lean-startup

SKILL.md

Lean Startup Methodology

A systematic approach to building startups and launching new products that shortens development cycles and rapidly discovers whether a business model is viable.

Core Principle

Entrepreneurship is a form of management. Success doesn't require a perfect plan or brilliant insight—it requires a systematic process for testing assumptions, learning from customers, and iterating rapidly. Most startups fail not because they couldn't build what they planned, but because they built the wrong thing: treat every plan as a set of hypotheses to falsify, and spend effort to eliminate waste and accelerate validated learning, not to execute a fixed roadmap.

Scoring

Goal: 10/10. Score a plan, experiment, or metric set by the five Quick Diagnostic rows—1 point each when the answer is yes, 2 points when it is also backed by evidence on the Validation Ladder (Level 3+):

9-10: every leap-of-faith assumption named and ranked by risk, the riskiest tested by a real MVP, actionable metrics defined, and explicit pivot criteria set before building.

5-6: a hypothesis and some MVP exist, but metrics are vanity or pivot criteria are undefined—decisions can't be made from the data.

≤3: waterfall thinking—building the full product first, asking customers what they want, or scaling before product/market fit.

State the current score and the lowest-scoring diagnostic row to fix next.

The Build-Measure-Learn Loop