Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Summary)
You've spent months perfecting a 50-page business plan, detailing your product, market, and five-year financial projections. Ash Maurya's advice? Throw it in the trash. Your 'Plan A' is a fantasy built on a pile of untested guesses, and the only thing that matters is systematically proving those guesses wrong before you run out of time and money.
Fall in Love with the Problem, Not Your Solution
The number one cause of startup failure is building something nobody wants. To avoid this, you must first validate that you are solving a 'must-have' problem for a specific group of customers before you write a single line of code.
Before building his product, Maurya conducted dozens of 'Problem Interviews.' He didn't pitch his idea or ask 'Would you use this?' Instead, he used a simple script to get potential customers to tell stories about their current workflow, their biggest pains, and how they currently solve the problem. This validated the problem's existence and severity, completely independent of his proposed solution.
Ditch the Business Plan for a 1-Page Lean Canvas
Traditional business plans are static, take too long to write, and are rarely read. The Lean Canvas is a one-page, dynamic business model snapshot that outlines your most critical assumptions and is designed for rapid iteration and communication.
The Lean Canvas intentionally forces you to fill out the 'Problem' and 'Customer Segments' boxes before the 'Solution' box. This simple structural change forces founders to prioritize their biggest risks first: are there real customers with a real problem? This is a stark contrast to a business plan that often starts with the solution as a given.
Your Product Isn't the Product—Your Business Model Is
Founders often obsess over features, but the product is just one component. The real product you're building is a working, scalable business model. The goal isn't just to build a cool app, but to build a repeatable engine for acquiring and retaining paying customers.
Dropbox didn't just succeed because of its file-syncing technology. Its success came from perfecting a business model with a viral loop. By offering users more free storage for referring friends, they turned their user base into a free sales force. This customer acquisition machine was just as important as the code itself.
Find Your Riskiest Assumption and Test It
A startup is a set of hypotheses. The lean method is about identifying the single riskiest assumption at any given time and then devising the cheapest, fastest experiment possible to test it. This process of systematic de-risking is the core of progress.
When Zappos started, their riskiest assumption wasn't 'Can we build an e-commerce site?' It was 'Will people buy shoes online without trying them on?' To test this, founder Nick Swinmurn didn't build a warehouse. He went to local shoe stores, took photos, and posted them online. When an order came in, he bought the shoes at retail and shipped them himself. This was a low-cost, high-learning experiment that validated the core of his business.
