer support weekly share goals and practices which I definitely appreciate. It helps me feel more integrated into the company as a whole, and offers the engineering team the opportunity to better understand both the in-house and customer needs for our business.

    While reading The Lean Startup, I did feel some of the points were hammered home a little to hard, and I found myself zoning out in a few places where the information seemed overly redundant or was presented like a college lecture. But thankfully, Ries would toss a real life startup story my way and re-engage me. I found the stories by far the most interesting and helpful aspect of the book and the most effective tool in validating Ries’ suggestions.

    All in all, a good read and a valuable looking glass into the moving parts of the startup engine and how to make them churn along as efficiently, and powerfully, as possible.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Bas Vodde
    5.0 out of 5 stars Fresh ideas on entrepreneurship
    Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2013
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    Lean Startup is a well-written book with a lot of fresh ideas and thinking about start-ups and entrepreneurship. Eric Ries, author of the book, has had a fair share of start-up experience and in his last start-up (IMVU) experimented with a lot of non-standard ways of managing start-ups influenced by Steve Blank and the Toyota Production System (or lean and hence Lean Startup).

    The book is divided in 3 parts which roughly map to 'phases' of start-ups: 1) vision, 2) steer, and 3) accelerate. Each of these parts is divided in 4 chapters each simply named with one word such as "Test" or "Measure" (not incredibly descriptive).

    The first part is called Vision and defines Lean Start-up and its influences. It explains how start-ups are about validated learning and how the optimization of start-ups needs to be about how fast they go through the build-measure-learn cycle. When starting a new product, the first thing you need to get is feedback on the product, so it is important to get a Minimum Viable Product out as quickly as possible as learning about how to use the product is a lot more powerful than research or asking customers.

    The second part continues with the Minimum Viable Product and the learning. The learning we'll need to get from the product is whether our business assumptions (leap-of-faith assumptions) were in fact correct. Start-ups need to change their accounting system to measure their progress in validated learning. When there is enough learning, they can check their leap-of-faith assumption and make the decision to pivot (change a bit in one direction) or persevere (continue).

    The last part (accelerate) first covers small batches, one of the basic concepts behind lean start-up and then explores the different "engine of growth" that companies have and stress to focus on one of these. After that it gives Eric's perspective on building lasting companies that continue to improve. The author shared his adaptation of the five why technique. It ends with some general discussion about innovation in larger companies.

    The epilogue contains a surprisingly positive perspective on the principled of scientific management from Fredrick Taylor.

    All in all, I enjoyed the book quite a lot, especially the first 2 parts. The way the author has weaved a bunch of concepts together into one holistic framework is quite nice and very concrete. It is not easy to manage your company the way the author suggests as it requires a lot of discipline and introspection (both lacking in many companies). But the Lean Startup moves us away from the black art of startups and creates an interesting structure, or at least perspective, to starting up new ventures. Recommended reading.
    14 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Max
    5.0 out of 5 stars Ottimo libro!
    Reviewed in Italy on March 4, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    Ho letto questo libro perché consigliato dai professori di due corsi di laurea che ho seguito e mi ha aiutato molto nel passare gli esami. Il libro è scritto molto bene e dimostra i concetti che spiega con molto esempi, anche riferiti alla vita dell'autore nella sua esperienza da imprenditore. Penso che la lettura di questo libro sia molto utile in generale poiché illustra un modo di pensare che si può applicare ovunque e di conseguenza lo ritengo utile per la propria crescita personale.
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    Max
    5.0 out of 5 stars
    Ottimo libro!

