LEAN START-UP

Is the lean start-up methodology useful for our business idea?

Nowadays, people use more and more apps in their daily life. According to TechCrunch, the number of mobile app downloads in 2017 (in Europe, Middle East and Africa) was 33,8 billions. The number expected in 2022 is 39,7 billions. The App market is a market with a lot of competition. That’s why it’s important to make the good methodological choice. For our app idea, the best would be to use the lean start-up methodology. Indeed, the Lean Start-up is a principled approach to new product development. It would et a desired product to our customers' hands faster and provide us a scientific approach to creating and managing our start-up.

The main idea is to eliminate uncertainty. Indeed, it’s very important for us to insure a certain level of stability to the growth of our project. We have to enter rapidly the market without risking too much money and time. The best way to do it is to develop our minimum viable product (MVP). Based on the facilitation of creating entrepreneurial teams, the goal of our MVP is to reach this reach, but in the simplest way we can do. When it will be launched, we will take in account our users’ perception of the product. It’s very important for an app, or a software, because their development is made up of different versions (1.0, 1.5, 2.0 etc.). If the MVP is successful, it allows us to start enlisting early adopters, adding employees to each further experiment. By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers. It will have solved real problems and offer detailed specifications for what needs to be built.

Moreover, in our team, nobody has an entrepreneurial past. Thus, we have to get informations of the insiders to improve our app. The idea is not to work hard but to work smart. The thing we have to ask ourself with our app is not « Can we build it? » but « Should we build it? ». The answer to this question is the reactions to our MVP. The way people reacted to our minimum viable product will lead us to think about the way we have to develop (or not) our app. It’s very important for us because the entrepreneurial market is a very special and wide one. That’s why we need to grow little by little to avoid loosing time and money.

To conclude, our business idea needs lean start-up methodology. We have to turn our idea into a product, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. Indeed, our lack of experience in the entrepreneurial sector has to be offset by the learning process we will benefit from our early users. When it comes to time and money, as students we don’t have a lot. That’s why we have to limit risks of losing it by placing us rapidly on the market and improving the product little by little.

For all of these reasons, we have to go through the lean start-up methodology.

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