The Real Startup Book

The Real Startup Book was one of the early Lean Startup resources based on the contributions of many practitioners from the field. Despite its name, it is useful to both entrepreneurs and innovators in established organisations. At its core, it is a cookbook of many different methods for testing ideas—i.e. designing, running, and learning from lean experiments—packaged in one book. It is an indispensable tool for innovation professionals across the globe.

I am happy to share that the updated and revised second edition had been published recently. It is available on Amazon in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats, and from Kromatic website as an online reference and a PDF (alternative download).

The book is quick and easy to use. First we check a two by two matrix called index of questions to see if we are trying to learn more about market or product, and if our questions if more of generative or evaluative nature. Once we know what we are inquiring into, we check the index of methods to see a list of appropriate experiments. Then we quickly skim through them to determine which fit our use case, and go from there.

Here is a full list of methods by quadrant:

• Generative market research:
  • AI-Moderated Interview at Scale
  • Pain Point Sorting
  • Contextual Inquiry
  • Discovery Interviews
  • Data Mining
  • Customer Support Analysis
  • Search Trend Analysis
  • Web Traffc Analysis
  • Experience Sampling
  • Focus Groups
  • Open-Ended Survey
  • Social Media Campaign
  • Storyboard the Pain
  • Synthetic Persona Screening
• Evaluative market experiments:
  • Closed-Ended Survey
  • Comprehension Test
  • Secondary Market Research
  • Value Proposition Test
  • Relabel Test
  • Broken Promise Test
  • Crowdfunding Test
  • Event Test
  • Fake Door Test
  • Flyer Test
  • High Bar Test
  • Landing Page Test
  • Landing Page (Extended) Test
  • Mock Sale Test
  • Online Ad Test
  • Pop-Up Store Test
  • Pre-Sales Test
  • Referral Program Test
  • Sales Pitch Test
  • Video Test
• Generative product research:
  • Analog/Digital
  • Ask an Expert
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Competitor Usability Testing
  • Concierge Test
  • Demo Pitch
  • Pocket Test
  • Dogfooding
  • Picnic in the Graveyard
  • Prioritization
  • Buy a Feature
  • Card Sorting (Features)
  • Product Box
  • Speed Boat
  • Solution Interview
  • Storyboard the Solution
• Evaluative product experiments:
  • Dashboards
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey
  • Prototyping
  • Paper Prototype
  • 3D Print
  • Clickable Prototype
  • Life-Sized Prototype
  • Mash-up
  • Single Feature MVP
  • Vibe-Coded Disposable MVP
  • Product-Market Fit Survey
  • Usability Testing
  • Wizard of Oz

Get The Real Startup Book from Amazon in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats. It is also available for free on Kromatic website as an online reference and a PDF (alternative download).