LEANSTACK

We build world-class tools, content, and coaching resources that help entrepreneurs succeed.

Authored Running Lean
Authored Scaling Lean
Created Lean Canvas

Founder/CEO

WiredReach

WiredReach enables the creation of dead-simple peer to web applications that blur the boundaries between the desktop and web. Our flagship product is BoxCloud - a dead-simple way for creatives to share large files with clients and co-workers.

Founder

Sonus Networks

Prior to founding WiredReach in 2002, Ash was Director of Software Development at telecom technologies inc., which was subsequently acquired by Sonus Networks in 2001. Ash built and led the development team responsible for tti’s distributed Voice over IP Softswitch product.

Director of Software Development

telecom technologies inc

He joined tti as a local number portability (LNP) expert at a time when tti was transitioning from a professional services company to a product company. He help put together a team and led the development project for their flagship product.

Nortel

Was part of an initial team of 5 people that later grew to 70 working on a local number portability administration system.

Software Engineer

Founder/CEO @ LEANSTACK | Bestselling author and founder

I am the founder and CEO of LEANSTACK, a continuous innovation platform that helps startup and corporate accelerators achieve better portfolio results. For over 12 years, I have been helping founders systematically find repeatable and scalable business models using battle-tested playbooks. 

As a best-selling author and creator of Lean Canvas, I have also contributed to the lean startup movement by sharing my insights and frameworks on overcoming the innovator's bias and validating ideas faster and cheaper. My personal mantra is "Life's too short to build something nobody wants," and my mission is to create better founders everywhere.

When to raise funding (for most startups): 
 
⏱️ Earliest time: Problem/Solution Fit 
Investors today don’t fund product development but traction (aka paying customers).  
 
Problem/Solution fit is when you validate demand for your product and go from hoping people will buy to knowing they will.  
 
What they buy: Promising pipeline with tangible customer commitments 
 
🚀 Optimal time: Product/Market Fit 
Before product/market fit, your goals and your investors' goals are misaligned.  
 
You need to learn, and they want growth. After product/market fit, you both need and want growth.  
 
What they buy: Repeatable and scalable business model with 10x growth potential.  
 
👊 Ideal time: Never :) 
Bootstrap all the way and build a profitable and scalable business powered by happy customers.  
 
Rarer, but possible, if you prioritize building Camels over Unicorns.  
 
P.S. Camels can/do still raise money, but for strategic growth, not survival. 

Ash Maurya

How can startups achieve problem/solution fit?

How can startups achieve product/market fit?

What is the difference between Camels and Unicorns?

An MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) is about nailing your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) with the smallest possible solution.  
 
Where “valuable” isn’t limited to viability but also addresses desirability, feasibility, and other non-negotiable x-factors critical to your mission, vision, and values.  
 


What are some examples of successful MVPs?

How can I create a unique value proposition?

This is bad and outdated advice. With the right mindsets the early stage startup journey can be traversed a lot more systematically than jumping off a cliff and hoping you don’t crash and burn.

What are the key mindsets for a successful startup journey?

What strategies can be employed for early stage startups?

How does mindset influence the success of a startup?

Founder and CEO of Acquire.com. Acquire.com has helped 100s of startups get acquired and facilitated $500m+ in closed deals.

"Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down. - Reid Hoffman

Here’s the simple 30-minute Monday morning routine I’ve used to grow all my products from zero to thousands of customers. 
 
1️⃣  Visualize my product’s weekly customer factory metrics on a single 1-page dashboard. 
 
2️⃣ Draw a circle around the slowest step - the limiting constraint.  
 
3️⃣  Channel all my energy towards breaking the constraint and ignoring the rest.  
 
In yesterday’s newsletter, I shared a template for creating your own 52-week customer factory dashboard—no fancy tools required.  
 
In case you missed it, the link is in the comments below 👇

How can I create a customer factory dashboard?

The #2 reason new products fail at large companies is they never get started. 

When proposing a promising new idea, you’re asked for the 20-page business plan, 5-year financial forecast, and 18-month product roadmap. 

These heavy-weight artifacts made sense in the old “analyze-plan-execute” world but don’t work today because speed is the new unfair advantage. 

These artifacts weren’t built for speed because they weren’t designed to adapt to uncertainty. 

If you want to go fast, you must move away from heavy-weight business planning to lighter-weight business modeling. 

You must install a more adaptive “model-prioritize-test” approach to validating versus executing an idea. 

A Lean Canvas is one such lightweight model that deconstructs an idea into 12 building blocks. 

But even a Lean Canvas can be overkill in a large silo’ed org. 

So, I built the Lean(er) Canvas to reduce ideation friction because...

Good ideas can come from anywhere. 

