Lean Analytics

Preface

The Lean Startup movement is galvanizing a generation of entrepreneurs. It helps you identify the riskiest parts of your business plan, then finds ways to reduce those risks in a quick, iterative cycle of learning. Most of its insights boil down to one sentence: Don’t sell what you can make; make what you can sell. And that means figuring out what people want to buy.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know what people really want. Many times, they don’t know themselves. When they tell you, it’s often what they think you want to hear.^[1] What’s worse, as a founder and entrepreneur, you have strong, almost overwhelming preconceptions about how other people think, and these color your decisions in subtle and insidious ways.

Analytics can help. Measuring something makes you accountable. You’re forced to confront inconvenient truths. And you don’t spend your life and your money building something nobody wants.

Lean Startup helps you structure your progress and identify the riskiest parts of your business, then learn about them quickly so you can adapt. Lean Analytics is used to measure that progress, helping you to ask the most important questions and get clear answers quickly.

In this book we show you how to figure out your business model and your stage of growth. We’ll explain how to find the One Metric That Matters to you right now, and how to draw a line in the sand so you know when to step on the gas and when to slam on the brakes.

Lean Analytics is the dashboard for every stage of ...