Eric Ries is a renowned entrepreneur famous for IMVU—an online virtual world, something we’d refer to as the metaverse today.

In The Lean Startup, he employs a scientific approach to analysing entrepreneurship, highlighting numerous successful examples. And as a consultant himself, he had a ton of those examples—he demonstrated the efficacy of adhering to certain constraints and instructions while building a product (mostly from scratch) time and again. With case studies from companies like Dropbox and Intuit while in their early days—there was a lot to learn.

Eric Ries also stresses a core component of The Lean Startup model: the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. This loop thrives when there is a Minimum Viable Product; this helps a startup learn about its customers and intended market as quickly as possible.

On learning—another core component of the Lean Startup model is Validated Learning. The idea of Validated Learning is to reinvent the learning process in startups; entrepreneurs explore seemingly uncertain territories in product development. When they do this, they can find the right nuts to lose/tie to tune the startup engine.

The right nuts, in many cases, cannot be communicated by a customer. As such, the goal of an entrepreneur is to bridge the startup’s vision with something customers would actually accept. Contrary to popular opinion, the goal isn’t to tell customers what they ought to want, and it is not to ask them what they think they want.

Long story short, this book has been pivotal in understanding how to build a successful business from the ground up, learn from customer interactions, sustain business growth, and more. Great read!