Lean AI

Foreword

What you have in front of you is not just one book, but two. It’s a comprehensive look at the elements of building and scaling a successful startup, written with clarity by someone with deep experience. It’s also a guide to the future of what that process will look like as companies add more and more artificial intelligence and automation to all of their practices—a transformation that has already begun and will evolve quickly in the coming years.

These two aspects of Lean AI work together for a number of reasons, but the most crucial one is that no matter what new technologies come along, the basic goals of growth teams aren’t going to change. They’ll remain the acquisition, retention, and monetization of customers. Some portions of this book cover how that process works, including discussions and examples of key metrics—like customer acquisition cost, retention rate, customer lifetime value, return on advertising spending, and conversion rate—and a deep dive into the elements that make up the optimal growth stack.

What will change going forward is how growth teams achieve their goals. This is where the other parts of the book come in, like the fundamentals of AI, its relationship to automation, what a basic framework looks like, and how to approach the decision about whether to build or buy the solution that fits your organization. It’s optimistic while also being realistic, and it doesn’t shy away from the risks and challenges inherent in adopting this new way of ...