The problem

In 2022, I moved to Alaska and seriously considered leaving the world of entrepreneurship. With zero business or financial background, I had started freelancing as a writer ten years earlier, quickly “graduating” to a boutique agency co-founder and a teacher at Columbia University’s Small Business Development Center. In that time, I took advantage of as many free and low-cost business trainings and resources I could get my hands on.

As grateful as I was for the intentions of the professionals who created these resources, they made me more rather than less confused about what exactly the rules of the game were and, occasionally, what game I was even playing.

The solution

With the question of whether business was for me hanging over my head, I picked up Ash Maurya’s Running Lean. As a result, I fell back in love with the creative potential of entrepreneurship.

Ash was one of the leaders of the grassroots Lean Startup movement in the early 2000’s, which transformed the game of entrepreneurship worldwide. His way of thinking and talking about startups felt simple, coherent, and matched what I had seen as someone who got to look behind the curtain of hundreds of early stage businesses.

Ash’s ideas got me hooked, but what kept me interested was the way he had continued applying the principles of continuous improvement—learning, iterating, always striving to create more value and less waste—to the Lean Startup movement itself. He calls it “The Continuous Innovation Framework.”

I’m not the only one who’s in awe of Ash’s humble, rigorous work in the field of innovation. In the words of Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup:

The Continuous Innovation Framework reflects where the Lean Startup movement is now, rather than where it was a decade ago.

I dove deep into Running Lean, reading it multiple times and taking a week-long intensive course led by Ash Maurya to get certified as a Continuous Innovation Trainer.

The tool

The Continuous Innovation Framework is a comprehensive and multi-faceted approach to starting any venture. I whole-heartedly believe it is the best way to think about business from the perspective of creating a viable business model that creates a ton of value for customers.

It took me several months to digest the principles and practices contained in the CIF. Here is my summary of the key points:

• Successful innovation has three pillars, with attendant mindsets
  • Desirability (”love the problem”)
  • Feasibility (”prioritize with now-next-later”)
  • Viability (”think in powers of ten”)
• The first stage of innovation involves:
  • Finding founder-solution fit using a Lean Canvas to lay out a complete business model and surface assumptions to test and explore (rather than jumping into product or writing business plans with no customer insight or validation)
  • Desirability: Identifying a customer problem and understanding the forces pushing and pulling your customer as they try to solve this problem (rather than creating in-depth profiles or full-fledged avatars)
  • Feasibility: Assessing and gathering the resources you’ll need to start the process of learning and iterating (rather than committing blindly to an untested hypothesis)
  • Viability: Use Fermi estimates (power of ten) to determine the minimum recurrent revenue a new business would have to make when it reaches product-market fit in ~3 years for it to be worth your time and energy (rather than calculating potential upside or getting lost in detailed forecasts based on little to no data)
• The second stage of innovation involves:
  • Finding product-solution fit by interviewing potential customers about their problem (not pitching your solution)
  • Desirability: Developing an offer based on a unique value proposition that’s 3-5x better than the solution your customer is currently using to solve their problem (rather than assuming your customer isn’t solving their problem or will be as interested as you are in a new solution)
  • Feasibility: Building a Minimum Viable Product—which could be as simple as a demo—aligned with the core features of the unique value proposition (rather than gambling months on building something that may or may not hit the mark)
  • Viability: Use powers of ten to determine the size of the problem you’re solving and therefore what type of customer you’ll serve—$10, $100, $1k, $10k, $100k (rather than hope your customer can pay)
• The third stage of innovation involves:
  • Determining 3-5 key metrics that paint a complete picture of your business (rather than vanity or lagging metrics that give you only part of the picture)
  • Desirability: Building a sustainable “customer factory” around your offer (rather than elaborate funnels or complex marketing plans)
  • Feasibility: Once you’ve found product-solution fit, sprint toward product-market fit, then growth
  • Viability: Focus on building and scaling real traction

Below is my visualization of the key elements of the CIF for startups. If you’d like to explore Ash Maurya’s Continuous Innovation Framework more deeply, try his free 5-day email course or buy Running Lean.