Lean AI: How Innovative Startups Use Artificial Intelligence to Grow

by Lomit Patel

How can startups successfully scale customer acquisition and revenue growth with a lean team? Out-of-the-box acquisition solutions from Facebook, Google, and others provide a good start, but the companies that can tailor those solutions to meet their specific needs, objectives, and goals will come out winners. But that hasn't been an easy task--until now.

With this practical book, author Lomit Patel shows you how to use AI and automation to provide an operational layer atop those acquisition solutions to deliver amazing results for your company. You'll learn how to adapt, customize, and personalize cross-channel user journeys to help your company attract and retain customers--to usher in the new age of Autonomous Marketing.


Learn how AI and automation can support the customer acquisition efforts of a lean startup
Dive into Customer Acquisition 3.0, an initiative for gaining and retaining customers
Explore ways to use AI for marketing purposes
Understand the key metrics for determining the growth of your startup
Determine the right strategy to foster user acquisition in your company
Manage the increased complexity and risk inherent in AI projects

Genres: Artificial Intelligence, Business, Technology

240 pages, Audiobook

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Lomit Patel is the Vice President of Growth at IMVU. Prior to IMVU, Lomit managed growth at early-stage startups including Roku (IPO), TrustedID (acquired by Equifax), Texture (acquired. by Apple) and EarthLink. Lomit is a public speaker, author, advisor, and recognized as a Mobile Hero by Liftoff. Lomit’s new bestselling book Lean AI, is part of Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” series, now available at Amazon.

Reviews

[Akbar Lalani · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a start-up or even a growth stage product/service developer looking to optimize for efficiency and scale quickly, this book highlights key factors to consider from an Al+ML point of view. From basic concepts of AI & Ml to real-world applications, this book covers it all. While it does get technical in certain areas, it is quickly followed-up with case studies and real-world examples that are easy to follow and relate.

Although this book does not cover AI & Ml applications outside of marketing, it does make you think about potential areas where you can apply these techniques. This book was an AHA moment in the way I see AI+ML playing a role in the social e-commerce product design that I am currently involved in (SpotReviews). It not only helps structure my digital marketing strategy but also changed the way I think about user engagement on the platform.

The author has made sure there is something in the book for every type of entrepreneur. Early-stage or growth stage it covers vital aspects of digital marketing optimization with a focus on customer acquisition and growth.

The book is easy to read and intuitive with every chapter highlighting what to expect from the next. If you are a digital entrepreneur like me, it helps get an insight into the author's personal experience with AI & Ml and provides a holistic view of its application in customer acquisition, retention & growth.

With an unlimited scope for applying AI & Ml in other scenarios, including elections, this topic has the potential to cover areas outside of marketing as well. As with any technology, there is always the risk of misuse & breach of privacy, due to vast amounts of behavioral & psychographic data used. I hope to see a follow-up book covering other areas outside of marketing and also analyzing its impact on privacy and data security.

Stopping short of calling this a Bible for Start-ups, I will say that this indeed is excellent reference material to have in your collection.

[Maria Rybak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book. It was a concise yet thorough introduction to the use of AI in a company’s marketing efforts whether big or small. It covered everything from how to implement it, what to look out for, and how to measure success. We’re an early stage start up and knowing what tools and strategies to be aware of as we grow our team and scale customer acquisition is allowing us to be as lean and mean as possible.

[Fausto Gortaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very Good Guide for Growth Marketers & Companies ready to add AI to their Marketing Stack! I read the book twice now. It was an easy read, and gave me lots of concepts to consider. I really liked how the book provided the secret sauce for how to make AI an effective tool in a company's tech stack. I also like the idea provided into getting better on basics, like creative testing and optimization. I recommend this book to any person or company that is struggling with digital marketing. Thanks!

[Groucho42 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book but for reasons other than the title. While AI is discussed, it's only part of a much better discussion of digital marketing as a whole. Also, it's not just for startups. Anyone wanting to better understand the concepts necessary for a modern marketing program should read this.

