Brant Cooper - The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development

Submitted by michaelmeyers
on Sat, 12/17/2011 - 22:30

Last night I attended a talk by Brant Cooper, author of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development co-hosted by Tech@NYU and Lean Startup Machine. If you are involved in product or software development, you should be intimately familiar with the Lean Startup principles - even if you aren't a startup; Lean Startup is a movement that is transforming how products are built, launched, and improved. 

"The Lean startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business... it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do.  I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question 'How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?"
- Tim O'Reilly

Lean Startup is not a formula, it's a framework that encourages a culture of experimentation - building, testing, and measuring. Entrepreneurship is an art and there is no formula for success. You have to make your own judgment calls and decisions, and while there aren't always clear answers to such difficult problems, the Lean Startup principles will increase your chances of success.  Brant's book extends on the Lean Startup concept by adding measurement and the use of analytics to the iterative Lean Startup process. 

What I enjoyed most about his talk is that Brad had a lot of great practical examples - success stories and failures, from companies and teams that are actively using the Lean Startup methodology. Another great aspect of the talk was that Brad did a great job dispelling a lot of misconceptions about the Lean Startup method. For example, Lean Startup isn't about or just for small companies, the size of your company is irrelevant to the framework. It's also not just for early stage startups - more mature companies like TheLadders.com and Meetup.com are experimenting with related ideas (i.e. Lean UX) and seeing success with cross-functional teams (product, marketing, design, development, etc.) coming up with hypotheses and testing solutions to problems together in an iterative fashion. 

Brant is a great speaker - very engaging, and dynamic. I highly recommend you pick up his book and go out and see him if you've got the chance. Slides from his presentations are available on SlideShare.com.

Interested in learning more about Lean Startups? In addition to his book (which according to the author has sold around 12-13,000 copies thus far) Brant highlighted a ton of great resources during his talk:

  Tools:

  Books:

  Blogs: 

  Twitter:

 

Tags: 
Brant Cooper
Tech@NYU
Lean Startup Machine
Entrepreneurship
Lean Startup
Startups
Customer Development

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