How I Pressure-Test a Product Idea Before Building Anything
AI can build your prototype in a weekend. So do you still need validation? I already ran the control group on myself. First post in Running Lean: AI Edition.
Ash Maurya · Blog
Essays on startups, business models, and continuous innovation by Ash Maurya, creator of Lean Canvas and author of Running Lean. 16 years of build-in-public notes.
Latest posts
Welcome to the Founder Economy
The Creator Economy turned audiences into income. The Founder Economy turns domain expertise into companies.
Why I Build for Wants, Not Needs
Features are needs and outcomes are wants, and customers care far more about their wants. How that one distinction shaped an entire MVP.
Why I Stopped Building an AI Coaching Tool
Two months of problem discovery interviews revealed that founders were not starving for frameworks. They were drowning in tools with amnesia.
How I Signed 209 Customers Before Building the Product
The Demo-Sell-Build campaign from the inside: a concierge MVP, a demo of software that did not exist yet, and 40 days from zero to 209 customers.
Why I Plan in 90-Day Cycles
Your 3-year goal is too far away to drive daily decisions, and your task list does not add up to a strategy. The missing middle between them is a 90-day cycle.
Why I Stress Test Business Models Before Talking to Customers
An advisor once killed my business model in five minutes, nine months too late. Now I run that conversation first, across seven dimensions, before any customer hears the idea.
Why I Waited Three Years to Build an AI Co-Founder
ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and I spent three years saying no. What changed my mind was not a better oracle. It was a loop.
What Startup Founders Get Wrong About Competition
When asked about competition, startup founders typically fall into two camps.
The Myth of the Perfect Plan A
Most entrepreneurs start with a strong initial vision and a Plan A for realizing that vision. Unfortunately, most Plan A's don't work.
When and How to Set Pricing for Your Product
Pricing is one of the riskiest assumptions on the Lean Canvas (Revenue Stream).
What is the Right Sizing for Early Adopters?
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Uncovering the Right Minimum Feature Set for Your Minimum Valuable Product (MVP)
Contrary to popular belief, an MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) is not a quick and dirty solution you throw over the fence at customers. It has to deliver value right out of the gate.
Traction is the Goal. Everything Else is Distraction.
What is the one thing that both investors and entrepreneurs care about? It’s growth or traction.
The Counterintuitive Science of Closing B2B Sales
As all B2B sales meetings went online during the pandemic, Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna, authors of _The Jolt...
The Art of Experiment Design
You run an experiment every time you release a new feature, run a marketing campaign or try a new sales method.
Stop Wasting Time on Unviable Business Ideas
Too many entrepreneurs prematurely rush to launch their product, join an incubator/accelerator, or hit the pitching circuit only to realize months (or years) later that they were chasing too small ...
Start with Premium Before Freemium
The thinking goes that when launching a new product, it’s often a good idea to lower friction by giving away your product for free so you can 1️⃣ Learn from users 2️⃣ Get them to try before ...
Say No to Product Roadmaps
Entrepreneurs need to be able to simultaneously pitch a big long-term vision while staying grounded in short-term actions to move their vision forward.
Raise Your Startup's Odds of Success By Up to 8x
Most founders set Product/Market Fit as their first significant milestone. The problem is that getting to product/market fit typically takes two years (for most products), and 80% of products never...
Prospecting Recipes for Conducting Problem Discovery Interviews
How do you get customers to openly talk to you during problem discovery interviews if you’re “not allowed” to pitch your solution? This is the top question I get from founders on conducting cu...
How to Use Business Model Patterns to Formulate a Starting Validation Strategy
Patterns are everywhere. We use patterns in architecture, design, software, chess, and cooking.
How To Turn Your Limiting Constraints Into Seeds For Breakthrough Innovation
I spent the first couple of years as a solo founder wishing for more of everything. More time, more people, and more money so I could build more features and get more customers.
How to Systematically Uncover Big Problems Worth Solving
Like a good magic trick, most big ideas seem obvious in hindsight because they solved a customer struggle (or problem), that was seemingly sitting in plain view. The challenge is that we live our l...
