After weeks of preparation, it’s almost time for us to get our startups off the ground.

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But first there are still things we need to learn.The Lean Startup reading starts off with this quote by Eric Ries:

Startup success can be engineered by following the process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught

Before this class, I thought being a successful entrepreneur was some skill a person had to be born with. You either had it or you didn’t. Either your idea was good or it was crap. There was no in between. I think since we’ve been taught to follow a stable career path, you know a traditional 9-5, entrepreneurship has always been this scary path for risk-takers only. I really hate how young people are encouraged to follow the traditional path when that path isn’t for everyone because let’s be honest for a minute. Who really wants to work all their life doing a job they hate just because of the money? That’s not living and lost time spent doing something you hate is more of a loss than losing money. We can always get money back but we can’t get back lost time.

In the Back Channel reading, the author tells us, “The problem with technology that allows us to target exactly who we want is that it allows us to target exactly who we want. In other words, the problem with technology is us.” While this a problem when people use social media to spread hate, a person can use this process of targeting exactly who we want in a constructive way. An entrepreneur can use technology to their advantage because it gives us access to millions of people at the swipe of our fingers. 

A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process, tells us that the person who can find errors the fastest wins. One of the hardest things to do is give yourself an honest critic or take criticism from others. We must figure out how we can improve and make our products better. A product is like a living organism. It needs to be growing, it needs to be changing and it needs to be improving. If we can’t improve our product then it will not grow and a product that isn’t growing will fade away.