What the stages mean?

Lean startup and Startup Genome talks about the stages of a startup but most people don’t understand them. You can read the books and still not really understand what they mean. Here is my quick summary;

– Discovery – is there a big problem?
– Validation – can you solve it well?
– Efficiency – can you scale it?
– Scale – have you scaled it?

Don’t skip steps. This means don’t spend an ounce of energy on the next stages until you’ve nailed the first one.