What best describes a 'lean startup'?

A lean startup is best described as a method that emphasizes rapid product development and customer feedback. This approach is rooted in the idea that startups can improve their chances of success by systematically testing their assumptions and learning from actual customer interactions rather than relying solely on traditional business plans or extensive market research.

In the lean startup framework, the focus is on building a minimum viable product (MVP), which allows entrepreneurs to introduce their product to the market quickly and gather feedback from early adopters. This feedback informs subsequent iterations of the product, helping to refine and optimize it based on real user experiences and needs. This cycle of build-measure-learn enables startups to be agile and responsive to market demands, ultimately leading to a better product-market fit.

The other options do not capture the essence of what a lean startup embodies. Minimizing costs, while a consideration for many startups, is not the primary focus of the lean startup methodology. Similarly, while lean startup principles can be applied in large corporations, they are fundamentally designed for entrepreneurial contexts, not as a strategy exclusively for big companies. Extensive market research may inform some decisions, but it is not a hallmark of the lean startup model, which prioritizes swift action and feedback loops over exhaustive preliminary analysis.