What Are Lean Startups?
Today in the market there are thousands of companies that may be working to build the same product as you are. So what assurance do you have that your target audience will prefer your product to others?
Let’s take an example, if your product is a smartphone, you already know that there are hundreds of other companies producing the exact same product and your young company will be welcomed with tough competition. Here comes the role of lean startups.
Lean startups run on the idea that before coming out with the whole product you should come up with a part of the product and let others review that. If the product gets a positive response only then you move further with the existing model. If not you can either make the relevant changes to the product or change the target audience.
Let's just say you are planning to incorporate new features into the smartphone. Take the new feature such as face recognition. We know that this new model must have taken hours to come to life, but before launching the model in the market you should test its necessity. By having some people rate your product you can have an idea whether you should work on it or not. For example, instead of selling cricket bats to cheerleaders you can shift the target audience to young children.
How Lean Startups Are Useful?
Instead of waiting for years to come up with a product, this approach helps to have hands on the parts of the product and even generate revenue from it. By the time we are ready with the complete product, we will already have an army of establishments from our parts of the product that have already been circulated.
Another advantage is that we can reduce hours of hard work. Suppose you put thousands of hours into a product and end up unsuccessful in the market it will not only be a huge waste of time and manpower but may also cost you a fortune for nothing. Having this lean startup the methodology you can combine hard work and smart work simultaneously.
Better management skills also play a key role in this method as it is all about managing the products and analyzing the feedback to improve the product.
Cloud-Native
By looking at the architecture of lean startups we know that the traditional cloud system might not be a very good idea. In the traditional cloud system, all the data is stored in a common database. For any change in any part of the product, the whole system had to be triggered. In simple words, we can take the scenario of pet and cattle.
Let us suppose we treat the pet as unique servers or server pairs. We believe that the servers cannot be down and are manually built. On the other hand, cattle can be treated as an array of servers. These servers are built using automated tools. In case of failure, no human interaction is needed as the array has attributes like “routing around failures”. This is done by replicating data to other servers in case of failure by strategies like triple replication or erasure coding.
Difference Between Traditional Cloud And Cloud-Native
In cloud-based systems which were designed to run on-premises apps, you just had to sign up for a cloud service and let them handle your data. But we all know that different clouds have their own specialty and some specific features that may help us in any specific part of the system. Cloud-native allows us to explore the different cloud services and use them separately in different parts of the system for which they are most suited. They promote usability and are reliable enough to handle big workloads. This equally divided feature has many advantages.
Advantages
Suppose we are managing an e-commerce website. The user information is stored in servers. If by any chance any of the servers fail, we can shift the information to a separate server. Here comes the use of cloud-native. In traditional cloud if the information was shifted to another server, information like login credentials will be lost and the user will need to go through the process all over again; but in cloud-native all the servers are previously fed with all the information, so the user even if he/she is shifted to a new server will not face any issues due to the unexpected server failure. This ensures a better user experience. Some other advantages from a broader aspect are.
- Reducing risk factor: One major advantage is the cultural shift. As companies bring parts of the product into the market even before the final output, the market is likely to experience the shift of users towards the product. This in turn also increases the speed by which the product reaches the audience. This increase in speed results in an increase in revenue generated from the product.
- Reducing expenditure: As the additional resources are not needed in the initial stage and can be slowly acquired along the process the cost of the resources is reduced. Also if any changes are being made, it can be compensated by the less number of resources bought initially.
- Upscaling: As the model is already being used by many users you already have an army of people supporting you. This increases further when the final product is being launched. The number of loyal users keeps on increasing as your final product approaches its launch in the market.
In view of all these factors, we can say that lean startup is a smart way of taking forward a business. There is a lot of risks involved in it too but with proper management, success is assured. Cloud-native is a smart way of addressing lean startups and both matched together has a long way to go.
Looking to adopt cloud? Let's discuss how cloud-native solutions can help your business.
