# Lean methodology - The Lean Methodology, created by Eric Ries and detailed in his book “The Lean Startup: How today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses”, is a methodology for startups to validate a business model around a product or service. The idea behind the framework described by Eric is a build-measure-learn cycle capable of progressively reducing the startup’s risk by validating core hypothesis of the product or service. (RIES, 2011) - This validation work by cutting the long-term plan into small cycles, this increases the speed of the validation and also the route-changes that are required for any startup to work (MAURYA 2012). - Ries also removes the stigma of entrepreneurship being limited to the activity of creating new companies. According to him, a startup is a human institution that tries to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This could happen both inside and outside companies and managed by any kind of person. Entrepreneur, according to him, is the person that manages this effort, regardless of his background or current situation. - According to Ries, a experiment is a product, launched through an MVP (minimum viable product) and with the objective to harvest metrics and analyse them in order to gain knowledge and validate (or invalidate) hypothesis - The minimum viable product is a prototype that translates the concept of the full product but removing the characteristics and features that are not core to the usability. The MVP changes depending on the hypothesis that you want to validate, the most important part is to keep it lean and test one thing at a time, in order to reduce co-variation effects - In the book, Ries gives as an example the dropbox case, that filmed a video to illustrate the concept and this was their first MVP - In the book it’s also defined the concept of the “Concierge MVP”, which is a non-scalable business model, often done via under-the-curtain services, to maximize the learning from the customers and their willings. For example, in a Food startup that recommends meals for people based on their mood and on previous choices, instead of doing it by complex algorithms, the founders themselves did the recommendations, to learn how customers behave and respond to the initial value proposition. - After launching the MVP, the objective is to collect metrics in order to validate product changes and the premisses taken. In the book, Ries defines the so-called “Vanity Metrics”, which are numbers that tends to grow but even though they are growing they don’t show product improvements. For example, when you increase the marketing spend the number of customers turn into a vanity metric, as it’s obviously going to increase, and the customer conversion or paying customer conversion is the proper innovation metric