The Lean StartUp - 4 Experiment

As already stated, a startup should seek validated learning, which mainly comes from experiments. A proper experiment is aligned with the scientific notion that 'if you cannot fail, you cannot learn'. In order to experiment properly, the author emphasises that the most reliable data about consumer demand can be found by analysing real customer behavior, not asking hypothetical questions. 

Subsequently, it is advised by the author that for someone to achieve long-term positive change, experimenting early is key. He uses the example of a woman working at Hewlett-Packard(HP), who as an entrepreneur within a large company, experimented to find why more people don't take advantage of the company guidelines to take up company time volunteering. She was classified as an entrepreneur because she had a lot of untested assumptions that could only be answered by experimenting to find out the cause of the problem. 

In this scenario, the first step to tackle the experiment, according to Ries, would be to 'break down the grand vision into its component parts.' For instance, the woman working for HP, Caroline, could create a minimum viable product that is aligned with her vision, something which would show the employees at HP that volunteering can really benefit the community. Therefore, applying this information with knowledge and principles given in previous Chapters on feedback, if the people who have tried the minimum viable product from Caroline do not volunteer again, she should ask them for feedback. It would be time to pivot and change her strategy in order to make the product better for people to sign up for volunteering. That change of strategy could be about anything from making volunteering more enjoyable or more meaningful.

Additionally, it is also advisable that an experiment should ask the following 4 questions:

1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?

2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?

3. Would they buy it from us?

4.Can we build a solution for that problem?

In fact, Cook, the vice president of products for Kodak Gallery's, rightly identified that "Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem.

Even government agencies can be considered startups. Such an example is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) which was established by the Obama Administration to protect consumers from fraudulent loans. This is considered a startup by Ries because it found innovative solutions to problems when faced with extreme uncertainty.