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been a long-term skeptic when it comes to the "Lean" movement, especially as it applies to the fields of Data Science and Machine Learning. Nonetheless, decided to give this book a go, and see what I can learn about the application of "AI" (DS and Ml really) in the business world. I wish I could say that my skepticism was justified, but after finishing the book it's really hard for me to say. The thing is, I really don't know what the main points of this book were. It is so filled with empty jargon and phrases, it reads like one long PR release. For the most part it reads like one long piece on marketing, customer acquisition, organizational building and similar businessy topics, more or less geared towards the startup crowd. AI, as much as it features, is just loosely tacked on as some overarching general mantra. The prose is highly rambling and vacuous, with a lot of filler verbiage. I found it extremely hard to keep my attention while reading it. The book is somewhat useful in that it can expose the more technical people to the way that business people "think" (used *very* loosely here). It will provide you with the insights into the main issues, talking points, and concerns that these sorts of people deal with. However, it will not provide you with any level of concrete actionable advice, nor give you any unique and valuable insights. If you have any extra spare time, and have not seen any of those topics covered elsewhere, then by all means read this book. Otherwise there are many more useful business-focused AI blogs out there that would probably serve you better.

[Tim]

I think it is safe to say that most of us now accept the dominant role AI is going to have on our lives in the future. In fact, artificial intelligence already underpins many of our day to day online and offline activities. We might not want to think about it but our modern lives are reliant on early forms and systems of machine learning and AI. From banking to entertainment our work, financial and personal lives are already strongly influenced by AI. Taking control of what AI does for us and how that power can be harnessed to grow your new businesses faster is what this book is all about.

Author Lomit Patel knows a thing or two about boosting growth in successful early-stage startups having worked with Roku (IPO), TrustedID (acquired by Equifax), Texture (acquired. by Apple) and Earthlink. He is now Vice President of Growth at IMVU and responsible for user acquisition, retention, and monetization. He is also a respected public speaker, author, advisor, and has championed the power of autonomous marketing from the very earliest of days, with his practical, no-nonsense approach to outperforming against your growth goals will be indispensable reading for anyone looking to be successful in digital marketing.

Lean AI is the next in a series of best-selling books for innovators and business people which is part of Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” series published by O’Reilly. While previous books in the series have addressed how companies can be more innovative and nimbler while being less wasteful, how to be more socially impactful and world-changing and how to structure a modern successful company, this book provides practical advice on how innovative startups should use artificial intelligence and machine learning with automation to scale up their growth.

The Lean Startup series is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aim to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable. These books along with associated online resources and worldwide events teach how this can be achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup—how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere—and grow a business with maximum acceleration. It is a principled approach to get a desired product into customers’ hands faster.

Lean AI is broken up into six sections to help tackle the complex and powerful features of AI and how it can be harnessed to take our businesses to the next level.

Part 1: AI + Growth Marketing = Smart Marketing focuses on Growth Marketing with an overview of the current startup landscape and the biggest challenges currently facing new companies around customer acquisition. It provides an overview of the main components of Lean AI and takes a look at industry trends for leveraging AI for smart marketing.

Part 2: Customer Acquisition 3.0 looks at the world of Customer Acquisition 3.0, which provides you with an overview to learn how to effectively leverage your customer data using “intelligent machines” powered by Artificial Intelligence. This includes reviewing how to identify tasks to automate, provides an overview of the “intelligent machine” framework, and explores whether to build it or buy it based on your resource constraints.

Part 3: What Metrics Matter to you? Moves you into the world of selecting the right metrics for success that align on driving long-term growth. It explores the importance of creative assets and the area of cross-channel attribution to help optimize your “intelligent machine”.

Part 4: Picking the Right Approach to User Acquisition looks at five proven keys to user acquisition strategies and how to pick the right one for your business. It also dives deep into the “growth stack” — a set of tools that all work together to help you get the specific results you’re looking for, given your situation.

Part 5: Managing Increased Complexity and Risk moves you into the world of managing increased complexity and risk with the data needed for artificial intelligence to work. It also explores how the future growth team which would coexist with humans and machines working together in ways that take advantage of the intelligent machine framework we share in the book.

Part 6: The Next Frontier moves into how humans and machines can work symbiotically to produce the best work — and that “next frontier,” as well as its potential for triumphs and its challenges to turbocharge your growth efforts.

Summing up the wealth of important info in this book is tough but for me, the core message of Lean AI is that modern companies now have the tools and technology at their disposal to vastly speed up the previously slow and expensive processes for determining if your product and market are aligned and to test and measure experimental iterations of your core marketing strategy. We can now turn over a lot of the time-consuming work of running a successful business to AI, acquire customers faster and more efficiently and see our business grow as a result.

