The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) / quote 13 of 19
Startups need a new definition of value
Yet those methods had led me down a road in which the majority of my team’s efforts were wasted. Why? The answer came to me slowly over the subsequent years. Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste. In a manufacturing business, customers don’t care how the product is assembled, only that it works correctly. But in a startup, who the customer is and what the customer might find valuable are unknown, part of the very uncertainty that is an essential part of the definition of a startup. I realized that as a startup, we needed a new definition of value. The real progress we had made at IMVU was what we had learned over those first months about what creates value for customers.