Name: Lean Analytics
ISBN: 9781449335724

Alistair Croll

Benjamin Yoskovitz

Whether you’re a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry or an entrepreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest challenge is creating a product people actually want. Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction. This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize your business, and how to spread the word. Packed with more than thirty case studies and insights from over a hundred business experts, Lean Analytics provides you with hard-won, real-world information no entrepreneur can afford to go without. Understand Lean Startup, analytics fundamentals, and the data-driven mindset Look at six sample business models and how they map to new ventures of all sizes Find the One Metric That Matters to you Learn how to draw a line in the sand, so you’ll know it’s time to move forward Apply Lean Analytics principles to large enterprises and established products

Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

Lean Analytics

Offers six sample business models and thirty case studies to help build and monetize a business.

Hatem Abdelmowgoud 

Confined and bored, decided to give a this book a read. Lean Analytics is one of the Lean books, a series curated by Eric Ries, founder of the Lean movement and author of The Lean Startup.

“Data is the antidote to delusion.”
- Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz

This book is mainly tailored to companies at the startup or the founding phase. It gives a couple of lessons on how to leverage data to be on you side and scale up. It mainly goes through what are the most metrics for different business models throughout different stages.

Not all statistics is useful. Be Data-informed, not data-driven.
This is one of the hardest lessons for anybody working with data professionally. The book explains why data should be the passenger not the driver in your decisions starting a new business. Choosing the right metric and even defining what a “metric” is may sound simple, but it has lots into it.

Choosing the right metric is also highly correlated to your business type. Is it SaaS? e-Commerce, Mobile App, Two-Sided Marketplaces, User-generated Content, or a Media site. The book explains what are the right metrics and their baseline for each of these models.

Focus: Pick one metric and make it actionable.
Although this may sound unproductive but the authors stress on the fact that you should focus only on one, key metric at a time.

Stages: Which data at what time?
The book describes the lifecycle of each company in phases and explains how its data model should transform at each stage. The main phases:

1. Empathy: This is where you connect with other people to determine a real problem that they have, which you can solve.

2. Stickiness: Where you figure out how to efficiently solve that problem in a way that people would be happy to pay for.

3. Virality: Here you build product features that keep people coming back and referring friends to make the product itself better.

4. Revenue: That’s when you start growing, expanding, and making sure you’re profitable. Scale. When your company tries to enter new markets and starts hiring a lot, you know you’re scaling up.

Personally I think this book is highly valuable if you are starting an online business. The agility of measuring, creating, and switching metrics is a luxury only Internet business posses. Honestly, while all of the advice in the book can be extremely helpful, they render themself impractical in a corporate or enterprise environment.

Lean Analytics Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

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