This book is bursting with valuable ideas and information for any business entrepreneur, leader, executive and investor who wants the competitive technical edge to scale up their customer acquisition growth better, smarter and faster than the incumbents. The startups with the best ideas don’t always win; it’s the startup teams that can execute well and leverage the right resources for optimal efficiency to get the job done well. Startups have a very low probability of success, so anything you can do to increase your chances of success or decrease your rate of failure is huge. We are moving into a golden age of AI and new companies simply must take advantage of it in order to be competitive. For those with little or no understanding of how to implement AI into their growth strategy, this book is a great resource, a must-read.

I have no doubt that AI will continue to drive tremendous transformation in the way innovative startups grow and this book provides a great roadmap to how to apply AI to growth in your business. It’s the best book that I have read so far in the Lean startup series and highly recommend it!

[Fred Cheyunski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rethink Digital Growth - Having read some of the books on artificial intelligence (AI) use, I turned to Lomit Patel’s “Lean AI” because it seemed to offer further insights not only for startups but also for legacy and mission-driven organizations attempting to modernize. The book argues that in an environment where “the average consumer’s attention is now literally worth billions of dollars” (p. 22), organizations must learn to navigate an attention economy that affects businesses, nonprofits, and public-service entities alike. Patel’s premise resonates with themes in related works such as Amerman’s “The Invisible Brand”—which examines how persuasion operates in digital environments—and De Langhe and Puntoni’s “Decision-Driven Analytics” which emphasizes making data actionable (see my reviews).

More specifically, the “Lean AI” is organized into 17 chapters across six parts, beginning with an introduction to growth marketing and the rationale for combining Lean Startup methods with AI. Patel emphasizes that survival depends on rapid experimentation: “We don’t need the best possible plan…We need to get through the build-measure-learn feedback loop with maximum speed” (p. 35). This iterative-learning approach feels familiar to those who know Sesame Workshop’s long-standing test-and-learn ethic, described in Rosemarie Truglio’s “Sesame Street: Ready for School,” though Patel applies it with a sharper commercial focus (see my review)

The middle sections of the book explore what Patel calls “Customer Acquisition 3.0,” covering automation, data integration, and the evolution toward “intelligent machines” that orchestrate cross-channel campaigns. He notes that “knowledge is power and there’s a lot of knowledge trapped in your internal data” (p. 33), an idea that parallels the argument in "Decision-Driven Analytics": organizations must identify the questions that matter and align data models accordingly. Patel highlights the accelerating role of Neuro Linguistic Programming and neural networks (p. 57), which echoes discussions in Katie Davis’s “Technology’s Child” (see my review) about how emerging technologies shape behavior and interaction.

Among the book’s most practically useful components is its careful breakdown of cross-channel attribution. Patel argues that without robust attribution, “growth teams are just guessing” (p. 145). He explains various attribution models—linear, U-shaped, and people-based—while noting that nearly 90% of U.S. companies were expected to adopt multichannel attribution by 2020 (p. 148). This analytic discipline has applications far beyond commerce. Educational and service organizations, such as those discussed in Truglio’s work or the broader ecosystem such as explored in Ugrešić’s novel “Fox” (my review) could use attribution analysis to understand how audiences encounter content, what matters most in their decision paths, and where resources should be invested for greatest effect.

Where “Lean AI” is limited is in even mentioning its applicability to nonprofit and human-service missions. The book largely assumes traditional growth goals—revenue, monetization, and customer lifetime value. Yet Patel also hints at broader applications when he notes that AI can “help you explore…entirely new experiences” and discover “new business opportunities” (p. 76). Mission-driven organizations might reinterpret these possibilities in terms of new learning environments, new forms of outreach, or more equitable service delivery.

Patel concludes that the future is not about choosing between humans and machines but about integrating them: “how you can best leverage artificial intelligence and human intelligence to work well together” (p. 276). In this sense, “Lean AI” stands as a practical complement to works such as “The Invisible Brand,” “Decision-Driven Analytics,” “Technology’s Child,” and “Sesame Street: Ready for School.” Read aside one another, they infer how data, persuasion, learning, and design could converge in an AI-driven world—and how organizations of all types might adapt in the continually changing digital environment.

[Digna A Roque · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let’s face it, there’s tons of information out there about artificial intelligence and how it can play a major role in the prosperity of your new business venture. But sifting through it all can take ages, and chances are, you probably don’t have the time… I know I don’t. And that’s one of the reasons I really loved Lean AI! This book is written in a clear and concise style that AI experts and newbies alike can totally grasp, and it presents crucial information about the Lean AI process in an easy-to-follow format that’s divided into six parts.

