• The Lean Entrepreneur

  • How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets
  • By: Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits
  • Narrated by: Erik Synestvedt
  • Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
  • 3.7 out of 5 stars (62 ratings)

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The Lean Entrepreneur

By: Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits
Narrated by: Erik Synestvedt
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Publisher's summary

You are not a Visionary... yet. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to become one. Most of us believe entrepreneurial visionaries are born, not made. Our media glorify business outliers like Bezos, Branson, Gates, and Jobs as heroes with X-ray vision who can look to the future, see clearly what will be, imagine a fully formed product or experience, and then simply make the vision real. Many in our entrepreneur community still believe that to be visionary, we must merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore all doubt.

With this mindset, companies build doomed products in a vacuum; enterprises make ill-fated innovation investment decisions; and employees and shareholders come along for an uncomfortable ride. Falling prey to the Myth of the Visionary confuses talented entrepreneurs, product managers, innovators, and investors. It leads us to heartbreaking, costly, and preventable failures in new product and venture development.

The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation, and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet. Anyone can be visionary.

The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to:

  • Apply actionable tips, tricks, and hacks from successful lean entrepreneurs
  • Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt existing markets and create new ones
  • Drive strategies for efficient market testing with Minimal Viable Products
  • Engage customers with Viability Testing and radically reduce the time and budget for product development
  • Rapidly create cross-functional innovation teams that devour roadblocks and set new benchmarks
  • Bring your organization critical focus on the power of loyal customers and valuable products you can build to serve them

©2013 Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"A sprawling overview of some of the biggest ideas in the start-up world." (Seth Godin, Author of The Icarus Deception)

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    1 out of 5 stars

The authors need to learn to write an LEAN boook!

What disappointed you about The Lean Entrepreneur?

I loved the Lean Startup. While I've listened to the Lean Startup twice, I cannot bear to listen to the Lean Entrepreneur again. The authors have this awful habit of making lists upons list upon lists. Several times, I paid special attention to these lists, and tried to figure out what was the point of these special long lists. There was no point as far as I could tell, other than being space fillers and perhaps showing off the authors' expertise at making lists. This book contains a lot of useless opinions and rehashed concepts, and poorly illustrated case studies. If you get this book with the hope of further understand the concepts behind the Lean Startup, you will be sorely disappointed. If you get this book with the hope of being entertained or perhaps learning something, you will be equally disappointed. And since this is an digital version from Audible, you can't even use it as a doorstop. What a waste of time and money.

Has The Lean Entrepreneur turned you off from other books in this genre?

No, since the Lean Startup is an excellent book. The Lean Entrepreneur is just a poorly conceived and poorly written book. If the authors were to write a book in another genre, it would be equally bad. They need to take a basic college writing course and learn some principles of good writing before attempting another book.

What didn’t you like about Erik Synestvedt’s performance?

Can't put a finger on it. But his performance in part 2 of the audio book was better than part 1.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

It has a section here and there that was interesting. But these good parts were quickly drowned out by the authors' interminable lists.

Any additional comments?

I have no idea where the good reviews come from. Maybe they are from the authors friends?? I will NOT trust another book with so few reviews.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
  • NB
  • 08-03-13

Crude and disappointing

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

I found the storyline crude and disappointing. I really love lean manufacturing and entrepreneurship but these hacks seem to regurgitate other books instead of coming up with new ideas. After listening to them for an hour and 45 minutes, and really wanting to like it, my basic reaction was to pull over and write this negative review

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Great Listen

This book is a must for people who want to dive in deeper into lean startup thinking. Very good advice on how to approach challenges and lots of real world examples from practitioners!

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3 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Oddly (i.e. poorly) organized book

What disappointed you about The Lean Entrepreneur?

I'm sure the authors are excellent lean startup consultants, but this book is very poorly organized and never really seems to get to the point. It just sort of rambles on, using all the lean startup buzzwords, and never builds any sort of case. Overall, I was ready to turn it off after an hour, but powered through.

Would you ever listen to anything by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits again?

Probably, may they could get another author to help them organize their next book...

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

I liked the idea of having cases mixed in, but they were so short and basic that they didn't really add anything (I can read more in depth about this sort of stuff online).

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Lean Entrepreneur?

I would have cut it up and reorganized it. At times, they use terms (like vanity metrics) freely as if we already know them (and that's probably a safe assumption), then much farther into the book they go into detail defining the term. It just wasn't well organized.

Any additional comments?

Honestly, while I love the whole Lean Startup thing, it's really nothing new that successful entrepreneurs haven't been doing implicitly and explicitly for many years. Eric Reis did an excellent job of laying out the principals eloquently in his book, that's why he's now the "father" of Lean Startup. Sadly, far too many of the other authors that write on this subject lack the eloquence and cohesiveness that Eric has in writing about and explaining these ideas.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Brant and Patrick did a great job!

If you could sum up The Lean Entrepreneur in three words, what would they be?

Startups need this

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I enjoyed the insights from HubSpot a very interesting company

What does Erik Synestvedt bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I prefer the audio version as it flows much better (although I own the hardcopy also)

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