Lean Startup is a great process to build new businesses. But when it comes to going from theory to practice, our faith in the process is tested and most often, teams give up to a "seemingly" simple and faster approach of building produces - based on gut feel and seeing what sticks.

It’s a Friday evening. There are two people in the conference room and they have been talking to their laptops for about 15 minutes. Vaidy is the founder and Arun is a Product Manager. At the other end of the Skype call, is an owner of a well-known yoga studio in Bangalore.

Another 15 minutes go by and Vaidy mentions “We’ll charge 5% of all the transactions that go through GoodKarma.”

GoodKarma is an application with a mission to help yoga practitioners grow through deliberate and consistent practice. One of the shorter-term goals of GoodKarma is to help yoga studio owners run their studios better.

The person on the other side gets worked-up “5% is just too high!” Vaidy calmly justifies why 5% is, in fact, a small number for the benefit he is getting.

Another 10 minutes go by. Arun and Vaidy are high-fiving!
They’ve just signed up the 5th customer this month, who’s agreed to start a trial on GoodKarma and be a paying customer.

Vaidy: “We better start building the product, fast!”

In this talk, I'll present our story of building a product using Lean Startup methods. How we went from an Idea to the story above and then shipping the product out. The challenges we faced and how we overcame them.

How fast can you go from an Idea to Reality?

From an idea to the time you validate your solution with real users - not friends and family, how long does it take?
In case you are yet to start, how long should you take?

Lean Startup is a buzz-word these days. And for a good reason too - it works! But, there may be times when you get hung-up trying to validate with methods like landing pages, MVPs, MVFs and Interviews. And before you know it, a month has passed by, trying to generate traffic to your landing pages, making sense of analytics and polishing your MVP. 

The Google Ventures' Design Sprint is a framework for solving real-world problems through research, ideation, prototyping and talking to real users, in 5 days or less.

How will Design Sprint help?

• Focus. First off, design sprint will put you on the clock. 3-5 days of complete immersion. 
• Build the right thing. Taking a Design Thinking approach inspired by IDEO, will help you look at the problem the way your customer would. Then user your teams creativity to solve it in unique ways. 
• See the Truth. When you'll put the prototype to test in the hands of a real user, your team will see first-hand what works and what doesn't. It's the next best thing to reading your customer's minds.
• With a couple of days still left in the week, you relax with a cup of Earl Grey tea and do some more thinking. Probably, get ready for the next sprint.

When we conducted design sprints with our customers, we had some unexpected realizations:

• We saw that the ownership and motivation in the team improved significantly.
  They were mindful about "why" they were working on the features they were working on.
• Our customers would say, "This has completely changed the way I think about building products." 
  Going from a solution driven approach to problem-first approach and keeping the products very lean.