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INSIDE This Issue
The ‘20s Are Back! page 1
Are New Year’s Resolutions a Waste of Time? Meet KevinWellfare, INSURICA VP of Agency Development page 2 Is Your Sexual Harassment Training From 1981? Sudoku page 3
Optimize Your Business With Eric Ries page 4
JUMP-START YOUR BUSINESS With Eric Ries’ ‘The Lean Startup’
registered users, downloads, and raw page views.” Anyone can generate immediate hype for a product, but it’s another thing to maintain constant engagement and experience growth of consumer interest. With a good MVP and continued improvement of your service or product, your business will see that growth and also retain customers. Ries’ guidance does not end with MVPs and vanity metrics; here are some other key takeaways that will keep you on the lean startup path when it’s most daunting.
After reading just a few pages, it’s easy to see why everyone raves about Eric Ries’ invaluable manual “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.” Ries is a fantastic writer, but two aspects of his writing style separate him from the pack of typical business writers and keep you turning pages: He is intellectually honest and cheerful about his business insights. Eric takes a common notion in business — “fail fast, succeed fast” — and breaks it down into a system that works for businesses and keeps consumers happy. “The Lean Startup” recommends the use of a minimum viable product, or MVP, to gauge demand before you embark on major product development. Forbes describes an MVP as “a product with only a basic set of features, enough to capture the attention of early adopters and make your solution unique.” If you jump into building the best product possible before measuring what your consumers actually need, you risk wasting a lot of time. Market research can tell you a lot, but MVPs can tell you even more. Plus, if your initial rollout is successful, you can respond quickly to consumer feedback and tailor your final product to specific needs. Throughout his book, Ries emphasizes the importance of consumer feedback for the success of your business, but he also warns against putting any real value in vanity metrics, which TechCrunch describes as data points, “like
“It’s the boring stuff that matters most.”
“Remember if we’re building something that nobody wants, it doesn’t much matter if we’re doing it on time and on budget.”
“Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.” In the epilogue, Eric’s intellectual honesty shines; he readily admits that some readers may take his theories as a means to justify their past business actions. But he encourages everyone to use his book instead as a guide for what they will do next in their entrepreneurial journey.
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