Measuring Progress is all about checking your path towards your goal. Thinking out of the box is a very essential part of startup. This could be achieved by doing validated learning and experimentation which would be thoroughly explained in this session.

1. HOW TO MEASURE PROGRESS?

2. The most pestering issue during the early stages of a
startup is of course determining whether it as an
enterprise is making any progress. The legacy yard
stick of measuring progress in terms of output and
input or even based on learning is no longer valid.

3. "learning" is the oldest excuse in the
book for a failure of execution.

4. Engineering vs
Entrepreneurship -
Learning is cold comfort to
employees who are following an
entrepreneur into the unknown.

5. Validated Learning
Itis a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is
embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups
grow. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating
empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a
startup's present and future business prospects.
It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market
forecasting or classical business planning.

7. Connecting the users with products is just as important as
developing a brilliant product. There are times at which we
may focus our efforts in the wrong direction, at times like
this instead of doubling down on our time, effort and capital
spent we need to learn to pivot our strategy to better suit
our customers’ needs. With the help of validated learning
we can mitigate the waste that happens.

8. VALIDATED LEARNING
AT IMVU

9. What is IMVU?
IMVU is the world's largest avatar-based social
media site.

10. VALUE VS. WASTE
Lean thinking defines value as providing
benefit to the customer; any thing else is waste

11. WHERE DO YOU FIND
VALIDATION?
Run experiments,
Test feedbacks,
Measure the changes in metrics.

12. THE AUDACITY OF ZERO
The irony is that it is often easier to raise money or acquire
other resources when you have zero revenue, zero customers,
and zero traction than when you have a small amount. Zero
invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about
whether large numbers will ever materialize

13. EXPERIMENTATION
Which customer opinions should we listen to, if any?
How should we prioritize across the many features we could
build?
Which features are essential to the product's success and which
are ancillary?
What can be changed safely, and what might anger customers?
What might please today's customers at the expense of
tomorrow's?
What should we work on next?

14. FROM ALCHEMY TO
SCIENCE
The Lean Startup methodology reconceives a startup's efforts as
experiments that test its strategy to see which parts are brilliant
and which are crazy

15. Think Big, Start Small
CASE STUDY: ZAPPOS

16. Start with an experiment:
Zappos began with a tiny, simple product. It was
designed to answer one question above all: is there
already sufficient demand for a superior online
shopping experience for shoes?

17. The first step of treating a project as an experiment
is to: break it down into value hypotheses and
growth hypotheses. Which test how customers will
respond to a product and new customers will
respond to the product respectively.

18. The next step is termed as the concierge minimum
viable product, which evaluates the customer
feedback.

19. This entire experiment could be conducted in a span of a few
weeks, much less than the time required by the traditional
strategic planning. It also allows a strategic plan to develop
in parallel. This further allows modifications even if the
results are substandard.
In the lean startup model the experiment is the first product.
Embracing experimentation allows expansion and adapting
to new spheres.