    Reviewed in Italy on March 4, 2023
    Ho letto questo libro perché consigliato dai professori di due corsi di laurea che ho seguito e mi ha aiutato molto nel passare gli esami. Il libro è scritto molto bene e dimostra i concetti che spiega con molto esempi, anche riferiti alla vita dell'autore nella sua esperienza da imprenditore. Penso che la lettura di questo libro sia molto utile in generale poiché illustra un modo di pensare che si può applicare ovunque e di conseguenza lo ritengo utile per la propria crescita personale.
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  • Joã Henrique Assad
    5.0 out of 5 stars Essencial para pessoas de produtos e negócios
    Reviewed in Brazil on December 30, 2024
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Na minha opinião, Eric Ries super Marty Cagan como referência para o desenvolvimento de produtos e negócios. Principalmente se você já tiver algum tempo de experiência nessas áreas de atuação e trabalhar em uma organização complexa, os insights práticos de Ries (embora, honestamente, não sejam exatamente uma novidade) vão te ajudar a navegar por ambientes de negociação e etapas de planejamento e priorização de uma forma mais sênior e holística. Para mim é um “must read”.
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  • Vaddadi Kartick
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, critical ideas marred by poor presentation
    Reviewed in India on June 21, 2016
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This book is full of excellent ideas that I expect will be critical to running a startup. I feel that I'm much better equipped to take the plunge after reading this book. The fact that Eric's ideas are widely adopted nowadays — minimum viable product, pivot, metrics, and so on.

    Unfortunately, the book is hard to read, specifically the first half, which could be condensed to half its length, because there's too much repetition. The author leaves you to figure out what a term means from reading an anecdote spread over two pages rather than defining it explicitly and clearly defining it. Some chapter names are meaningless, like "Leap", and give you no indication of what to expect. Some case studies are not obviously connected to the point the author is trying to make — you scratch your head and try to figure out what it means, and what the point must have been, and what the moral of the story must have been.

    But, stick with it, and you'll be rewarded with a solid, well thought-out, evidence-based method on running a startup with less risk, stress, time, money and effort.

    Here's a summary of the book:

    Introduction:
    The lean startup method has five principles:
    1) Entrepreneurs are everywhere.
    2) Entrepreneurship is management, albeit a form of management that applies under the conditions of extreme uncertainty in a startup. If you think management is not cool and reject it, you'll have chaos and failure.
    3) Validated Learning. Startups exist not to just make things, serve customers, or make money. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
    4) Build - measure - learn: Startups should go through this loop, as fast as possible.
    5) Innovation Accounting is needed to measure a startup's progress, set up milestones, prioritise work, and for the people in it to hold themselves accountable.

    Chapter 1:
    - The lean startup draws from related fields like lean manufacturing and design thinking.
    - If a company commits itself to the wrong plan and executes that plan excellently at a big scale, it may not be able to pivot in time, because it has committed all its resources and time to the wrong vision. It will achieve failure.

    Chapter 2:
    - Startups can exist as islands of independence within big companies.

    Chapter 3: Learn:
    - Which actions are value-creating and which are wasteful? This question is at the heart of lean manufacturing as well.
    - Validate your assumptions more cheaply than building the entire product.
    - But not by asking people what they want — most of the time, they don't know in advance.
    - People who fail often give the excuse that they learnt a lot.
    - It's easier to raise money when you have zero revenue and users. Zero invites imagination. A small number invites questions about whether big numbers will ever materialise.
    - So, it's tempting to postpone getting any idea until you are sure of the success. But don't do that.
    - Early in a startup's life, revenue growth happens slowly. But the real progress is in validated learning.
    - Don't fall prey to vanity metrics, which are numbers that look good but are not the best indicators of your company's health. For example, if you have a web site that encourages people to download an app, page views on the web site is a vanity metric, because there are better metrics, like downloads of the app, signups, active users, etc.
    - Don't waste money on PR and buying media attention and getting written up in magazines. Focus on learning.

    Chapter 4: Experiment
    - The founder of Zappos first tested his e-store for shoes by fulfilling orders manually — going to a nearby physical shop, buying the shoes, and shipping them. After a month, a thousand orders were placed, validating his idea.
    - He observed real customer behaviour, interacted with them, and learnt about their needs, not asked hypothetical questions.
    - Customers react in unexpected ways, revealing information you might not have known to ask about, like returning shoes.
    - Startups have a value hypothesis and a growth hypothesis.
    - The value hypothesis is that customers derive value from the product or service once they start using it.
    - The growth hypothesis is about how new customers will discover a product or service.
    - Give your first few users wonderful attention, as if you're a concierge.
    - An experiment is actually a startup's first product, not just a theoretical enquiry.

