Lesson 8. How Lean Inspires a Lifelong Learning Platform – NEXA15 and the 10-Year Journey of KisStartup
Nguyễn Đặng Tuấn Minh
In 2025, KisStartup reaches the milestone of 10 years accompanying Vietnam’s innovation ecosystem. Ten years may not be long in history, but it is enough for us to witness the maturity of a new generation of entrepreneurs—those who dare to try, dare to fail, dare to learn, and dare to start again. Along this journey, we discovered a simple truth: entrepreneurship does not begin with capital—it begins with the capacity to learn.
That is why, as we look back and prepare for a new decade, KisStartup has chosen to invest in the learning capacity of the community by building NEXA15—an online learning platform that is not just a library of courses but a Lean Learning Platform, where each lesson is a Build–Measure–Learn cycle designed for learners to immediately apply in real life.
Why We Choose the Lean Path in Learning
Lean Startup teaches us that every idea only becomes valuable when tested through action. After 10 years of working with thousands of entrepreneurs, we realized that most early failures do not stem from a lack of ideas or capital—but from a lack of the right learning method.
Learners—like entrepreneurs—often fall into three traps:
- Accumulating knowledge without taking action,
- Acting without measuring,
- Measuring without learning.
We aim to break those three traps. NEXA15 is designed so that every module does not end at “understanding,” but requires learners to try, measure, and learn again.
Each lesson is a small experiment—where you cannot just watch a video; you must apply and record your feedback. That is “Lean in learning”: learn just enough, act immediately, fail small, and improve fast.
Lean Learning for Everyone – Not Just Startups
Lean thinking is not limited to technology or early-stage founders. It is a way of thinking and acting in a constantly changing world.
- For students, Lean helps you self-discover, self-reflect, and find your own path.
- For SMEs, Lean helps you validate business ideas quickly, reduce investment risks, and accelerate digital transformation.
- For educators and startup support organizations, Lean provides a structured way to design training, incubation, and coaching programs grounded in real-world feedback.
- For policymakers and managers, Lean offers a way to observe societal change—not through thick reports, but through evidence gathered from the field.
Thus, NEXA15 is not “a course”—it is a practical knowledge platform designed for anyone to learn and build in their own way.
Why NEXA15 Was Created – Making Learning and Knowledge Sharing Lean
Throughout our journey, KisStartup has designed hundreds of training programs and accompanied startup teams across Vietnam. We noticed a common issue: knowledge is passed on in short workshops, but there is rarely a mechanism to help learners maintain long-term habits of learning and applying.
NEXA15 was created to fill exactly that gap.
Named after NEXA—short for Next Action, Next Learning, Next Impact—and “15” representing 15 minutes of daily learning and practice, the platform is built on three principles:
- Learn to act, not learn to know – every course includes an Action Task tied to the learner’s real-life context.
- Lean and measurable – short duration, focused content, and built-in progress assessment.
- Continuously updated and co-created – content developed from the reality of Vietnamese businesses, refined through feedback from learners and mentors.
In 2025, marking our 10-year journey, we launched a series of 10 Lean courses on Thinkific—distilled from thousands of hours of teaching, research, consulting, and hands-on work.
The 10 Lean Courses on NEXA15
1. Innovation-driven Entrepreneurship – Basic & Advanced
→ Provides frameworks and tools to identify, validate, and scale business models.
2. Digital Transformation for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises
→ Helps SMEs understand, select, and apply digital technologies effectively and inclusively.
3. Startup Ecosystems and Global Support Models
→ Analyzes the roles of stakeholders, investors, support organizations, governments, and businesses in fostering innovation.
4. Impact Businesses & Impact Innovation
→ Guides entrepreneurs in measuring impact and building sustainable business models balancing social, environmental, and economic goals.
5. Intellectual Property in Startups
→ Helps founders understand and leverage IP as a strategic asset.
6. Entrepreneurship Based on Cultural Heritage (Basic)
→ Shows how to combine cultural value with business thinking to create unique creative products.
7. AI for Innovation – Basic & Advanced
→ Enables startups to use AI for market research, product design, and business model optimization.
8. ESG for Businesses
→ Introduces practical standards, tools, and roadmaps for SMEs to adopt ESG.
9. Data Asset Management for SMEs
→ Guides businesses in building data strategies and protecting digital assets.
10. Lean Thinking for Founders
→ Synthesizes Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Effectuation, and AI-driven Innovation—the foundation of all KisStartup programs.
Lean Learning to Create Sustainable Value
Each NEXA15 course is not just a lecture, but a real story—drawn from ten years of working alongside Vietnamese businesses, especially founders who have experienced both success and failure.
We believe that knowledge becomes meaningful only when validated through experience, and experience becomes valuable only when given time for reflection.
That’s why every course integrates three components:
- Real case studies from KisStartup’s projects,
- Short action exercises for immediate application,
- Feedback and mentoring mechanisms to help learners not just “learn once,” but learn for life.
From Community – Toward Sustainable Creative Value
Over the past decade, KisStartup has been fortunate to learn from many inspiring people—passionate young founders, persistent innovators, dedicated support organizations, and investors who believe in Vietnam’s potential. They are the reason NEXA15 exists: so this community can keep learning together, sharing with one another, and continuing to grow.
Our 10-year anniversary is not the end of a journey, but the beginning of a new decade—where we look ahead to building a global learning community:
- where Vietnamese students can learn and connect with international founders,
- where mentors can share knowledge across borders,
- where every small idea can become a seed for big change.
We call this “From community—spreading into sustainable creative value.”
Looking Toward the Next Decade – Keep Learning, Keep Creating
In today’s turbulent world, entrepreneurship is not just for the young. It is the spirit of trying, relearning, and reinventing—at any age, in any field. As KisStartup enters its second decade, we hold this belief:
“The entrepreneur of the future is not the one who knows the most, but the one who learns the fastest.”
With NEXA15, we hope to offer that opportunity—to learn lean, experiment small, and generate meaningful impact.
For the past ten years, we have learned through failures.
For the next ten, we hope to learn with you—through action.
KisStartup – 10 Years of Learning, Experimenting, and Spreading Innovation.
From community – to sustainable creative value.
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