6 ms·

Lean Startup "Marketing Bullshit"

46 points by hshah 16y ago

gfodor 16y ago
I'm admittedly short on my knowledge of this newfangled "lean startup" notion. But, it sounds to me like the fundamental principle is "lazy product evaluation." Ie, instead of building anything up-front, go out, find out what people want, and build that, MVP, reacting to markets that you know, provably, to already exist. At the risk of getting told I don't "get it", this sounds like a great way to build a very successful but horribly boring startup.
- kylemathews 16y ago
  Vision is a critical part of a leanstartup and by no means is the fundamental principle "lazy product evaluation". To quote an Eric Ries post: "Lean Startups are driven by a compelling vision, and they are rigorous about testing each element of this vision against reality." The two most important leanstartup principles or teachings for me are a) I'm stupid and make really poor assumptions all the time. To combat that, I need to continually be validating my ideas against real customer feedback. b) Validated learning is the most important metric for progress. Ultimately my company be successful if I understand better than anyone else the lives of my customers as that in-depth understanding of their hopes and dreams and pain will enable to build and market products which speak to those emotions.
  - gfodor 16y ago
    Your last paragraph has a lot of words but says very little. Can it not all be summed up as "talk to your customers?" Isn't this the foundation of any business? Does anyone actually advocate not doing so? Obviously you need to be aware of the problems your customers face as a business. But the notion that anything is the "most important" metric of progress reeks of classic silver-bulletism that plagues software engineering. I also am not a big believer in "validation." You're never going to "validate" your ideas through customers. You're going to evolve your ideas through seeing people use what you build. But they're never "validated" or "proven right" through intimate customer feedback. Good ideas are "validated" over the course of years, often after much ridicule, resistance, and pain.
    - rw140 16y ago
      Well, 'talk to your customers' is a little different from 'listen to your customers and make sure you understand exactly what problem your product/service solves for them'. And I think the only difference between evolution (as you've described it) and validation is that seeing how people use what you build, and getting qualitative data on those users is emphasised, rather than something that just happens over time. At a minor level, that could be making sure that the next feature you implement is the one that will make your software much more usable from their point of view, rather than the shiniest or most technically interesting to implement. (e.g. it doesn't matter if your mousetrap automatically telling your computer when it's caught something, if their local mice just aren't interested in $bait_that_works_best_in_bobs_house ) On the larger scale, if your customers are using your product to solve a problem you didn't expect, you can't optimise your product so it sells even better. If the largest user of your mousetrap is the gremlin-catcher's guild, then perhaps you need to look at building more gremlin-specific features, and changing your marketing a little. And, of course, the simplest metric for validation is that if they ain't buying it then it ain't doing what they want enough for them to pay for it. Disclaimer: I have never run a startup, let alone used these principles. They just seem to make sense to me.
    - edanm 16y ago
      "Can it not all be summed up as 'talk to your customers?' Isn't this the foundation of any business? Does anyone actually advocate not doing so?" I don't think anyone advocates not talking to your customers, but Steve Blank makes a bigger point than that. The point isn't just to talk to your customers. It's that the CEO, the founders, the people with the control have to talk to the customers. A lot of companies have the CEO, the programming team, and the rest of the decision makers relatively isolated from the customers, whereas the sales team is the one out there talking to customers every day. This isolation still makes it look like the company is talking to customers (they have sales out there, every day, listening to customer feedback). But because the real decision makers aren't themselves experiencing the way the customers use their product, they'll never understand it the way they need to to keep making their product better.
    - rmc 16y ago
      'Talk to you customers' is a bi ambiguoud, and could be wrong. My reading of the lean startup thing is that you look at the numbers and metrics of what your customers are doing, rather than ask them what they want. If you're not sure what feature to add, don't ask people, and do surveys, do a half version of all the possibilities, and see what features your customers are using.
- rokhayakebe 16y ago
  Would you rather build a very successful & boring startup, or work on something super cool, with no clear way of turning a profit?
  - edanm 16y ago