    Chapter 5:
    - Startups have a build - measure - learn feedback loop.
    - The learning is how to build a sustainable business.
    - This learning is more important than revenue.
    - Minimise the time it takes for you iterate through this loop.
    - People are often trained and specialised in one aspect of this loop, like engineers trained to build. What matter is not one part, but how fast you can iterate through the entire loop.
    - Startups should use a scientific method.
    - To do so, they should know what hypotheses to test.
    - The two most important hypotheses are the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

    - Every startup is based on assumptions, often not recognised as such by founders.
    - Some assumptions are validated by the existence of other products. For example, when Apple built the iPod, one assumption was that people want to listen to music in public places using earphones. But the popularity of the walkman validated that assumption.
    - "Leap of faith" assumptions are trickier, like saying that people want to pay $399 for a portable music player.
    - You want to validate them ASAP.
    - The riskiest ones first.
    - You do so by building one or more MVPs. An MVP lacks features that are needed later, but its purpose is to validate assumptions with as little time and effort as possible.
    - You should identify and list assumptions before, not after, building the MVP. Ideally give quantitative estimates like 20% of people will be interested in our service, and 5% will be willing to pay. That way, you can't claim later on that you succeeded, by defining the goal as what you actually achieved.
    - You actually run the build - measure - learn loop in reverse: start with what you want to learn (assumptions to validate), then think about what to measure to validate those assumptions, and then build that MVP.

    - Don't act as if your assumptions are true. Validate them. Otherwise your startup will fail.
    - You can look for analogs and antilogs.
    - An analog is a similar situation that validates your assumption, as with people listening to music in public using earphones.
    - An antilog is something that goes against your assumption. For example, an assumption behind the iTunes Music Store was that people are willing to pay for music, but Napster was an antilog.
    - Get out of the building and talk to users. Don't theorise.

    Chapter 6: Test
    - Start with a quick, crappy implementation.
    - Groupon began as a themed Wordpress blog with the coupons being PDFs mailed by Apple's Mail app to 500 people.
    - An MVP is not necessarily the smallest product to build, but the quickest to build.
    - It's hard for entrepreneurs to launch an MVP, because the vision they have of themselves is launching high-quality, polished products, not crappy ones. Overcome that hesitation.
    - If you don't know who the customer is, you don't know what quality is.
    - Users may be fine with what you think is low-quality stuff, and may actually find it better, disagreeing with your opinion as to what constitutes high or low quality.
    - Low quality is a problem only if it slows down the build - measure - learn feedback loop.
    - An MVP can also be a marketing pitch accompanied by a sign up page to gauge interest.
    - Or a video, in Dropbox's case.
    - You can have humans substitute for an algorithm.
    - Don't worry that an established company will copy your idea. Try pitching it to the managers there. They will do nothing, partly because they're already overwhelmed with good ideas.
    - MVPs often result in bad news. Or, rather, they bring it out. You're better off facing reality.

