• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.91-107
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• 2023

Lean startup is a concept that combines the words "lean," meaning an efficient way of running a business, and "startup," meaning a new business. It is often cited as a strategy for minimizing failure in early-stage businesses, especially in software-based startups. By scrutinizing the case of a startup L, this study suggests that lean startup methodology(LSM) can be useful for hardware and manufacturing companies and identifies ways for early startups to successfully implement LSM. To this end, the study explained the core of LSM including the concepts of hypothesis-driven approach, BML feedback loop, minimum viable product(MVP), and pivot. Five criteria to evaluate the successful implementation of LSM were derived from the core concepts and applied to evaluate the case of startup L . The early startup L pivoted its main business model from defecation alert system for patients with limited mobility to one for infants or toddlers, and finally to a smart bottle for infants. In developing the former two products, analyzed from LSM's perspective, company L neither established a specific customer value proposition for its startup idea and nor verified it through MVP experiment, thus failed to create a BML feedback loop. However, through two rounds of pivots, startup L discovered new target customers and customer needs, and was able to establish a successful business model by repeatedly experimenting with MVPs with minimal effort and time. In other words, Company L's case shows that it is essential to go through the customer-market validation stage at the beginning of the business, and that it should be done through an MVP method that does not waste the startup's time and resources. It also shows that it is necessary to abandon and pivot a product or service that customers do not want, even if it is technically superior and functionally complete. Lastly, the study proves that the lean startup methodology is not limited to the software industry, but can also be applied to technology-based hardware industry. The findings of this study can be used as guidelines and methodologies for early-stage companies to minimize failures and to accelerate the process of establishing a business model, scaling up, and going global.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.89-104
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• 2021

Food delivery service combined with IT technology and HMR (Home Meal Replacement) are rapidly growing due to the COVID-19. Recently, the demand for salads along with HMR has increased among office workers in their 20s and 30s who are interested in health and beauty. Freshcode is a food startup with 6 years of experience that started selling salad products through O2O service. Freshcode applied for a patent for a service that collects orders from nearby areas and delivers them on the same day to a designated delivery address 'FCOSPOT' to save shipping costs. In March 2021, in recognition of the growth potential of the regular delivery service, Freshcode received an investment of 6 billion won in Series A. This study may have practical implications to early-stage startups and scale-up stage startups through a longitudinal case study on the growth of a single company. As for the research method, the lean startup methodology and lean canvas were used in the early stage of startup. In particular, the process of the build-measure and learn feedback-loop, which is the core of lean startup methodology, was applied to each major decision-making step. In the scale-up stage after 5 years, the business model canvas was used to schematize the growth as a food online O2O platform to verify continuous innovation. This case study has three main findings. First, the idea of 'FCOSPOT' was successfully implemented through the Lean Startup methodology. Second, Freshcode demonstrated the scalability of the differentiated business model of shared base delivery O2O. Third, a key factor of success was the digital integrated communication operation strategy that maximizes the experience for the created customers.