leanHaving read through a few “Lean Startup” books it appears to me that’s the way to go for Silicon Valley type of startups. The books paint a beautiful picture of manageable risk and high profile success stories (e.g. Groupon, Quicken etc. and of course the spiritual mother Toyota).
While the outlined methods make a great deal of sense to me and I’d also love to try them, the claims of success are still largely based on anecdotal evidence.
Does anyone know of instances where “Lean Startup” was a failure or caused significant problems and delays?
For example: one method outlined in “Running Lean” (Ash Maurya) is conducting “problem interviews” before defining a “minimal viable product” - the focus is on solving existing problems real customers have and trying to gauge if there is a real interest in your solutions or how to adapt your solutions to be minimal (to the point) and still attractive and marketable.
What about technological innovation that basically creates “new problem spaces” and introduces something to the world that did not exist like that before (such as the telephone, TV, or Internet). Could “problem interviews” be a waste of time, when interviewees cannot follow your vision and ideas? I know, you could still argue that the existing problem space before the invention of the telephone was “long distance communication is difficult and slow”. But were people back then really having that problem and missing something, that would justify the risk of creating the telephone in the sense of “lean startup”? Both telephone and Internet brought people closer together and created an environment where we expect more from our lives (being able to quickly communicate and socialize online). About 16 years ago I had absolutely no cravings for meeting people online and I got my knowledge from books and the library.
To wrap it up: what could be points that would speak against the use of “lean startup” methods? Are there any real world examples for failure?
Most of the problems with the lean startup approach are the people using it, not the approach itself. The simplicity of the lean startup leads people to believe it will make finding a business model easy, it only makes it easier.
Speaking to this issue, I see having seen a bit of Ash Maurya’s data for LeanStack.com, and as far as I’m able to tell, most people on average only create one canvas, try the process and appear to give up.
As with most approaches, you only really understand the process after having used it for real a number of times - and most people attempt to use it, before learning how to use it.
To that end, if you’re really interested in trying the process, take an concept you know you already understand, model it, do customer development, do an MVP, etc. - then throw in a pivot, then do the process again, and lastly, create a new canvas from scratch, and repeat the whole process. Do all of this not to find a viable business, but to get a sense of the flow of using the process in the real world.
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