Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Entrepreneur: A Lean Startup Culture for Smart Entrepreneurs to Build a Sustainable Business
    The Entrepreneur: A Lean Startup Culture for Smart Entrepreneurs to Build a Sustainable Business
    The Entrepreneur: A Lean Startup Culture for Smart Entrepreneurs to Build a Sustainable Business
    Ebook195 pages3 hours

    The Entrepreneur: A Lean Startup Culture for Smart Entrepreneurs to Build a Sustainable Business

    By Nkem Mpamah

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    All over the world, entrepreneurs are adding value to lives and transforming economies. But many who started this journey soon discovered that the path to success is so narrow that about 80% of all start-ups veer off the curve every year.
    The sad reality is that start-ups fail not because founders do not build exactly what they want; but because they waste too much time and money planning and building something that nobody wants to buy.
    When it comes to starting a business, everyone seems to follow a traditional pattern:

    1Find an idea,
    2Write a business plan,
    3Pitch to investors,
    4Build what you want, and
    5Sell to the market.
    For many years, entrepreneurs and product developers have followed this outdated pattern to build what they thought customers liked, only to realize after trying too hard to sell without success that nobody actually wanted what they built.
    Now, The Entrepreneur - A Lean Startup book for the Smart Entrepreneur to Build a Sustainable Business has been written to show you the step-by-step approach that you can follow to turn your ideas into reality and build a successful business using Lean Startup principles.
    The Entrepreneur contains comprehensive tools and ideas that can raise your odds of success to build a profitable sustainable business if you implement them.

    In this book you will learn:

    •How to turn ideas into reality
    •Why you don’t need business plan for starting a business
    •Step-by-step guide to design your business model
    •Customer discovery and customer validation models
    •How to turn your business model assumptions to fact
    •How to create a minimum viable product (MVP)
    •The process of validating your MVP
    •Fundamentals for creating a company
    •How to make the first sale

    Whether you are thinking of starting a new business, or have started one already; or if you are a product developer, programmer, small business owner or CEO looking for simple step-by-step approach to lay a solid foundation for your business, The Entrepreneur has been written to provide guidance for you to eliminate waste and build products and services that customers can buy willingly and pay for.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNkem Mpamah
    Release dateNov 2, 2015
    ISBN9781311310347
    The Entrepreneur: A Lean Startup Culture for Smart Entrepreneurs to Build a Sustainable Business
    Author

    Nkem Mpamah

    If you are the type of entrepreneur who wants to grow your business and have total control of your life; doing what you love when you want it, and enjoying the freedoms of entrepreneurship; I can help you.Over the past one decade, I have contributed to the success of several successful entrepreneurs and CEOs in improving performance, increasing revenue, and creating sustainable growth. My clients span across the United Kingdom, the U.S, Germany, Australia, China, and Nigeria.My business coaching Concepts, tools, and strategies get to the core of what Is inhibiting growth. For example; not only will working with me keep you on track of your goals and multiply your revenue, you will be able to do more of what you love that bring the most revenue back into your business also, and experience growth in every areas of your business and life.If you would like to explore how my business coaching can contribute to your success and growth, why not schedule a date on the link below for us to speak? Here’s the link - https://calendly.com/cognitionglobal/nkem-mpamah.I look forward to hearing from you.Nkem Mpamah

    Read more from Nkem Mpamah

    Related to The Entrepreneur

    Related ebooks

    Small Business & Entrepreneurs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Entrepreneur

    4.5/5

    4 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      easy to read and digest... unlike the other summaries of the lean startup. Saving this one!
    • 5/5
      Very clear book, highly recommend to read for junior enterprisers
    • 5/5
      Great book for startup! I strongly recommend it to beginners

    Book preview

    The Entrepreneur - Nkem Mpamah

    THE ENTREPRENEUR

    A Lean Start-Up Culture for the Smart Entrepreneur to Build a Sustainable Business

    NKEM MPAMAH

    ~~~

    Smashwords Edition

    Copyright © 2015 by Nkem Mpamah. All rights reserved.

