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Lean Startup: A Basic Guide for Entrepreneurs


Associations typically move at a snail's pace. It comes from a good place. You want to make sure your programs deliver maximum value before they get off the ground. However, in the long run, it will waste your money over and over again.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Some associations have started developing at the radical pace of a lean startup and you should too. “The Lean Startup” is a methodology founded by Eric Ries. It's a way to run your company to maximize growth and minimize waste. It favors repeated experimentation over a long-term business plan. This way, a startup (or an association) can't fail by falling down the rabbit hole of a bad idea.



What is MVP? 

An MVP, denoted from Minimum Viable Products, is one of the most important steps to build a great product. The main goal of shipping a Minimum Viable Product should always be “putting it in front of customers to start validating your assumptions”.

As a team, you need to gather your strengths and focus on creating a shared understanding of the business vision and goals. You need to identify the problem you’re trying to solve and work out how you’ll organize to, as quickly as possible, start learning about what customers really want and how they’ll help you drive those goals.

The Doughnut Analogy

The Doughnut analogy entails a simple plain doughnut as the MVP, and a doughnut full of chocolate, sprinkles and all the goodness possible as a later iteration of the product. 

This analogy would be easy to grasp for those with teams. But to those who were on startup business, having the product role in mind, the concept of MVP would make you question what is about in this analogy. Building MVPs to validate assumptions may in fact mean that you were wrong to start with, and the next iteration isn’t even a doughnut; perhaps it’s a plain waffle?Granted, it would still be plain, and you’d again need to go through the process of validating it, but it would no longer be a doughnut.



The Lean Startup Cycle: Build-Measure-Learn

“The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere,” Ries explains. By focusing on accelerating this cycle, startups (and associations too) don't have to waste the time or money pursuing the wrong ideas.

By using a short Build-Measure-Learn cycle, you can iterate over and over again. Following the cycle allows you to improve upon what you have, while collecting feedback in real-time—or scrap what you have entirely and start something new without wasting too many resources. Applying this cycle to your association will give you the room and resources to take bigger risks, and reap bigger rewards.



Build Your Association's Product

Building the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the first step in the cycle. LEANSTACK, a collection of tools that assist lean startups, defines an MVP as “the smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value.”

According to lean startup expert Henrik Kniberg, that means, that if your customers need a way to get around, you don't build them a car first. You start with a skateboard (the Minimum Viable Product), get their feedback, and iterate from there.
Henrik describes two different approaches that share the same vision: a car. Now if the problem you’re trying to solve is transportation, would you, as a customer, go anywhere with a tire? Definitely not with a tire, but certainly with a skateboard.Henrik defends the agile, incremental way of delivering products but states that every iteration should be a usable/testable product. Obviously, a skateboard is far from being a car, but at least you have your customers trying your product much earlier in the process and feeding back so you can start learning and thinking about the next iteration.

You shouldn’t be spending a lot of time looking at design or making it technically great—you don’t want to make it perfect to begin with, but instead you should build just enough to validate your business hypotheses. 

As an association, you might not think you're creating a product. But you're trying to create something that delivers value - just like a lean startup is trying to give value to their customers. Even though your product might not be tangible, or for sale on the open market, it's still a product. Career networking events provide the connections you need to get ahead, professional development sessions provide opportunities to expand your career, humanitarian initiatives provide a service to those in need.


Measure if Your Association's Product Is Working

The measurement process, the second part of the Build-Measure-Learn cycle, tests the effectiveness of your MVP. Your MVP is a hypothesis. You think your customers or members need something and the measurement step analyzes whether or not that hypothesis is correct.

Once you have an MVP it's easy to get excited about what you've created and experience confirmation bias, but rigorous analysis will prevent your team from going down the rabbit hole of executing a program without a good reason. In the measurement step, you collect qualitative and quantitative data about your initiatives.

For an association, that could be a number of opened emails for your marketing initiative, attendees at your networking event, or member feedback for a service program.


Learn Whether to Expand or Cut Your Product...

The third stage of the cycle, learning, is when you implement your findings. No matter what happens—whether you trash or expand your Minimum Viable Product. You've taken a step forward in knowing what your members need. Even if your initiative was a complete failure, remember that it's better to fail fast and get right back up again. When your MVP fails, it fails without wasting too many resources. And when it succeeds, you've got the feedback to know what to do better next time.

The lean startup techniques to grow association are a cycle, which is exactly why they work. The cyclical nature of the lean startup method should be exciting rather than be discouraging. At the beginning of every cycle, you've got a low-risk opportunity to revolutionize your association.

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