Eric Ries Quotes

Don’t be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

Reading is good, action is better.

The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.

Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.

A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.

If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

New Customers come from the action of past customers

We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.

Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.

Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.

The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.

All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.

Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.

If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up

The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.

A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty

Entrepreneurs can't forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan - and on the brink of success.

If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?

The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.

A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.

If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed - at seeing what happens - but won't necessarily gain validated learning - If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.

At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.

At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.