The Lean Gates of Analytics

---

You don’t know what book you’re writing until you’ve written it.

As most authors will tell you, the act of writing a book—particularly on a fast-changing, widely-discussed topic—is both a creative and a destructive one. You don’t know how little you know until you start to structure your thoughts.

As Ben and I have been working on the book (now topping out at over 200 pages on our various hard drives) we’ve come up with some basic stages and gates that most startups go through from initial idea to successful exit. These map—loosely—to established frameworks like those from Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya and Dave McClure. We’re not sure if we have it right, yet, but this is our current working model.

We’d love some feedback on whether this is right or wrong. Obviously, some startups will enter the Lean process at different stages, or clear certain gates before others; but as a general model, this is what we’re thinking.

Now that we’ve built it, it’s time to measure and learn: what’s wrong with it?