Anyone in a company with an idea should be able to describe the four boxes on a Lean(er) Canvas (Problem, Early Adopters, Existing Alternatives, Problems) and get others to see what they see. 

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of these four boxes. 

Using just these four boxes, you can then go on to stress-test the desirability, viability, and feasibility of any idea. 

If they pass the tests, further prioritization, then testing steps are in order. 

If they don’t pass the tests, further model refinement is needed. 

This is the essence of a Lean Governance process. 

I’m sharing this process on a webinar with Peter Bradd at Miro tomorrow at 9 am central (US). 

If you are charged with bringing bold new ideas to life, I hope you'll consider joining.

Link in the comments 👇

How does the Lean Governance process contribute to idea validation and refinement?

What benefits does the Lean(er) Canvas offer for reducing ideation friction?

The way we build products has fundamentally changed in one significant way. 
 
It's NOT the stages of product development. 
 
All products go through 
- a requirements stage, 
- a build stage, 
- release, and 
- market validation. 
 
What HAS changed is the cycle time between stages. 
 
We've gone from 18 month cycle times from idea to early market validation to less than 3 months. 
 
We've gone from defining product/market fit as the first significant milestone to problem/solution fit. 
 
We've gone from distinct stages to iterative to continuous. 
 
Continuous Discovery + Continuous Validation = Continuous Innovation 
 


Why is problem/solution fit important in product development?

How can cycle time impact product development?

How does continuous innovation benefit product development?

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Some people think that the solution box does not belong on a business model (canvas). But that makes the canvas just another business artifact founders create, mostly for investors and budget gatekeepers.  
 
I wasn’t interested in that, so I designed the Lean Canvas for makers... and added an explicit solution box.  
 
But while building a great solution is key, it’s not enough.  
 
It’s a single piece in a twelve-piece puzzle that turns the spark of an idea into a repeatable and scalable business model.  
 
True product = Working Business Model = Making twelve pieces of the puzzle fit

How can a business achieve a repeatable model?

What impact does the solution box have on a business model?

Before chasing Product/Market fit, you need to ensure you have Founder/Customer/Market Fit.  
 
An idea that works with one founder is not automatically guaranteed to work with another.  
 
I envision the journey to product market fit as a series of interlocking rings. The order in which you acquire and build these rings matter.  
 
In tomorrow’s LEAN 1-2-3 newsletter, I’ll reveal the first: The Ring of the Founder.  
 
Subscribe below 👇

How important is Founder/Customer/Market Fit in a startup?

Why is it crucial to have Product/Market fit in business?

What can we expect from the LEAN 1-2-3 newsletter?

Problem/Solution Fit (not Product/Market Fit) is the first significant milestone of a startup. 
 
Getting to product/market fit (the inflection point in the hockey stick curve) takes roughly two years, and 80% of products never find it.  
 
At this rate, not counting downtime between ideas, finding a good idea could take up to 10 years!  
 
A better first milestone is aiming for Problem/Solution Fit.  
 
Problem/Solution fit takes roughly three months to achieve and flips the failure rate by prioritizing what’s riskiest first. 
 
In tomorrow’s LEAN 1-2-3 newsletter, I’ll share why and outline some actionable tactics for charting a course for Problem/Solution Fit.  
 
Subscribe below 👇

How do you identify the riskiest aspects of a startup?

How does Problem/Solution Fit differ from Product/Market Fit?

Starting with a solution is like building a key without a door. 
 
Sure, you can build a great-looking key quickly, but then you spend a lot of time searching for the right door to open. 
 
You might get lucky or brute-force your way in, but where you end up is usually not where you expected to be. 
 
If you flip this around and start with doors or problems worth solving, key-building becomes much easier. 
 
You start building keys to doors that take you places. 
 
Love the problem, not your solution. 
 
P.S. Starting with problems before solutions is deceptively simple but not easy. 

“Build a life plan before your business plan.” 
- Bo Burlingham 
 
There are only four types of games to play in the startup Olympics. Don't start without knowing what game you're playing.  
 
Pick with deliberation because each game requires different rules, tactics, and strategies to win. 
 
Ensure, too, that your founding team signed up to play the same game. 
 
This simple step will not only drive better clarity and focus but also avoid mis-expectations and painful regrets later. 
 
MINIMUM SUCCESS CRITERIA: The smallest outcome (ARR) that would deem your project a success at the 3-year point. 
 
P.S. The same is true for the corporate innovation Olympics. 


How can defining success criteria impact project outcomes?

What impact does alignment within the founding team have on startup success?

Why is alignment crucial for team success in startups?

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Everyone gets hit with ideas. Entrepreneurs act on them.  
 
