Common Idioms

2 minute read

CAUTION: Some use these as their Motto, but you have to understand the real meaning behind it, when to use it, and when not to use it.

Fake it till you make it

  • “Act as if you already have it”
  • When things can go bad, the Theranos Case

Do things that don’t scale

  • Do not create software for eve thing in the beginning. Humans can act as your software until you have enough validation and data that you know exactly what to build.
  • Do things that don’t scale by Paul Graham (founder at YCombinator)

There’s a more extreme variant where you don’t just use your software, but are your software. When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. This lets you launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the loop, you’ll know exactly what to build because you’ll have muscle memory from doing it yourself. Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be a little frightening to be solving users’ problems in a way that wasn’t yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn’t yet solve anyone’s problems.

Move fast and break things

  • Mark Zuckerberg said it in an interview with Business Insider in 2009
  • He also said, “Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough”
  • Facebook used this a lot until 2014
  • This is very true when you are creating a new product because you want to learn fast and the best way to do that is to ship fast and learn from it. If you pay attention to every detail in the beginning you won’t be focusing on the real end game which is the validation of your hypothesis (not only in the Discovery process but also in real life)

References

 The Power of Habit - by Charles Duhigg
Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
The Hard Thing About the Hard Things - by Ben Horowitz
Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Blitzscaling - by Reid Hoffman (founder of Linkedin)
The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
Running Lean - by Ash Maurya
Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
Original Version Launch Year: 2010
Key takeaways
  • Systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success.
  • 3 Principles: Document Plan A (your initial plan), Identify the Riskiest Aspects of your Plan, Systematically Test your Plan
  • 3 Stages of Startup Growth: PROBLEM/SOLUTION FIT, PRODUCT/MARKET FIT, SCALE
  • Lean Canvas: focuses on addressing broad customer problems and solutions and delivering them to customer segments through a unique value proposition.
    		•
    		The Lean Startup - by Eric Ries
    How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
    Original Version Launch Year: 2008
    Key takeaways
  • Is about maximizing learning and minimizing waste in the innovation process; it combines Customer Development, Agile software development methods and Toyota’s Lean practices.
  • Lesn Startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning.
  • MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
  • Continuous Deployment
  • Split Testing (A/B Testing)
  • Actionable Metrics
  • Pivot
  • Build-Measure-Learn
    		•
    		Business Model Generation - by Alexander Osterwalder
    A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
    Original Version Launch Year: 2008
    Key takeaways
  • Business Model Canvas - business model design template, that help describe its business model.
    		•
    		The Four Steps to the Epiphany - by Steve Blank
    Successful Strategies for Products that Win
    Original Version Launch Year: 2005
    Key takeaways
  • Customer Feedback is a framework for incorporating customers’ inputs into your product development cycle.
  • Customer Development Methodology consists of 4 steps
  • (1) Customer Discovery: tests hypotheses about the nature of the problem, interest in the product or service solution, and business viability.
  • (2) Customer Validation: tests the business viability through customer purchases and in the process creates a 'sales road map', a proven and repeatable sales process. Customer discovery and customer validation corroborate the business model.
  • (3) Customer Creation: executes the business plan by scaling through customer acquisition, creating user demand, and directing it toward the company's sales channels.
  • (4) Customer Building: formalizes and standardizes company departments and operations.
  • Customer Discovery Steps
    		•