    That's a good question, and I'm sure people go either way on this. I for one am definitely looking for success, but I try to find it by doing things I like and care about. I'm comforted by Paul Graham's thoughts on this, namely that if you build something people like, you'll usually manage to find a profit somewhere.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - jteo 16y ago
    Success is success. The details are secondary.
    - giffc 16y ago
      this attitude doesn't prevent successes, but it does lead to unnecessarily high failure rates
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
klochner 16y ago
The author is lacking an understanding of business jargon. Very little jargon was vacuous when coined. It is the endless repetition by the uninformed that renders it meaningless. Ries is trying to change the way people think about startups, and as a part of that effort he is consciously promoting neologisms that capture the principles of the lean startup. I like those principles, I understand that he wants to create language to concisely express those principles to help grow awareness of his philosophy. I think "Tipping Point"--which the author cites as true "Marketing Bullshit"--is a good analogy. The general public (people who hadn't read Complexity or Chaos) didn't understand complexity before Gladwell, and so the phrase "Tipping Point" was coined and used to capture the principle. It worked: pretty much everyone understands it now. It's just that the term "Tipping Point" is now slightly irritating to anyone who "got it" a long time ago, and it has been (predictably) misused enough to place it in the Business Jargon Pantheon. That's how business jargon works. Just consult your Buzzword Bingo scorecard for examples.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Gladwell didn't invent that term 'tipping point'. I remember seeing it and using it long before his book came out, which according to Wikipedia was around 2000.
  - klochner 16y ago
    Please send me a link if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he coined the non-scientific, or at least popular usage. I don't remember having heard the phrase tipping point before the book came out, even though I was fairly familiar with the idea.
    - georgieporgie 16y ago
      Dictionary.com lists Gladwell in the etymology. However, Wikipedia's entry for "tipping point (sociology)" (which, to my knowledge, is effectively the same as Gladwell's use) says, "The phrase was coined in its sociological use by Morton Grodzins, by analogy with ..." The page on Grodzins says, "He is known for coining the term "tipping point" in studies of white flight, such as The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem (1958)". No doubt Gladwell popularized the phrase, but I don't think he coined it by any means.
plinkplonk 16y ago
I personally find Steve Blank has some interesting things to say and Eric Ries not so much, comparitively. The latter seems to be trying to turn a simple idea (combine agile engineering practices with Steve Blank's "customer discovery/validation" idea") into a consultingware "movement" with kool-aid conferences and such, just as with all business fads. The jury is still out on the eventual success of such efforts. The nearest analogy is the whole "Agile" movement. There was a useful/interesting kernel of ideas but it was soon overrun by scammy consultants (e.g the hwle "Scrum Master" certification scam). I suspect "Lean Startups" are on the same path. I do think Mr.Ries has some (mildly) interesting things to say, but (and this is probably blasphemy for at least a subset of HN readers) my "marketing bullshit" filter is on at high when I read or listen to him these days. I believe that the whole "lean startup" movement is in its early stages of being overrrun by scamsters so there are still interesting ideas there. So yes, (imo) at least some part of the "Lean Startup" (the phrase is copyrighted by Mr Ries btw!) stuff is marketing BS. As always you as the consumer of such fads have to use your intelligence to discard the marketing fluff and find the useful core. And every fad generally has a (sometimes tiny) useful core. Caveat Emptor. Useful idea, especially as it applies to methodology salesmen, irrespective of whether said methodology applies to sw dev (agile) or building/running a business ("lean startup").
- giffc 16y ago
  I believe that Eric's heart is in the right place and he truly wants to help more entrepreneurs. I don't disagree that born-again evangelism and "scammy consultants" is an unfortunate side effect of what is going on. While people will like or dislike my op-ed as they will, I'd just like to say that in writing the blog post, I had no such motives (consulting, that is) -- I'm just another startup guy trying to build a company. I do agree with the other commenter that there is a new set of "buzzwords" floating around, like MVP, product-market fit, pivot, etc. These phrases emerge as shorthand. But still I do believe that these authors are more rigorous, more into measurement and results, and more down-to-earth practical than the kinds of biz-consulting blowhard that turned everyone off business speak in the first place.
  - plinkplonk 16y ago
klochner 16y ago
Here's a snippet from a HN submission currently ranking about as well as the Lean post: "Introducing, Braintrust, my bootstrapped lean startup . . . Braintrust is hosted in the cloud, works in real-time, and provided as a SaaS offering."