    Chapter 7: Measure
    - If you're making changes to your product resulting in more users, that's not good enough. It's storytelling. How do you know that your changes are causing the results? How do you know that you're drawing the right lessons from your changes?
    - You need innovation accounting.
    - Innovation accounting works in three steps:
    1) Use an MVP to establish real data on where you are. Without a clear-eyed picture of your current status — no matter how far from the goal you may be — you cannot begin to track your progress.
    2) Tune the engine to move towards the ideal.
    3) Decide whether to continue on your current course or pivot.
    - An MVP gets you real baseline data — conversion rates, sign-up rates, trial rates, customer life-time value, and so on.
    - Don't optimise something (like making your app easier for new users to use) until you know that it's a driver of growth and is less than what you'd like.
    - Putting all these together, start with a baseline metric, then form a hypothesis as to what will improve that metric, and then perform a set of experiments designed to test that hypothesis.
    - Metrics about the customer acquisition funnel are important.
    - Running Adwords ads, even on a low budget is important, because it gives you critical data.
    - Cohort analysis is important. Here, you define a cohort, such as people who signed up during a given week, or those who used a certain feature. Then you track the performance of your app for that group of users.
    - Cohort analysis lets you prove or disprove theories like, if your number of users is declining, that people who signed up recently are abandoning the app while old users continue to use it.
    - Cohort analysis can point out problems when other metrics are all up and to the right (hockey sticks).
    - When you get poor quantitative results, they force you to declare failure and create the motivation, context and space for more qualitative research.
    - If you pivot, and the experiments you run afterward are more productive than the ones before, that's the sign of a successful pivot.
    - Don't focus on optimising, whether the conversion rate or the performance of your app, because you may be building the wrong thing, in which case no amount of optimisation will help.
    - A startup has to measure progress against a high bar: evidence that a sustainable business can be built. This is possible only if you've made clear, verifiable predictions ahead of time.
    - Sometimes, when you make changes and launch them, it's hard to look for cause-and-effect relationships after the fact. In that case, do an A/B test.
    - A/B testing can also tell you things like whether the social features you've added to a product matter.
    - Hypothesis testing can require you to build new infrastructure. For example, if you're testing delayed sign-up, you'll need to support a state where users have their data in the system but haven't yet signed up.
    - Industry norms like delayed sign-up helping may not be true in your case.
    - That may, in turn, reveal an insight, such as: customers were not basing their decision on whether to use your product on your demo. Maybe on positioning and marketing.
    - Good metrics must follow the three As: Actionable, Accessible, and Auditable.
    - Go by actionable metrics, not vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are those where the cause and effect relationship isn't clear. You don't know what change you made that led to an increase (or decrease) in this metric, like page views. Or maybe it has nothing to do with you, like a mention in a popular blog. An actionable metric is the number of customers. If it decreases by 50K, you know something is wrong. You can work on it and hopefully fix it. That's actionable.
    - Accessible means that you can understand what it means, like a "customer" as opposed to a "hit on your web site".
    - Auditable means that if a question arises as to the validity of the metrics, you should be able to verify it. The best way is to talk to customers, who will also tell you why something is happening, not just that it is. In addition, the mechanism that generates the results must not be too complex for the metric to be auditable.

    Chapter 8: Pivot
    - Companies that can't pivot may be stuck in the land of the living dead, neither growing quickly enough nor dying, consuming the time and money of the people involved.
    - Launching early and iterating means that if you pivot, you waste less time, energy and money. If you drag it on, you won't want to pivot because of sunk costs.
    - Go by actionable metrics, rather than vanity metrics that can give a feeling of false success.
    - A startup's runway is conventionally defined as the number of months, but it should be defined as the number of pivots it can make.
    - Don't cut costs by slowing down the build - measure - learn loop. Then you're just going out of business slowly.
    - Two telltale signs that you need to pivot are the decreasing effectiveness of product experiments and the general feeling that product development should be more productive.
    - Not having PR and media attention on you is good, because you can pivot without drama.
    - Some types of pivots are:
    + Zoom-in pivot (where you focus on a subset of your original product)
    + Zoom-out pivot
    + Customer segment pivot (where you realise that you're more successful with different customers from the ones you expected)
    + Customer need pivot (where you discover that the customer has more important needs than the ones you thought they had)
    + Platform pivot (where an app becomes a platform or vice-versa)
    + Value capture pivot (commonly called monetisation, but monetisation is more like a feature while value capture is more central to the product)
    + Engine of Growth pivot (moving between viral, sticky and paid engines of growth)
    + Channel pivot (moving between sales channels)
    + Technology pivot
    + A pivot is a hypothesis; we don't know ahead of time whether it will succeed.

    Chapter 9: Small Batch Sizes:
    - Optimise the entire system, not a piece of it.
    - Have a small batch size: deliver work in smaller units.
    - Launch each feature independently.
    - Continuous deployment. Launch many times a a day.
    - Have lots of automated tests.
    - Have your designer sit with the engineer and have them design and implement each screen together. As opposed to your designer working by herself for weeks and then delivering the entire result at once.
    - Smaller batch sizes are actually more efficient, despite our intuition.
    - Quality problems can be identified much sooner. If you make something no one wants, you'll learn sooner.
    - Large-batch systems tend to malfunction, and when they do, people blame themselves.
    - Large batches lead to multiple rounds of rework.
    - ... and to still larger batches, which becomes a death spiral.
    - And to interruptions, people being blocked on others, communication gaps, scheduling problems, and so on.
    - The longer a project takes, the more bugs, problems and conflicts it has.
    - Have minimum work in progress.
    - Pull, don't push. Start from the hypothesis that needs to be validated or the experiment that needs to be run, and pull work from product development in the smallest batch size to validate that hypothesis.
    - Small batches will also let you work with less capital.
    - Companies can stay lean as they grow. They don't need to become bureaucratic.

