In the past two weeks we've read and taken notes on Eric Ries' The Lean Startup and Ash Maurya's Running Lean, two books that focus on helping startups economize time and financial waste. The former does a particularly good job of laying down the groundwork of what it means to work lean while the latter offers a more specific blueprint.
No matter which you read, they agree on the most important first step - getting out of the building to talk to customers - and what the biggest mistake is - building a product before even listening to said customers.
To that end, we are now beginning a startup's most important phase - customer discovery. And we'll do it by dipping our toes in the customer waters by directly reaching out to and talking to locals.
