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How Lean Startup Principles Shaped My Business

September 26, 2021
By James Gussie

Entrepreneurship is a constantly evolving process of trial and error. In today’s world, it’s not enough to have a business idea that sounds good on paper. You need to be able to deliver value in order for your idea to succeed.

Lean Startup principles are a set of business principles that have been used by many companies to create successful startups. The lean startup example is a company that has taken the lean startup principles and applied them in order to make their business successful.

The term “lean startup” is often used in entrepreneurial discussions. I’ve attended numerous panel talks on the subject, had it taught to me in a business school classroom, and read a book on the subject. Despite all of this instruction, I frequently questioned whether the ideas were simply a ruse—until it came time to start my own company.

The principles of lean startups may be boiled down to a few simple concepts:

1. Deploy resources with care, testing out the assumptions that underpin your business model one step at a time.
2. Get feedback from customers as soon as feasible.
3. As soon as feasible, revise your product or service.

The confluence of these concepts has shifted the focus of my company, PopInShop, an online platform that links young designers and retail brands with independent boutiques throughout the country, in the past year. As a consequence of putting up pop-up shops or trunk shows inside existing brick and mortar stores that are a suitable match for their product, companies may get visibility in new areas, while store owners gain a source for donated goods to attract new consumers and engage current ones.

When I initially launched PopInShop, I described it as a platform for brands and boutiques, comparing it to “AirBnB for retail.” However, after adhering to lean startup principles and learning from my first clients, I now market PopInShop as an online dating service for businesses and boutiques, describing it as “eHarmony for retail.” It’s a little distinction that’s had a big impact on our product development and business strategy.

Using the lean startup approach, here is how my company progressed from the “concept phase” to our present product.

Table of Contents

Using resources as efficiently as possible

The gradual use of resources, in my view, is the most organic lean startup concept to apply. We didn’t have an option in this issue, like many other businesses, since funding for PopInShop came in slowly. First, I won a $1,000 award in a pitch competition. We were then awarded a $4,000 grant. Finally, a local investment organization provided us with a modest amount of initial money.

Because each of these milestones occurred a few months apart, we never had enough money to employ a developer and build our fully-imagined retail platform. Instead, at each stage, we posed ourselves a lean startup question: How can we utilize this money to go in front of our consumers and re-evaluate and modify our product?

Getting feedback from customers

Because our clients are retail brands and shops, the first step was to create a simple version of our website to reach out to them. This was referred to as a minimal viable product, or MVP, in lean startup jargon. We created a visually appealing landing page as well as a straightforward registration procedure. We wanted to know whether brands would join up for our services and pay us for the things we intended to provide.

We could have sent out surveys, but the objective of a lean company is to get as near to a genuine market reaction as possible. So we contacted 100 companies, presenting ourselves as the company we want to become. Fortunately, almost half of the people were willing to give us a chance. Because the alternatives in the market were worse than we expected, brands were more needy for our service than we had anticipated.

We utilized this data in our grant application, and when the second round of funding arrived, we asked ourselves, “How can we use this money to gather consumer feedback?” We knew how brands reacted to PopInShop, but boutiques were cautious of our lack of experience.

We chose to utilize our grant money to pay businesses in advance for floor space. This was the fastest method to establish trust for future sign-ups while also gathering useful information about the in-store experience. We divided corners, shelves, and display space at participating shops, then sourced goods from the businesses we had reached out to in our first outreach effort. We put up iPad screens to make it easier for customers to purchase the goods in our sectioned-off sections.

PopInShop’s first pilot event was held in a boutique in Philadelphia, and this was the in-store exhibit.

Unfortunately, it found out that in a boutique setting, customers did not want to purchase from iPads. When we had already paid the store in advance, store workers didn’t seem to have any motivation to steer customers to our goods.

To summarize everything, here’s what we learnt for $5,000:

- Emerging companies were in urgent need of shelf space.
- Stores were very selective about what they placed on their floors.
- In retail, a product does not sell itself.

These qualitative conclusions, as well as the data that supported them, seemed to be less valuable than our assets. We did, after all, have an MVP now. We had a user base. We even have a mock-up of an iPad purchasing screen. However, the lean startup methodology focuses on getting closer to product-market fit, and these results suggested that we needed to rethink our product roadmap and business strategy.

Re-launching and revising the product

We recalled some of our early consumer interactions as we examined alternative online platform concepts. When rephrasing our proposal, several businesses and retailers referred to PopInShop as a matchmaker. We hadn’t given the comparison much consideration until recently, beyond its ramifications for sales and marketing. We investigated the digital counterpart of matching, online dating, and discovered that the premium sites’ user experience was more about curation and suggestions than a pure marketplace. We also discovered that these sites used a variety of income methods, such as collecting membership fees or performance-based matching fees rather than just taking a commission.

We recreated the lean startup process with a fresh set of MVP features and pricing options, using this as inspiration. Brands and shops are increasingly signing up for and using our services as a result of these features and payment options.

The the lean startup amazon is a company that was founded by two entrepreneurs who wanted to create an easy way for new businesses to succeed. They have created the lean startup which is a business model that uses continuous improvement and validation to make sure startups are successful.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can the lean start up approach help you as you start your own business?

The lean start up approach is a business model that starts with the idea of creating a minimum viable product (MVP) and iterating on it. This means that instead of waiting to build something perfect before launching, you create something that works well enough to get feedback from your customers about what they like and dont like.