How to Systematically Prioritize and Tackle the Riskiest Assumptions in Your Business Model
When launching a new product under extreme uncertainty, it’s critical to prioritize tackling your riskiest assumptions first. While a simple enough concept to grasp, it’s ironically quite challengi...
How to Pitch Pricing Without Getting Butterflies in your Stomach
If you’re a product-oriented founder like me, you probably get a little nervous when you get to the pricing conversation during a product pitch. You’d rather defer this conversation to later (like ...
How to Formulate Your Unfair Advantage Strategy with a Lean Canvas
Communicating defensibility against copycats and competition is critical when pitching your business model to investors and key stakeholders.
How to Deliver an Elevator Pitch That Gets Anyone to Ask for More
The elevator pitch is one of four foundational pitches every founder should master.
Crafting Attention-Worthy Unique Value Propositions
The first battle for any product is getting noticed by customers.
Balancing the Conflicting Pulls on Time in a Startup
Time, like any resource, has multiple pulls. In a startup, there is a basic pull for activities outside and inside the building.
A Systematic Roadmap to Product/Market Fit
Getting to product/market fit is considered the most significant milestone for a startup. This is often described as the inflection point in the hockey-stick curve when traction takes off.
A Blueprint for Understanding How People Buy Anything
There is no such thing as an impulse purchase. Behind every purchase is a string of causal events and forces.
3 Steps for Running More Successful Pilots
Ever had a customer go cold after a sizzling start? You’ve just closed a big customer and can taste problem/solution fit. They’ve agr...
3 Common Customer Interviewing Mistakes
At the early stages of a product, before problem/solution fit, customer interviews are the best (and fastest) way to learn from customers....
Why Lean Canvas versus Business Model Canvas
I often get asked why I created a different adaptation from the original Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder. Lately, this question has bubbled up in frequency which is why I decided to take ...
What is a Lean Canvas?
A Lean Canvas is a 1-page business modeling tool that helps you deconstruct an idea into key assumptions or beliefs.
The Bootstrapping Startup Operating System
Bootstrapping an idea is more relevant today than ever, but the rules have changed.
The Just Start Manifesto
While we may look different and speak different languages, the world is flatter than it’s ever been. We are living through a global entrepreneurial renaissance that can be witnessed through the wor...
What is Continuous Innovation?
As products have gone from being delivered in a box to being delivered over the Internet, there’s been a dramatic shift in how customers consume, demand, and interact with products.
A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs
Both of them studied at the same university and got good grades, and after graduation, both worked at a high-tech startup where they quickly grew into key roles. After a few years, they both got hi...
The Art of the Demo
Me: You seem to have identified a big-enough customer problem that you have a plausible solution to (feasible)… What’s keeping you from closing customers?
Position Against Your True Competition to Win the Customer
Most entrepreneurs never bring up their true competition during a product pitch because either they
Nailing Release 1.0
I recently declared that I’m moving away from MVP in favor of:
Moving beyond MVP
After 14 years, I'm abandoning the MVP.
Forget Personas
If you were a marketer at a mattress company, when is the best time to run an infomercial?
Stop Trying To Validate Problems
When asked to do the smallest thing to learn from customers, the first instinct of many founders is to run a survey.
3 Hacks to Mastering Any Skill Quickly
Cultivating a learning mindset is a key skill in any field.
Slow Down to Go Fast
Most entrepreneurs are understandably in a rush to get to the right side of the hockey-stick curve (aka scaling).
Moved to Substack
Moved to LEANFoundry.com I’ve moved this blog to https://leanfoundry.com/articles. I’m still a huge fan of the writing experience at Medium. Not a fan of their business model. If you’d like to follow my work, check out: https://leanfoundry.com Thanks for reading! Ash
Extending the Job Story to a Customer Forces Story
Customer Forces Stories are a powerful way of summarizing customer conversations during your search for problem/solution fit.