Validated Learning
Let's ditch the “let’s see what happens” approach.
We’re back!
The team of StartUpDrafts wishes you all a very Happy New Year.
An entrepreneur is constantly plagued by whether their company is making any progress towards creating a successful business. Managers are accustomed to measuring progress by making sure work proceeded according to plan, was of high quality and cost about what was predicted. But, for a startup whose roots are sown in the soil of uncertainty and risk, evaluating a day’s progress just by the amount and quality of work done doesn’t seem appropriate.
Many entrepreneurs take comfort in the fact that they have learned something at the end of the day. How can you be sure that you have learned something valuable? Do you think whatever you have learned will steer your startup one step closer to the right path? Maybe you learned something which was not at all needed, then will you call it a success? For instance, you are a product manager who found a bug in a feature and spent the whole day fixing it. You are happy that you did something useful and learnt something. But if the feature whose bug you fixed was something that your customers never really wanted or cared about, then it’s not worth the effort you put in.
To solve this dilemma, Eric Reis, a pioneer in popularizing the lean startup methodology, came up with the term- ‘Validated Learning’. He describes it as the principal antidote to the problem of achieving failure, which is - ‘successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.’
Validated learning is “a small unit of progress that can be quickly verified to determine whether a chosen direction is correct.” It describes conclusions generated by trying out an initial idea and then measuring it against potential customers to validate the effect.
Validated learning involves creating a hypothesis, choosing a metric to evaluate it, testing it on customers, preparing your following hypothesis based on the results and repeating the process.
Typical steps in validated learning:
Specify a goal
Specify a metric that represents the goal
Act to achieve the goal
Analyze the metric – did you get closer to the goal?
Improve and try again
WEEKLY ROUNDUP
🚗 Bajaj Auto announces EV manufacturing unit at Akurdi: Bajaj Auto Limited has announced an investment of ₹300 crores and commenced work at a new unit at Akurdi for manufacturing electric vehicles (EV). The unit will have a production capacity of 500,000 EVs per annum.
🚚 TuSimple’s biggest test yet: Autonomous trucking company TuSimple says it has completed its first driverless test run on public roads, successfully completing an 80-mile trip with no human intervention.
😋 Zomato, Swiggy hit new highs: Food delivery giants have claimed to have processed over 4.5 million orders cumulatively for December 31, 2021, with several thousand orders per minute.
✋ SEBI Chief Asks Mutual Funds To Refrain From Crypto-Related Investments: Last month Invesco Mutual Fund put on hold the launch of its blockchain fund in India. The government is scheduled to table the cryptocurrency bill in the ongoing winter session of the parliament.
💰Funding Galore: From MamaEarth To Skippi Ice Pops
💸 Business-to-business (B2B) manufacturing services marketplace Zetwerk Manufacturing Business Pvt Ltd has raised nearly $210 million as a part of its Series F funding round.
👶 Baby and mother care brand Mamaearth has raised close to $52 million in a new round at unicorn valuation led by Sequoia. This is the second round for the Bengaluru-based startup in 2021.
🍭 Skippi IcePops, an ice popsicle brand, has raised $0.13 million from Shark Tank India for a 15 per cent equity.
🤑 This week 25 Indian startups raised funding, of which 19 received a total of about $592 million.
That’s all for this week!
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