Hi there,
I’m Ash Maurya, author of two bestselling books and the creator of the popular 1-page business modeling tool: Lean Canvas.
In 2009, I had an epiphany:
Life’s Too Short to Build Something Nobody Wants.
I had launched dozens of products by then. While all my ideas started off as awesome ideas, not all of them ended up as awesome products. What bothered me wasn't my success rate but cycle time. I was averaging about 18 months across projects and I didn’t have a repeatable process for systematically navigating the highly uncertain terrain of early-stage products.
This sparked my search for better and faster ways for building successful products which first led me to the early works of Eric Ries and Steve Blank who pioneered the Lean Startup movement. I joined in on the conversation with my blog and began rigorously testing and applying these principles to my products.
This tinkering led to the development of the highly popular business modeling tool (Lean Canvas) and a best-selling book (Running Lean). While researching my book, I got to travel the world and found entrepreneurs everywhere I went. The persona of an entrepreneur I encountered was the same: They all wanted the same things, feared the same things, and made the same starting mistakes.
This prompted me to want to more openly share my learning and I founded LEANSTACK in 2010 with a mission of:
Helping entrepreneurs everywhere succeed.
I spent the first five years rigorously stress testing and refining the systematic step-by-step process that I laid out in my book over thousands of hours of workshops and bootcamps with a diverse range of teams and products.
Along the way, I developed additional business modeling tools (Customer Factory Blueprint, Customer Forces Canvas, and the Traction Roadmap), better validation strategies, and more practical techniques synthesizing concepts from a wide range of methodologies and frameworks including Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Business Model Design, Jobs-to-be-done, Systems Thinking, Behavior Design, and many more -- into a new framework of frameworks: Continuous Innovation Framework.
With the framework built, we then moved into the second act of our mission:
Teaching others how to help entrepreneurs everywhere succeed.
We launched a Coaching Lean certification program and packaged all our learnings, tools, and early-stage playbooks into a Continuous Innovation Platform that we now license to thousands of startup accelerators, universities, and enterprises that share our mission.
Practice Trumps Theory is the learning flywheel that got us to where we are today and we continuously iterate on everything we do by practicing what we teach on our founder-focused site: LEANFoundry.com. While it's been an incredible 14 years, it feels like we're only just getting started.
Thanks for reading, and for giving LEANSTACK a try. You can always contact me directly if you have any questions at ash@leanstack.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
Ash Maurya
Founder & CEO