    Chapter 10: Engines of Growth:
    - New customers come from the actions of past customers. This happens in four ways:
    1) Word of mouth.
    2) As a side effect of product usage
    3) Through advertising
    4) Through repeat purchases (sticky)
    - Each of these engines has a feedback loop that leads to success.
    - One of the most expensive forms of potential waste for a startup is spending time arguing about prioritisation of new features.
    - The engines of growth help you prioritise better.
    - There are always a zillion new ideas about how to make the product better floating around, but most make a difference only at the margins. They are merely optimisations.

    - If you're using the sticky engine of growth, you will grow if the rate of new customer acquisition exceeds the churn rate. Track both.
    - The metric to focus on is the compound growth rate. If it's high, you're doing well.
    - Activation rate and revenue per customer have little impact on growth. (They're better suited to testing the value hypothesis)
    - If the churn rate and customer acquisition rate are the same, then the standard intuition to invest in sales and marketing doesn't work, because you will lose your new customers as well.
    - This is an example of vanity metrics misleading you.

    - The viral engine of growth depends primarily on people sharing it with friends, as a central feature of the app, not an afterthought.
    - The metric to focus on is the viral coefficient, which determines how quickly your app spreads. If it's 0.1, it means one of ten people using the app are referring a friend.
    - If the coefficient is less than one, the cycle of growth fizzles: if you start with 100 users, they refer 10 more, who refer one more, at which point the loop ends.
    - Exactly 1 gives you linear growth: if you gain 10 new users this week, you will gain 10 the week after that, 10 the third week, and so on. That's not good enough.
    - The coefficient needs to be > 1 for exponential growth.
    - Tiny changes in this number cause dramatic changes. If it's 1.01 per week, you end the year with twice as many users as you began.
    - If it's 1.1, you end the year with 140 times as many users as you began.
    - These are often free and ad-supported because being asked to pay comes in the way of viral growth.

    - The paid engine of growth relies on more paid sales. It's different from the sticky engine, which relies on repeat sales to the same customers.
    - If one company earns a revenue of ₹10 per user, and another earns ₹100, and they both reinvest their profit in acquiring new users, which one grows faster? A: It depends on the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). If they are proportional, like ₹2 and ₹20, both grow at the same rate.
    - For faster growth, you need to reduce CAC or increase revenue.
    - The lifetime value (LTV) of a customer is the total revenue they generate over their lifetime, minus variable costs.
    - If LTV > CPA, the company will grow.
    - If < it won't, despite one-time tricks like using invested capital or publicity stunts.

    - Don't pursue multiple engines of growth, since it's complex to model all these effects simultaneously. Startups usually focus on one.

    - Product-market fit is the moment when a startup finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate with its product.
    - A great market — a market with lots of potential customers — pulls product out of the startup. In a terrible market, the best product and best team are going to fail.
    - When you achieve product-market fit, it's exhilarating.
    - If you have to ask, you're not there yet.
    - Depending on which engine you're using, look at the appropriate metric, like viral coefficient for a viral engine. If it's 0.9 or more, you're on the verge of success.
    - The number doesn't matter as much as the direction and degree of progress.

    - Every engine eventually runs out of fuel.
    - Moving from early adopters to mainstream users is not automatic. The engine may stop and may require tremendous additional effort.
    - Be careful to not confuse growth coming from an engine already working efficiently for growth from product development. It's possible your work has no effect, in which case you can have a sudden stop.
    - To prevent this, focus on actionable metrics rather than vanity metrics, and use innovation accounting rather than traditional accounting. In other words, are you making progress on your actionable metrics? Are you running experiments and building MVPs to improve them? Are you verifying that, if you ran an experiment to reduce the churn rate, for example, that it has actually reduced the churn rate, rather than assuming that it did from increased revenue?
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