46 points by hshah 16y ago

I'm admittedly short on my knowledge of this newfangled "lean startup" notion. But, it sounds to me like the fundamental principle is "lazy product evaluation." Ie, instead of building anything up-front, go out, find out what people want, and build that, MVP, reacting to markets that you know, provably, to already exist. At the risk of getting told I don't "get it", this sounds like a great way to build a very successful but horribly boring startup.

kylemathews 16y ago
Vision is a critical part of a leanstartup and by no means is the fundamental principle "lazy product evaluation". To quote an Eric Ries post: "Lean Startups are driven by a compelling vision, and they are rigorous about testing each element of this vision against reality." The two most important leanstartup principles or teachings for me are a) I'm stupid and make really poor assumptions all the time. To combat that, I need to continually be validating my ideas against real customer feedback. b) Validated learning is the most important metric for progress. Ultimately my company be successful if I understand better than anyone else the lives of my customers as that in-depth understanding of their hopes and dreams and pain will enable to build and market products which speak to those emotions.
- gfodor 16y ago
  Your last paragraph has a lot of words but says very little. Can it not all be summed up as "talk to your customers?" Isn't this the foundation of any business? Does anyone actually advocate not doing so? Obviously you need to be aware of the problems your customers face as a business. But the notion that anything is the "most important" metric of progress reeks of classic silver-bulletism that plagues software engineering. I also am not a big believer in "validation." You're never going to "validate" your ideas through customers. You're going to evolve your ideas through seeing people use what you build. But they're never "validated" or "proven right" through intimate customer feedback. Good ideas are "validated" over the course of years, often after much ridicule, resistance, and pain.
  - rw140 16y ago
    Well, 'talk to your customers' is a little different from 'listen to your customers and make sure you understand exactly what problem your product/service solves for them'. And I think the only difference between evolution (as you've described it) and validation is that seeing how people use what you build, and getting qualitative data on those users is emphasised, rather than something that just happens over time. At a minor level, that could be making sure that the next feature you implement is the one that will make your software much more usable from their point of view, rather than the shiniest or most technically interesting to implement. (e.g. it doesn't matter if your mousetrap automatically telling your computer when it's caught something, if their local mice just aren't interested in $bait_that_works_best_in_bobs_house ) On the larger scale, if your customers are using your product to solve a problem you didn't expect, you can't optimise your product so it sells even better. If the largest user of your mousetrap is the gremlin-catcher's guild, then perhaps you need to look at building more gremlin-specific features, and changing your marketing a little. And, of course, the simplest metric for validation is that if they ain't buying it then it ain't doing what they want enough for them to pay for it. Disclaimer: I have never run a startup, let alone used these principles. They just seem to make sense to me.
  - edanm 16y ago
    "Can it not all be summed up as 'talk to your customers?' Isn't this the foundation of any business? Does anyone actually advocate not doing so?" I don't think anyone advocates not talking to your customers, but Steve Blank makes a bigger point than that. The point isn't just to talk to your customers. It's that the CEO, the founders, the people with the control have to talk to the customers. A lot of companies have the CEO, the programming team, and the rest of the decision makers relatively isolated from the customers, whereas the sales team is the one out there talking to customers every day. This isolation still makes it look like the company is talking to customers (they have sales out there, every day, listening to customer feedback). But because the real decision makers aren't themselves experiencing the way the customers use their product, they'll never understand it the way they need to to keep making their product better.
  - rmc 16y ago
    'Talk to you customers' is a bi ambiguoud, and could be wrong. My reading of the lean startup thing is that you look at the numbers and metrics of what your customers are doing, rather than ask them what they want. If you're not sure what feature to add, don't ask people, and do surveys, do a half version of all the possibilities, and see what features your customers are using.
rokhayakebe 16y ago
Would you rather build a very successful & boring startup, or work on something super cool, with no clear way of turning a profit?
- edanm 16y ago
  That's a good question, and I'm sure people go either way on this. I for one am definitely looking for success, but I try to find it by doing things I like and care about. I'm comforted by Paul Graham's thoughts on this, namely that if you build something people like, you'll usually manage to find a profit somewhere.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jteo 16y ago
  Success is success. The details are secondary.
  - giffc 16y ago
    this attitude doesn't prevent successes, but it does lead to unnecessarily high failure rates
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

