For the past year+ I have heard people talk about lean, read articles about lean, and generally felt that I had an idea of how to run lean - and we were doing i

For the past year+ I have heard people talk about lean, read articles about lean, and generally felt that I had an idea of how to run lean - and we were doing it. We ran surveys to ask our customers for feedback, and tried to only build things that we had validated they wanted. That seemed lean. Several weeks ago, one of our investors, a three-time successful entrepreneur (his last company is doing close to $50MM in revenue this year) told me that his current endeavor was failing and he couldn't figure out why. After reading Lean Startup, he realized he had been lucky three times in a row, succeeding despite himself. He encouraged me and my team to read the actual book. Long story short, @dasil003 is right, the problem with the explosion of Lean is that everyone writes tidbits about it and most people read those tidbits and think they're being "lean", but most, including myself, were misinformed about how to actually be lean. Not to mention, applying the true principles of lean is not easy. In fact, it's quite painful. But doing it half-ass leads to potentially even worse decision making than just operating a hunch-based business. Earlier this week, after taking a step back and identifying our true core metrics, we launched a real lean dashboard with cohort testing and deep analytics into the health of our company. We have already run one successful cohort of 3 variations on a feature that we thought might help improve engagement, most of it was a relative smokescreen. All three implementations were nearly the same, but only one actually had a noticeable impact. Previously, we would have built one of them, seen that people used it (but not necessarily known the impact it had to company health) and would have moved onto the next feature. There would have been a 2 out of 3 chance that it was an unsuccessful implementation. And in those 2 out of 3 cases, even though maintaining that worthless feature would take ongoing resources, we would have kept it because it appeared people were using it, even though the impact to metrics that matter was close to zero. It's safe to assume that the majority of our features have worked at a fraction of what they could have. Without identifying the true metrics that are going to make your company great, without real cohort testing, and without trying things in literally the lowest resource way possible, you are wasting massive amounts of energy and money. I can already tell that we are going to learn more about our product and business in the next 3-4 months than the whole previous 2 years. Talking about Lean is a fad. I believe truly being Lean can change the way people build startups.