To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we post a short video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics to help entrepreneurs succeed.

This week, we again present startup guru Eric Ries, author of the new book The Lean Startup and a very smart entrepreneur; he previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU and blogs at Startup Lessons Learned.

In this interesting interview (via TechCrunch TV), Eric discusses the following:

• how he’s created a “lean startup” methodology for systematically testing which elements of an entrepreneur’s vision are “clever” and which are “crazy”;
• the main components of the lean startup methodology, including the “minimum viable product” and the “build-measure-learn feedback loop”;
• how it is “inevitable that the first product will be bad in some ways”;
• the importance of separating the product launch from the marketing launch;
• the importance of “product-market fit”;
• the “just do it” school of entrepreneurship;
• why a lean startup is even “more important” in a bubble;
• “vanity” metrics vs. “actionable” metrics;
• the “fat” startup and its consistency with the lean startup methodology; and
• how obscurity is often an entrepreneur’s advantage.

I hope you enjoy this interview.  Cheers, Scott

Tags: actionable metrics, Eric Ries, feedback loop, lean startup, minimum viable product, product market fit, startup, startup lesson learned, TechCrunch, The Lean Startup