We have been taught to prepare.  
 
Prepare for the test, prepare for the big trip, prepare for the new project. Our natural tendency is to apply the same thinking to our ideas. 
 
When we get hit with an idea (or in preparation for getting hit with the right idea), we try to find the perfect time to act, book to read, or course to take. 
 
But entrepreneurship is different. 
 
Riddled with extreme uncertainty, new ideas have no perfect time, perfect book, or perfect course that can fully prepare you to be ready to act. 
 
You have to take a leap and just start.

Stas Pavlov

You don't need a working product to get paying customers.

Customers don't buy working products but a promise of something better.

Start by defining better.

Speed of learning is the new unfair advantage. But we have been taught to prepare.  
 
Prepare for the test, prepare for the big trip, prepare for the new project. Our natural tendency is to apply the same thinking to our ideas. 
 
But entrepreneurship is different. Spending 3 months preparing to start puts you 3 months behind.  
 
Riddled with extreme uncertainty, new ideas have no perfect time, perfect book, or perfect course that can fully prepare you to be ready to act. 
 
You have to just start.

How important is speed of learning in the workplace?

What are some key strategies for entrepreneurship?

Common-sense: Tackle your riskiest assumptions first.  
Common-practice: Misdiagnosing what’s riskiest and wasting already limited resources on sub-optimal initiatives.  
 
Why does this happen?  
 
Because people guess at their risks (or have “experts” do so). Or they map their risks on a board and then vote which tends to average out what’s riskiest. 
 
Average risks leads to average results.  
 
Here’s a GO LEAN framework for systematically uncovering the right risks at the right time:

How can businesses identify their riskiest assumptions?

What are the key components of the GO LEAN framework?

How can businesses avoid relying on guesswork or experts to identify risks?

Open article: How to Systematically Prioritize and Tackle the Riskiest Assumptions in Your Business Model | LEANFoundry by leanfoundry.com • 4 min read

How to Systematically Prioritize and Tackle the Riskiest Assumptions in Your Business Model | LEANFoundry

FREE makes people irrational. It’s a powerful marketing tactic, but you need to know when and how to wield it.  
 
In the article below, I outline several pitfalls of rushing too early into FREE and offer some strategies for knowing when and how to leverage it best.  
 
Link in comments 👇

What are some best practices for using free offers in marketing?

How important is offering free products or services in marketing?

What are some effective strategies for leveraging free offers?

Qualitative learning is the fastest (and only practical) way to gather insights at the early stages of a product.  
 
Metrics can tell you what just happened, but getting to causality requires large sample sizes and good experiment design (testable hypothesis, A/B tests, statistical significance, etc.) 
 
These conditions are rarely practical at the early stage of a product unless you already have a pre-established channel to many customers.  
 
In yesterday's LEAN 1-2-3 newsletter, I offer some actionable tactics to use instead. In case you missed it, the link is in the comments 👇

The challenge for most products today isn’t if we can build it but if we should. Problem/Solution Fit aims to answer this question by prioritizing customer and market risks above technical risks. 
 
This isn’t to say you should downplay technical risks but not overplay them. 
 
Ensuring your product is “buildable within a reasonable timeframe” passes the first feasibility test, which is sufficient to shift focus on customer desirability and market feasibility. 
 
In yesterday’s newsletter, I define Problem/Solution fit and laid out a 3 step approach.  
 
In case you missed it 👇

Why is customer desirability important in product development?

What are the potential benefits of Problem/Solution Fit?

What are some examples of Problem/Solution Fit in action?

Open article: Problem/Solution Fit (not Product/Market Fit) is the first significant milestone of a startup. | LEAN 1-2-3 Newsletter by leanfoundry.com • 3 min read

Problem/Solution Fit (not Product/Market Fit) is the first significant milestone of a startup. | LEAN 1-2-3 Newsletter

Common Misunderstanding: The early-stage startup journey is always uncertain, chaotic, and unstructured.  
 
Secret: The early stage journey is much more systematic and predictable than the later stages.  
 
▪️ Every business has customers, customers have problems, etc. 
▪️ The process for uncovering problems worth solving is the same.  
▪️ The process for validating demand for promising solutions is the same.  
 
With the right mindsets and systematic process, uncertainty can be tamed and aimless wandering avoided. 
 
 


How can I identify problems worth solving for my startup?

What are some best practices for navigating the early-stage startup journey?

What is the process for validating demand for promising solutions?

First-time founders obsess about their 
- company/product name, 
- domain name, 
- logo. 
 
Second-time founders obsess about building something worth naming. Then, they buy whatever name they want.  
 
Starting Risks > Scaling Risks.

What does it mean to build something worth naming?

What are the risks of starting a business?

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