lystn

Entrepreneurs can spend years working on the wrong thing because they failed to test their assumptions along the way. We look for positive indicators when entering a new relationship, or evaluating a new job opportunity, so why do many of us skip this step when starting a new business? Because starting a business is a lot like having a baby, and when you're so attached to something it can be difficult to admit when it isn't working.Lean startup, design thinking, and agile development are just a few principles that have been developed to address this very issue, and to underscore the importance of validating a business concept before investing resources into developing it. In this episode we walk you through how we were able to test completely different types of business ideas before spending any time developing the actual product. We also highlight stories from the early days of Airbnb and Uber, proving how any smart entrepreneur can use very little resources to validate or invalidate an idea, even if that idea requires a lot of capital to be fully developed. We also tell stories from the founders of Netflix and Kayak, and how they were focused on constant communication with their customers, even after gaining success, to continue to iterate on their business model, building sustainable innovative enterprises along the way. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.