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In Silicon Valley, there's a very practical way of thinking about creating businesses.

It's called the Lean Startup methodology.

This is a way of thinking about creating businesses 'with less risk' and 'as quickly as possible'.

The current era is one of rapid change. People's preferences, cultures, trends, technologies, and everything else are continuously evolving at an astonishing speed.

Basically, people who gather in Silicon Valley are not interested in existing jobs.

They focus on creating new businesses, changing the world, and bringing significant change to society.

As a result, they are creating services that don't exist in the world at all, going even further beyond a rapidly evolving world.

Since they are creating jobs that have never existed before, there's nothing in the existing world that they can refer to.

In such a situation, after much thought on how to reduce risk and increase the possibility of succeeding with new ventures, the Lean Startup method was born.

That's right. Let's just build something small and have customers try it out.

Businesses launched with Lean Startup are not fundamentally undertaken with prior assurance of success.

Of course, they will have confidence, but entrepreneurs proceed by believing 'that's definitely it'.

The probability of failure is high, but in return, when successful, it holds the potential to change society dramatically.

Now, a question.

When trying out a service or product that has never been seen before, what would happen if you built everything completely and released it all at once?

If you release it after incurring high development costs, a long time, enormous effort, and investment.

If it fails, everything will be wasted, won't it?

After all, no matter how much preliminary research you do, no matter what data you pull, creating a business is fundamentally 'unknown until you try it'.

Even if you thoroughly build something based on a preliminary prediction of 'this is how it will be,' ultimately, you won't know if people truly need it until you actually try it.

No matter how meticulously you prepare in advance, it doesn't significantly increase the probability of success.

This isn't just when tackling unknown ventures.

When you start something small yourself. When launching a new business at a company. No matter how much you research, if you plan to launch something significantly differentiated from rivals, it all becomes 'unknown'.

You won't know until you try it.

Therefore, smart entrepreneurs came up with the idea of 'releasing it once the minimum is built, and letting customers use it!'

No matter how much desk research or interviews you conduct, you won't know until you actually do it.

In that case, build it to the point where the vision can be minimally realized, have people actually use it, and receive feedback. Then, discover how many people, what kind of people, and where it will be most used.

If they find it's not working, they quickly change direction, and sometimes even change the entire service's policy.

They don't change the vision or theme, though. While keeping the vision and theme as the core, they continuously change even the approach methods.

This is sometimes called a pivot.

By repeatedly failing on a small scale, having people actually use it, continuously improving, they build wonderful services and products.

This is how they realized that refining a business this way is faster and cheaper!

Analyze, hypothesize, test, revise... repeat at high speed.

However, it's not just trial and error done haphazardly.

What's important in Lean Startup is to firmly establish 'hypotheses' like 'This is why this result occurred. Therefore, this is what we should do next.'

People who like to use difficult words (including myself, haha) sometimes call this 'hypothesis thinking'.

For example, if you fail or receive feedback, you properly consider why it happened.

Then, to avoid the same mistakes next time and reach success, you firmly form a hypothesis in your mind and repeat revisions.

Whether or not you have this hypothesis thinking makes a world of difference in the results.

Rather, without this hypothesis, it cannot be called a Lean Startup.

If you fail as a result of a challenge based on a hypothesis, you won't make the same mistake twice, right? However, if you just proceed without thinking, you will likely repeat the same mistakes, or similar ones, several times.

Furthermore, the process of forming and executing this hypothesis is carried out at an incredible speed.

For example, it's like this.

Let's say there's a product that took a lot of time to create. This is the traditional Japanese way.

Spending money, properly creating a project proposal, consulting with superiors countless times, gathering data, following procedures, spending more money, and finally, hooray for the release!

However, when we actually tried it, it didn't go so well. Why is that?

The traditional method involved investing enormous time and effort for just one attempt.

However, Lean Startup is different.

We planned, we built, we launched.

It didn't go very well. Now, why didn't it go well?

Perhaps this was the problem. So, let's fix it.

And release. This time, it turned out as expected, hooray!

This cycle is attempted at least 5 times in the time it would take to try it once with the traditional, lengthy method.

One challenge based on accumulated armchair theories versus five challenges based on actual market reactions.

Which do you think will yield results?

Needless to say, the latter.

Hypotheses, verification, and corrections are repeated at such a rapid pace that previous business speeds seem to have come to a complete halt.

Thinking carefully and taking on challenges at an incredible speed—this is the true essence of Lean Startup.

Summary

I've written at length, but in reality, I've only talked about the very first step.

Lean Startup, so to speak, has a set flow, but it would be a bit too formal for a first step, so I decided not to talk about it.

If you want to know more, I might write about it someday, or if you search online right now, I think you'll find a lot of information.

However, I think it might be difficult to understand.

This kind of topic really has a lot of Katakana terms.

So, if you're not used to it, you might end up thinking, 'What is this person even talking about?'

But I think it's a process where, even if you don't understand Katakana or technical terms at first, there's a moment when you suddenly grasp it, and through repetition, you eventually become able to read and understand them.

Well, since it originated overseas, it can't be helped.

That being said, the origin of Lean Startup was created by Toyota. Lol

If you want to use more Japanese, then maybe it's about creating new methods and approaches from Japan.

I feel like the final summary didn't really summarize anything, but I'll leave it at that for now.