Ash Maurya

Ash Maurya has been an entrepreneur for more than a decade, searching for a better, faster way for building successful products.

He is the founder of the LeanStack and a passionate international speaker.

Ash has tried everything from building products in stealth, a platform, open sourcing, practicing release-early release-often, embracing “less is more”, and even trying “more is more”.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Ash’s success

Using an experiment focused for developing a product prior to launching.

Result if you follow the steps in Ash’s session

A process to test assumptions about your product prior to launch that allows you to quickly judge its interaction with the market and gives you an iterative method to adjust to the feedback

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

A few differences though, obviously in the past we would say, if you’ve got an idea, go write this business plan.

The problem with the business plan is it’s a very lonely exercise. People spend a lot of time. Just like writing a novel. You’re writing a book on your own in a big document. And when you’re done, the problem is the people who often tell you to go write it, they don’t take the time to read it.

They say come in to my office and give me the summarized version of it.

The business plan is really a critical thinking exercise. And as I said, what has happened in recent years is we have learned that the business plan just doesn’t work as written

It’s going to change. There’s going to be changes to it. That’s just a given.

What we propose, A Leanstack approach, is rather than writing one big business plan based on some fictional assumptions, let’s instead create many different models of how the business might look like and let’s test them rather quickly.

Given a two month period rather than writing a big document and try to go pitch that and raise money around it is far more effective to create a small model and that’s where tools like the LeanCanvas come in. They help you describe the same aspects that would that would matter about your business. Just in a more condensed fashion.

It’s not meant to be fully fleshed out, it’s not meant to be a perfect plan because there is no such thing.

We get outside the building and hit the streets and talk and test to with customers. That’s when the plan really emerges.

I would almost argue that there never is really a plan. It’s always a moving evolving document. It’s moving evolving model of our business.