Real visionaries are internally driven to make big change. They are committed to disruption. They have an idea, but it is secondary to the change they hope to make. They make mistakes, are wrong—fail—but relentlessly pursue their ambition.

There is no blueprint for true, black-swan, radical, big disruption. Too many variables are involved. Previous economic, technological, and societal transformations create platform layers like Earth ecosystems that drive new innovation and make possible big wins. In our opinion, the best one can do is position oneself for such an occurrence through unrelenting persistence and nonstop experimentation.

Despite what you might think, a graveyard of equally visionary individuals surrounds the well-known entrepreneurial icons of our day.

The value-creation economy is the result of technological and cultural transformations. The uncertainty and volatility in the marketplace mean that companies not only must innovate, but must learn to move faster and be closer to their customers simply to compete in existing markets.

Whether hoping to change the world, change your company, or change the circumstances of your daily life, the time is ripe.

Despite the cries of a lack of innovation in the world, major industries are being disrupted at an increasing rate. Regardless of whether you want to be labeled a visionary, lean startup is a methodology that can help you not only to find a place in the world, but to thrive. Lean startup is a process for identifying and eliminating business-model bottlenecks.

Like an engineer who must locate and eliminate bugs and other inefficiencies on the path toward delivering a high-performing product, entrepreneurs can view their startup endeavor as a series of bottlenecks inhibiting growth.

The question is: How will you align your organization and establish the culture and processes necessary to actively, relentlessly seek out and eliminate your bottlenecks? The lure of acting for acting’s sake is strong. “Just do it” might be a clarion call to merely be busy, depending on what “it” is.

Broadly speaking, the major choke points in building a new business are at the idea stage, releasing the minimum viable product (MVP), finding product–market fit, establishing revenue-positive customer acquisition, and then scaling up.

At the idea stage, through interacting with customers and running experiments, you validate that you have the right customer profiles and understand the problems they face.

At the MVP stage, you iterate on the product, run experiments on functionality, perform usability testing, and try to nail the core value proposition for the market segment. You continue to interact with customers to test that you are building the right product, learning more about their problems and learning how you will market, sell, and deliver your value to them.

Product–market fit is a continuation of experimenting on the correct messaging, marketing, selling, and tailoring of the product to find a large market of Passionate customers.

In the customer acquisition stage, you’re validating the conversion funnel, testing acquisition channels, and measuring return to ensure that you have a functioning business model.

The final stage is learning how to get out of the way. To scale, organizations must adapt. They must learn how to execute efficiently, while continuously learning and continuously improving.

But, of course, the devil is in the details.

The details are organized by the 3 Es: empathy, experiments, and evidence.

Your competitive advantage is your ability to glean customer insights, and then build a long-term relationship with those customers, based on providing real value.

Startups spend years iterating on product and market segments trying to find the fit that propels them into product–market fit nirvana—a nirvana that is often short-lived. Even after finding product–market fit, you must continue to learn, iterate, and discover new ways to disrupt again.

The new reality considers that to dominate like oligopolies of old, you must continually improve known processes while learning new ones, continually reiterate new products or existing product functionality, and continually discover new market segments where you can provide value.

To build a successful business, you must learn several things:

• The problem or passion to address.
• The solution to provide.
• For whom to provide it, segment by segment.
• How to market to the segment.
• How to sell to the segment.
• How to turn a customer into an advocate.
• How to scale a segment.
• How to innovate again.

The idea is to evolve from lean startup to lean enterprise as you validate the answer to each question. In other words, you move from learning to executing.

The point is to embrace the I don’t know in your unrelenting pursuit of change. Whether you seek to change your own life, change your community, or change the world, and whether you’re seeking to support your family, 10 employees, or thousands, you have to start small to be big. The lean startup is a language to describe how to create value as quickly as possible, to leverage deep knowledge of your customers, to discover your driving force, and to scale quickly once you’ve figured it out.

Building a lean startup, whether in a true startup or transforming the culture of a large enterprise, is difficult. It’s a long journey. Why should you undertake such an effort?

Because it’s fun, rewarding, and challenging. It’s empowering. Your company needs to do it. The world needs you to do it!

WORK TO DO

For all those who want a step-by-step, bulletproof blueprint plan for success, here it is. Treasure it. Hold it close. This is how to become a visionary.

Job 1: Is There a Solvable Problem?

• Leave the comfort of your home and go find one person who is emotional about the pain or passion you are addressing.
• If you are a business-to-consumer (B2C) play, create a customer advisory board with 10 customers.
• If you are a business-to-business (B2B) play, find five customers to form your advisory board.
• If you are creating a multisided marketplace, serve all sides.
• Can you see a pattern emerge in your customers? How are they similar? How do they differ?

Job 2: Is the Solution Tenable?

• Do your customer advisory members like your solution?
• If necessary, fill out your team of 10 (customer advisory board) with new blood if some are not on board with your solution.
• Are any patterns emerging about customer behavior or other characteristics?

Job 3: Solution Discussions

• Engage your customer advisory board during product development.
• Are you on the right track?
• Is the customer on the right platform?
• Perform usability testing with competitive products.
• Conduct a high hurdle experiment. (See AppFog case study in Chapter 5.)
• If customer responses are lukewarm or uninterested:
  • Change the solution.
  • Change the segment (start over).

Job 4: Viability Testing

• What is the biggest uncertainty about your business model? Run purpose-built tests to move the unknown into the known:
  • Landing page
  • Concierge
  • Wizard of Oz
  • Prototypes
  • Wireframes, mockups, similar products
  • Test apps
• If you lose members of the customer advisory board, go find more!

Job 5: Minimum Viable Product

• Validate that customers behave the way you think they will.
• Iterate.
• Develop discrete functionality that addresses the pain or passion.
• Iterate.
• Validate through customer interaction with the product.
• Iterate.
• Perform usability testing.
• Iterate.
• If you lose members of the customer advisory board, refill.

Job 6: Post-MVP

• As you learn, split off execution:
  • Learn “activated”; build toward Satisfied.
  • Learn Satisfied; build toward Passionate.
  • Build toward “whole product.”
• Developers should have the guts not to develop.
• If customer advisory board members are not passionate, refill.
• What patterns in your customers do you see?
• Double the size of your customer advisory board.
• Learn what makes customers Passionate; increase speed of customer acquisition.
• Create cross-functional teams charged with achieving specific objectives based on data that moves the needle of the business.

Job 7: Funnel Vision

• Use insights from your customer advisory board to:
  • Validate where your customer segment hangs out.
  • Validate that you can reach them.
  • Validate what messaging and positioning resonate.
  • Validate what makes customers trust you.
  • Validate what convinces customers to buy.
• Resegment existing customers based on a combination of:
  • Pain
  • Origin
  • Value (revenue)
  • Funnel
  • Product usage patterns

Job 8: Minimum Viable Business

• Lifetime value > cost of acquisition.
• Velocity: average revenue per user versus cost of acquisition.
• Word of mouth: viral coefficient.
• Acquisition channel viability.
• Discovery of shadow force.

Job 9: Long-Term Growth

• Execution + continuous improvement + continuous learning.
• Continuous improvement of shadow force.
• Resell, cross-sell, up-sell.
• New products for existing customer segments.
• Existing products for new customer segments.
• Disruption: new products, new customer segments.