Lean Startup Principles and Services Businesses
by Whitney Baxter ( @whitneybaxter ) & Dave Krasik ( @davekrasik ) Our project focused on building out the sales and marketing strategy for a growing tech‐focused service firm. We attempted to apply many of the LTV principles to this service model and found them quite useful. Some we found could be applied interchangeably with between product and service based firms, while other required modification or adjustment. We’ve focused on the later for our post, but in both instances the principals were useful lenses through which to examine the business. We’ve observed that services firms can successfully apply some of the most important concepts of lean startup methodology, including minimizing startup costs and iterative hypothesis testing. Resource Constraints Launching a service firm can require significantly less capital than launching a product firm but may be much harder to scale at the high rates achievable by product firms. The costs of resources to create lean product‐ba...