    No part of this publication may be stored or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual wellbeing. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

    The information presented herein represents the view of the author as of the date of publication. This book is presented for informational purposes only. Due to the rate at which conditions change, the author reserves the right to alter and update his opinions at any time. While every attempt has been made to verify the information in this book, the author does not assume any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, or omissions.

    Published in Cambridge United Kingdom

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Dedication

    This book is dedicated to:

    The entrepreneur who has just started a business or is thinking about starting one in the future.

    The CEO, product developer, or small business owner who is looking for innovative concepts to raise his or her odds of success and create sustainability in business.

    The business coach, mentor, consultant, or advisor who supports the cause of turning ideas into reality or designing products that customers want.

    To you, who are undecided about when or how to quit your corporate job and become your own boss. This book is for you.

    Contents

    Dedication

    Why I Wrote This Book

    1. The Willingness to Be Laughed At

    2. The Search for Market Fit

    3. Business Plan Versus Business Model

    4. Testing and Validating the Business Model

    5. Application of Lean Culture Tools

    6. Getting Outside the Building

    7. Company Creation

    8. Website Development Concepts

    9. Raising Funding

    10. Making the First Sale

    About the Author

    THE ENTREPRENEUR

    Why I Wrote This Book

    Let me start by telling you a little about what brought me into entrepreneurship.

    I have a calling in entrepreneurship. I started my career as an accountant and worked for almost twenty years in a bank. At one point, my work involved preparation of financial statements, which later changed to business advisory for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Then I became interested in understanding business, and started reading good business books, magazines and journals to increase my knowledge. I love hanging out with entrepreneurs in order to understand how they think and what drives their decisions. So, when the 2008 economic recession threw me out of employment, becoming an entrepreneur was the only reasonable option I could consider.

    Despite being a Chartered Accountant, I am naturally blessed with the capability to turn ideas into reality, and bringing simplicity to chaos. So by a divine order, I came across John Spence, who became my personal mentor. John is America’s Top 100 Business Thought Leader, Top 100 Small Business Influencer, and Top 500 Leadership Development Expert in the World. On the average, John has read two business books every week for nearly twenty years running; he is a connoisseur of business information. His honest advice and support has had an incredible influence on my life and business. He taught me the business books to read, and advised me on the best business practices across the world. Although John Spence is not the title of this book, I think that not talking about him would be a disservice to humanity in view of his priceless support to me.

    Entrepreneurship dramatically changed everything I learned in my twenty years of corporate life. Since becoming an entrepreneur, I have been privileged to support other entrepreneurs across the world to turn ideas into business. I have had incredible opportunities to work as mentor for Startup Loans UK through NWES and become business growth coach for Growth Accelerator, in addition to managing my own coaching and strategy consulting firm, Cognition Global Concepts Limited. These rare privileges opened the door for me to work on a large scale with some successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and senior executives across the globe to create business excellence and drive growth.

    Entrepreneurship is tough, but it is worth stepping into, if you have the courage and understand the rules. I have worked with many clients to start new businesses, some having literally one penny to start with. I built my own businesses from scratch, although one of them failed.

    Being a good student of John Spence, I read a lot of business books and have never stopped learning how to make entrepreneurship less complex, less risky, and more successful. In all the lessons I learned, the most interesting is discovering why many businesses and new products fail. This completely changed my perception about everything that it takes to start, manage, and grow a successful sustainable business. In my study, I discovered that very successful start-up founders and product developers across the world adopt what I refer to as lean culture.

    Lean culture is an alternative behavior that challenges conventional thinking and seeks to create more effective and reliable ways of starting, managing, and scaling a business, delivering real value to customers and returning part of that value back to the business. It consists of tools that create exactly what the customer wants, as opposed to what entrepreneurs think they want. This wonderful discovery led me to write the book you are reading right now.

    Why Many Businesses and Products Fail

    In the past five decades or thereabout, launching a business or developing new products has become an uphill task. Statistics show that about 80 percent of new businesses fail within the first three years of existence. This unending failure seems to put enormous strain on founders and individuals seeking to turn ideas into products that customers can buy. The few who escaped failure did so through stressful trial and error.

