My point is, jumping in with vision and method but zero skills results in pretty much guaranteed failure. On the other hand, if you can acquire the skills whil

My point is, jumping in with vision and method but zero skills results in pretty much guaranteed failure. On the other hand, if you can acquire the skills while, say, at university, or working for someone else, and then jump in with the method/vision, you'll have a much better chance. The manner in which you decide to implement your vision will necessarily depend on the skills you have. If you're a programmer, you will tend to dive into implementation first. If you're a salesperson, you'll tend to dive into sales first... etc. To maximise your chance, you need a reasonable level of skill in each of those core areas, so that you don't avoid obvious shortcuts just because you don't know anything. Some obvious shortcuts that are often missed by people with limited skills: - building a product for 6 months instead of making a few phone calls and preliminary paper-based demos to validate the demand; - hiring an outsourcing firm to "build your prototype" instead of rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself; - building an unusable or ugly product instead of using a baseline competence in design to create something reasonably ok... Etc. Reductio ad absurdum: by itself, with no skills, the lean startup method cannot achieve anything. It assumes some skills. The more skills you have that fit into whatever method you've picked, the higher your chances of success. If you don't mind needlessly failing over and over again for years, though, feel free to jump right in with no clue what you're doing.