When I was in bschool, one of the founders of Aardvark came and gave a talk about their early days. What it boiled down to was a few super-smart guys taking EXA

When I was in bschool, one of the founders of Aardvark came and gave a talk about their early days. What it boiled down to was a few super-smart guys taking EXACTLY the strategy prescribed in this article (namely getting a landing page up and manually handling the backend processes). They eventually sold the company to Google for $50MM. Great for them. Where is Aardvark today? I said it then and I'll say it again- experimentation is for laboratories, not for businesses. At the core of a business is a product or service that people exchange money for because it solves a problem. Too many startups set out with the mission of meeting their founders' needs (ie, quick money and fame) as opposed to any real societal needs. The irony is that if the founders worked from the consumer need backward and took a more long-term approach, their chances of success would likely go up substantially. The Lean Startup Method to me involves some mix of laziness, lack of vision, and giving up on your product and vision prematurely. The faster your product proves viable, the easier it will be for competitors to rip it off anyway (Groupon, anyone?). You want real, sustained traction? Do the things that others are too lazy or unwilling to do because they are too hard or involve some risk. I'm not advocating over-engineering, and it is great that development tools have progressed to the point that designers and developers can perform experiments for free while honing their skills. But to put an initial idea out there and let the public bat it around and bastardize it until it has some weird mixture of users and you don't even understand your own product is a path to nowhere. Remember- tools are merely used to complete a task. Let the task dictate the tools, and not the other way around.