    I wondered: what if I had written this book earlier to show entrepreneurs how to bypass the failure traps that stopped others? To my mind, starting and growing a business shouldn’t be too stressful if only founders knew what they should do from day one.

    Truth is, businesses and products fail not because founders and developers do not build exactly what they have in mind. Instead, businesses fail because founders waste too much time and money in planning and building what nobody in the market wants to buy. Like most traditional entrepreneurs, they build what they think customers want, without attempting to find out how their idea or their product matches the pains and needs of their customers. I found this to be the greatest challenge entrepreneurs face: the inability to create products and services that solve the problems of the customer.

    The Big Deceit

    From 1908, when Harvard Business School founded the first Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program, the world was made to believe that the first thing anybody should do when a business idea comes to mind is to write a business plan. It wasn’t too long before it became the norm to:

    1. Find an idea.

    2. Write a business plan.

    3. Build a product or service.

    4. Pitch to investors.

    5. Sell to the market.

    It wasn’t until they had tried so hard to sell their products without success that they realized they built the wrong products.

    I do not have any problem with writing a business plan though. In fact, I consider it a useful tool for describing the size of a business opportunity and identifying the various ways to nail that opportunity. The real problem is with the educators and early experts who misinformed us, telling us to build new businesses by writing up a plan.

    Business plans are not relevant for start-ups, but they are significant for large companies that already have validated products and services (product-market fit). As Steve Blank points out in his book - Four Steps to the Epiphany, start-ups are not smaller versions of a large company. They do not have abundant resources at their disposal to be managed in the same way as a large company.

    That said, the goal of start-up founders is to search for a product-market fit. As you will soon learn from subsequent chapters of this book, a market fit is the relationship that exists between founders’ value propositions and the specific people they are meant to serve in the market. We refer to these sets of people as customer segments. To find the right product-market fit for a business idea, founders need to create compelling value propositions, then get out of the building and talk to their ideal customer segments.

    Over the years, the business plan has failed to create this interface between start-up founders and their customer segments. This breakdown is largely responsible for creating products and services that fail to meet customers’ wants and needs.

    What You Will Find Inside The Entrepreneur

    Inside this book are incredible ideas—which I have already referred to as lean culture—that challenges conventional approaches to starting a business and creating a product or service. Whether you are a start-up founder setting up a business, a programmer, software, or product developer creating new products, a CEO or small business owner seeking to create improved value for your customers, lean culture principles can raise your odds of success in building a profitable, sustainable business around your idea. They are perfect also for coaches, mentors, mentor organizations, and evangelists who are supporting start-up causes around the world.

    Not only will I tell you stories about lean culture, I’ll also give you the step-by-step process of implementing each concept and tool so you will be able to:

    • Formulate hypotheses and design your business model

    • Link your idea to a pain or need in the market

    • Create a minimum viable product (MVP)

    • Get out of the building and validate your MVP

    • Iterate, and if possible pivot, your business model based on customer feedback

    • Find a product-market fit and launch your business

    There are ten easy-to-understand chapters in this book, each covering a key lean start-up culture principle. You will find a summary at the end of every chapter to helps you remember what you learned and how to implement them.

    -Chapter 1: The Willingness to Be Laughed At

    I learned early in my entrepreneurial journey that not everybody is suited to be an entrepreneur. Many people who started well fell off the curve because they lacked key entrepreneurial qualities. One such quality is the willingness to be laughed at. In the past, many successful entrepreneurs were laughed at either because of the craziness of their ideas, or their resolve to say no to failure and defeat. In this chapter, you are going to find insights to why entrepreneurs get laughed at and what they do to overcome their detractors.

    -Chapter 2: The Search for Market Fit

    As you will soon learn, the primary goal of start-up founders and product developers should be to find a product-market fit for what they are building. This is a crucial search that determines whether an idea can be turned into a business or product. In this chapter, I will show you how to ensure that your product or service will resolve your

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1