klochner 16y ago

The author is lacking an understanding of business jargon. Very little jargon was vacuous when coined. It is the endless repetition by the uninformed that renders it meaningless. Ries is trying to change the way people think about startups, and as a part of that effort he is consciously promoting neologisms that capture the principles of the lean startup. I like those principles, I understand that he wants to create language to concisely express those principles to help grow awareness of his philosophy. I think "Tipping Point"--which the author cites as true "Marketing Bullshit"--is a good analogy. The general public (people who hadn't read Complexity or Chaos) didn't understand complexity before Gladwell, and so the phrase "Tipping Point" was coined and used to capture the principle. It worked: pretty much everyone understands it now. It's just that the term "Tipping Point" is now slightly irritating to anyone who "got it" a long time ago, and it has been (predictably) misused enough to place it in the Business Jargon Pantheon. That's how business jargon works. Just consult your Buzzword Bingo scorecard for examples.

mkramlich 16y ago
Gladwell didn't invent that term 'tipping point'. I remember seeing it and using it long before his book came out, which according to Wikipedia was around 2000.
- klochner 16y ago
  Please send me a link if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he coined the non-scientific, or at least popular usage. I don't remember having heard the phrase tipping point before the book came out, even though I was fairly familiar with the idea.
  - georgieporgie 16y ago
    Dictionary.com lists Gladwell in the etymology. However, Wikipedia's entry for "tipping point (sociology)" (which, to my knowledge, is effectively the same as Gladwell's use) says, "The phrase was coined in its sociological use by Morton Grodzins, by analogy with ..." The page on Grodzins says, "He is known for coining the term "tipping point" in studies of white flight, such as The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem (1958)". No doubt Gladwell popularized the phrase, but I don't think he coined it by any means.

plinkplonk 16y ago

I personally find Steve Blank has some interesting things to say and Eric Ries not so much, comparitively. The latter seems to be trying to turn a simple idea (combine agile engineering practices with Steve Blank's "customer discovery/validation" idea") into a consultingware "movement" with kool-aid conferences and such, just as with all business fads. The jury is still out on the eventual success of such efforts. The nearest analogy is the whole "Agile" movement. There was a useful/interesting kernel of ideas but it was soon overrun by scammy consultants (e.g the hwle "Scrum Master" certification scam). I suspect "Lean Startups" are on the same path. I do think Mr.Ries has some (mildly) interesting things to say, but (and this is probably blasphemy for at least a subset of HN readers) my "marketing bullshit" filter is on at high when I read or listen to him these days. I believe that the whole "lean startup" movement is in its early stages of being overrrun by scamsters so there are still interesting ideas there. So yes, (imo) at least some part of the "Lean Startup" (the phrase is copyrighted by Mr Ries btw!) stuff is marketing BS. As always you as the consumer of such fads have to use your intelligence to discard the marketing fluff and find the useful core. And every fad generally has a (sometimes tiny) useful core. Caveat Emptor. Useful idea, especially as it applies to methodology salesmen, irrespective of whether said methodology applies to sw dev (agile) or building/running a business ("lean startup").

giffc 16y ago
I believe that Eric's heart is in the right place and he truly wants to help more entrepreneurs. I don't disagree that born-again evangelism and "scammy consultants" is an unfortunate side effect of what is going on. While people will like or dislike my op-ed as they will, I'd just like to say that in writing the blog post, I had no such motives (consulting, that is) -- I'm just another startup guy trying to build a company. I do agree with the other commenter that there is a new set of "buzzwords" floating around, like MVP, product-market fit, pivot, etc. These phrases emerge as shorthand. But still I do believe that these authors are more rigorous, more into measurement and results, and more down-to-earth practical than the kinds of biz-consulting blowhard that turned everyone off business speak in the first place.
- plinkplonk 16y ago

klochner 16y ago

Here's a snippet from a HN submission currently ranking about as well as the Lean post: "Introducing, Braintrust, my bootstrapped lean startup . . . Braintrust is hosted in the cloud, works in real-time, and provided as a SaaS offering."