But here’s the deal breaker for me… Lean AI was written by someone who really knows his stuff, so I know I was getting first-rate info about how to grow startups in an innovative way. Author Lomit Patel is the Vice President of Growth at IMVU, the world’s largest avatar-based social network, and he’s responsible for user acquisition, retention and monetization. Before that, he managed growth at early stage startups including Roku (IPO), TrustedID (acquired by Equifax), Texture (acquired by Apple) and Earthlink. Yup, he’s the real deal!

In Lean AI, Lomit Patel shares precious nuggets mined from his first-hand knowledge of the marriage between Artificial Intelligence and the Lean Startup, one of the most successful systematic approaches to date. This approach has been widely adopted across the globe, changing the way startups are built and new products are launched. And in Lean AI, Lomit takes things to the next level. He provides the blueprint to help startups really grow by acquiring the right customers for their product using artificial intelligence, automation and a lean team. After reading this book you come out feeling that a Lean AI is truly the next evolution to radically improve your startup’s successful outcomes… and you really need to get with it! I mean, anyone can get a startup going right? But today, the trick to real longevity and unprecedented growth rests on your ability to use Artificial Intelligence… well, intelligently. And Lean AI can really help you do that, and then some. I highly recommend it!

[Arpit S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blueprint to automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence!

You don't have to be in the growth marketing field to understand the context of this book. However, it would help to have some basic understanding of user acquisition, mobile marketing, and the terminology around growth marketing as it does get a bit technical as you read on. Lean AI, provides lots of great examples that can be applied in your overall growth strategy. The author explains how one can take growth marketing to the next level in six parts.

About 90% of startups fail and 10% of those start-ups fail within the first year. The majority of these start-ups fail due to running out of money. The number one reason why startups fail is due to misreading market demand according to the studies done by embroker. What a lot of these start-ups focus on is growth at any cost without having to realize that they are already sitting on massive data from day one. It's a question of how are you going to leverage the data and how can you cut your user acquisition cost to maintain steady growth. The answer is intelligent machine learning.

You don't have to be at a start-up to consider any of this. It's practically the future of marketing and not growth at any cost. If you are involved in the growth strategy, this book walks you through key components of machine learning and AI and why it's considered as the future of marketing. Those who will embrace machine learning and AI will rise up to the top and will have a solid foundation to expand on to further enhance their ability to acquire users at a much quicker rate and at a cheaper cost.

Just read the book and you'll know what I mean. It's easy to read and a lot of information which you can mostly relate to if you're already part of a growth marketing team.

[Joe · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is nothing but filler content and jargon. There's no real substance since it almost feels like the author just copy and pasted fluff blog posts from McKinsey or HBR.

It was also weird to read how much time and energy the author spent on advocating for and justifying machine learning and the importance of data (again - only at the highest of levels) since this book was published in 2020. It was sort of like stepping back in a time machine since these topics are more than mainstream and accepted, even at the slowest of adopters, at this point. An ironic attribute for a book that harps on competing on the rate of learning.

Maybe I'm not the audience for this book (even if the book itself says I am), but I would not recommend spending anytime reading this.

[Dr. Tathagat Varma · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book should have been named Lean Marketing for Startups! - I think 70-80% is marketing, which isn't bad...just that I opened the book thinking it will be all about applying lean methods, or rather lean startup methods to developing AI, but instead the book is all about applying AI, or perhaps lean methods to applying AI in marketing, with a slight twist for startups.

In terms of AI, there is nothing new..it is too elementary except for some very generic hand-waving treatment of AI. The marketing discussion is reasonably in-depth, and might be helpful for a non-marketing tech startup founder.

[FcastilloI · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book with some repeated topics

This book has a nice things about how to develop a startup leverage our marketing with AI. There is some strategies and good practices that we should use for becoming successful, but there is some repeated topics that is not necessary because they were good explained in previous chapters.

[Alexander Snitsarenko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frankly, this book is not about AI. It is about marketing and some growth philosophy, in a very general way. A big part is about product metrics. The part about AI - is like "use AI and you will achieve more". But as we know, most do not achieve:)

The title is sound. But what is inside is very banal stuff.

The book has very few real cases, and those with no real details or metric.