Revisited: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
This story was originally published on October 29th, 2013 as part of the blog on my first professional website that was updated from 2009 to 2015. It was written during my journey from enthusiast at tech events, to co-founder of Fuse Accelerator, to working at the fastest growing tech company in Australia. This post was salvaged in the hope that posterity might glean insight — or at least a knowing scoff — to the perspectives and raw idealism it takes to keep moving forward, with additional commentary on this theory in hindsight.
Around here, we’re used to the idea that science is business, but rarely do we think that business can be a science. The Lean Startup is about turning business activity into an active experiment-driven science, focused on avoiding waste by building products people actually want to use.
A lot has been written about the ideas across the web, so much that even the word “Lean” has that over-saturated ring of alienation. However, upon reading the source material, rather than the echoing of blogs, I can say that Lean Startup does present a lot of potent ideas. They are simple to understand, sometimes difficult to embrace, and perhaps the potent change agent the culture of business needs to move from management to science.
