Live your life as if you were a startup
By: Kawisara W.
Tags: Agile, Enterpreneurship, Startup, Business, Lean Startup

I became interested in startups and how they worked when I was first assigned to be an account executive for APAC online travel startups while working for one of the global travel technology companies in July 2019.

As Sun Tzu said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” although my customers were not my enemies, I desperately wanted to win them over. As a result, I began my research about how startups worked and the best practices they followed. My favorite way to prepare my foundation for something was by reading, so I looked up some book recommendations online and ordered a book that has changed the way I live my life, “The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses” by Eric Ries.

In this book, Eric Ries instilled his experiences of founding (and initially failing) his startup and coaching both big and small enterprises to build a startup mentality following the Lean Startup model. Ries’ Lean Startup model has many interesting sub-components, so I highly recommend you to read the book yourself if you are interested. Although the book’s target readers are entrepreneurs, I think anyone could apply the learnings from the book with their life if they took their life as their startup.

First thing first, what is a startup?

According to Ries, a startup is “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

Despite not being an entrepreneur, I consider my life as a human institution. And similar to a startup, we all know (but sometimes forget), life is “highly uncertain.” There are many unpredictable things in life that we have no control of.

For example, back in 2019, who would have thought about the impacts of COVID-19 on global citizens? Resilience, or the ability to adapt quickly to the changing situation, has been a critical element for people of this era to survive So, if you are still doing okay while reading this article, congratulations! Your startup is still running.

Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop Applied to Life

The Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop

The core concept of the Lean Startup model is the “Build-Measure-Learn” feedback loop. To start the loop, you will have to build your minimum viable product (MVP), or the basic functioning version of your product, and launch it to the market as quickly as possible in order to measure the outcome and get the customers’ feedback. Through this “validated learning,” or “learning based on empirical data,” you will be able to improve whatever you are building in the following phases.

What I like about this Build-Measure-Learn approach is that it takes failures as necessary steps to progress. It encourages people to start small and continue to improve themselves along the way. Even though you are not perfect, you are good enough to function, and you will be better as time goes by as long as you don’t stop learning and improving yours

Growing up in a very conventional family, I lived my life very carefully and was very afraid to take risks. Back in early 2020, I thought I had a very secure job working for a big multicultural travel technology company until COVID-19 hit, and what seemed to be secure didn’t seem like it anymore.

The most important and challenging step in the Lean Startup model is when you have to decide if you will “persevere,” or continue with the same cause of action, or “pivot,” or change the direction. After thoroughly assessing the impacts that the new pandemic could have on my career in the long run, in May 2020, as the owner of my life startup, I decided to pivot and resigned from my first job at a big company, and moved to an E-commerce startup to learn new things while I could still afford risks.

Since my first pivot, I have gone through a lot and pivoted many times to reach where I am right now. Despite all the hardships, I have never regretted any failures as I took them as lessons learned required to become a better version of myself, personally and professionally.

Although I cannot say that “I have made it” and claim that I am successful in life, I can proudly say that I am enjoying every day of it, knowing that I have tried my best regardless of the given circumstances.

This startup is still running, and because it still is, I am pretty satisfied. :)

Recommended Reading: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries