9 ms·

Following the Lean Startup Method

89 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

arkitaip 3y ago
One of the most important life lessons I've learnt is to not conflate the model for the reality it tries to capture but also not waste a good model because it doesn't perfectly capture the underlying reality. In this case, poor understanding of both the model and the underlying reality means that people will dismiss both the lean startup methodology and MVP as a technique when both are incredibly powerful tools aimed at exploring if and how a product might be successful.
- soulofmischief 3y ago
  The map is not the territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation > The point is not that all maps are useless; rather, the point is simply to maintain critical thinking about the discrepancies: whether or not they are either negligible or significant in each context, how to reduce them
- drc500free 3y ago
  Absolutely. It's become almost trite at this point to note that "all models are wrong; some models are useful," but it's true and the MVP is one of the better ones. The difficulty is the same one Agile has - the model has become more useful as an excuse to avoid rigor than as a way to get better outcomes or understand the world. If you say you're "doing agile," you don't have to put the effort into writing rigorous requirements. If you say you're "doing an MVP," you don't have to put in the effort into building a rigorously-engineered product. Neither model is supposed to be about being lazy. They're supposed to be about making trade-offs between different kinds of rigor. Agile is supposed to unlock the ability to truly re-plan after each sprint and make very different decisions about your product direction. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are being rigorous about looking at your results, generating alternative paths, and assessing them. Otherwise you just end up with no documentation and a shitty architecture. MVPs are supposed to be prototypes that reveal the answer about a specific hypothesis that is critical to your strategy. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are rigorous about what knowledge you don't have about your customers and technology, and build exactly the thing that will answer the question. Otherwise you just end up with a half-baked and buggy product. Together, they give you the information you need to head in the best direction and the means to do so. But only if you're taking all that time you were originally spending on system design, rigorous documentation, and product quality and putting it towards stuff that tech teams aren't usually as comfortable doing.
  - Beldin 3y ago
    > MVPs are supposed to be prototypes that reveal the answer about a specific hypothesis that is critical to your strategy. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are rigorous about what knowledge you don't have about your customers and technology, and build exactly the thing that will answer the question. Put differently (to put the misunderstanding to rest): MVPs aren't alpha- or beta-versions of software; don't treat them as such.
iAkashPaul 3y ago
Those slanted underlines on hyperlinks was really cool though
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  To me they look like separate links.
baxtr 3y ago
The lean startup approach will regain relevance in a non-ZIRP world where money truly costs money once again.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  Why should money cost money? It's created literally out of bits being flipped in a computer. It's marginal cost is essentially zero. The only thing affecting its price should be the risk profile it's loaned against, not the cost of obligated associated liquidity.
ggeorgovassilis 3y ago
So essentially MVPs need to demonstrate higher quality now, attesting not only to the product, but to the capabilities of engineering organisations. Team topologies [1] is an organisational paradigm that solves a major issue with tribes locking themselves up in silos, while contributing to quality on both product- and platform- levels. [1] https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2022/07/10/team-topologies-fix-the-spotify-model/ https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2022/07/10/team-topologies-f...
webinar 3y ago
"I believe some folks in tech love to make simple things sound complex, maybe to seem more impressive." Seems to apply here
nadam 3y ago
"What Ries and the Lean Startup advocate is picking an X value so that you have to build as little as necessary to validate your long-term assumptions. Neither the book nor the method prescribes whether the “X value” should be high or low on the spectrum. This decision is entirely up to you, influenced by your market and your criteria for evaluation." For exactly this reason, although the lean method still works, it is no longer a 'revelation' or an 'edge'. It was a revelation when the cost of validation was low. Now using the lean method is just a triviality: you constantly need to validate your ideas. As the cost of validation increases dramatically the importance of other success factors (like insight, strategy, deep knowledge) increase.
- mikehollinger 3y ago
  Y - the concept of frequent validation differentiated the stuff I’ve worked on that’s done well from the stuff that didn’t. Put a different way: the items that we didn’t get good validation on had to landed with a thud in market, or needed to make sizable changes before they were accepted. The items we validated effectively had to make the same changes, but we got there in smaller steps with less pain. Also: don’t forget business model validation. Having great tech that sellers won’t sell, or customers can’t buy is a tremendous waste.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
There are a few problems with the approach: - Technical debt /migration costs when mvp matures / more bugs - High support costs, since MVP often doesn't solve everything lot of manual work needs to be done. - Often making promises of future features to close sales - This leads to high emotional costs, continue asking of clients when promises are fullfilled. Now of course you can create a very stable solid product, properly tested with perfect data structure. But that's highely unlikely to happen with an MVP, due to the nature of the approach. Also very hard to get exact feature set right. These things are solvable, but I don't think they are always properly adressed by the advocates of the approach.
- hresvelgr 3y ago
  > Now of course you can create a very stable solid product, properly tested with perfect data structure. But that's highely unlikely to happen with an MVP, due to the nature of the approach. I think this is more to do with "move fast and break things" than MVP specifically. > Now of course you can create a very stable solid product, properly tested with perfect data structure. But that's highely unlikely to happen with an MVP, due to the nature of the approach. The interpretation I've always had is that an MVP is the smallest subset of useful features to take the product to market. How you reach that subset is entirely up to you, and in my opinion, you should take time and do a good job, not rush. In my experience, if you solve only the problems you have, you'll be fine as far as long term maintenance goes. Hacks and corner cutting are inevitable but you'll be doing a lot less of it if you can stave off the desire to invent new abstractions.
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    Yeah but those ideas don't work well together, the whole idea of MVP is to move fast, since you don't know if it's worth investing time in those features yet. So it also doesn't make sense to fully develop it to maturity in that line of thought. So practically that's what happens.
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    Your definition is incomplete: an MVP is the smallest subset of useful features to take the product to market in order to prove or disprove its viability and the reason you want to keep it to the minimum is to minimize the time and money invested in it so that you can throw it away if it doesn’t work and then try a different product. You’ll probably have to do this several times before succeeding so your budget for each should be about 1/10th of your available time and money.
peterhadlaw 3y ago
While I'm a huge fan of the lean startup method, Ries was heavily associated with the R E S I S T movement and ultimately ended up creating resistbot. Kinda lame imo.
RamblingCTO 3y ago
If someone from the company reads this: for gods sake, limit the width of text. This is horrible on wide screens.
- punkspider 3y ago
  And for some reason the scrollbar doesn't display on Chrome (tested with multiple profiles and latest Chrome 122.0.6261.95)
  - 0xferruccio 3y ago
    Oh thanks for reporting this just pushed a fix!
- 0xferruccio 3y ago
  Does it look better now? I just pushed a fix for larger screens! We just redesigned our blog so there's still some rough edges :)
- greenie_beans 3y ago
  does your browser not have a reader mode that fixes typography problems like that?
ryukoposting 3y ago
The author argues that the notion that an "MVP is an outdated idea" is a misunderstanding of the definition of MVP, but I think the author is missing the the point that those folks are trying to make. As the minimum viable product approaches the complexity of a complete product, the difference between the two shrinks to the point that the concept of MVP isn't all that useful anymore. That's the actual case against Lean Startup in 2024. To be clear, I personally think MVP is still an immensely useful concept, but Reid's own 0-100 scale makes it hard to understand that. There is no 100. Most SaaS, and user-facing software in general, must be developed and maintained perpetually. It's not about approaching 100, it's about approaching a limit at infinity. Today's MVP identifies a local maxima that's a composite of two axes: user experience, and technical debt. If that sounds surprisingly similar to the original definition, that's because it is.
- enra 3y ago
  > As the minimum viable product approaches the complexity of a complete product, the difference between the two shrinks to the point that the concept of MVP isn't all that useful anymore. That's the actual case against Lean Startup in 2024. I think this is an excellent way to summarize this. I'm one of the anti-MVP persons out there, and my point is that more often than not people tend to use MVP as practice ship something half baked, not truly trying to build something viable or trying to validate anything. Then the response is crickets. In many professional domains, people are busy and not willing to spend time or evaluate solutions that are half way there to provide any value. For startups with limited resources, more practical advice would be focus on building great core experience for a specific user group. You narrow the scope, build less but something better and different and shows the value for that group fast, whatever it takes. You could call this a MVP but I'd just call it building a product people want to use. The MVP term is unnecessary. Some ways maybe the success of Lean Startup also means that it's just a normal to build things iteratively. I don't think anyone is recommending here go back to the days shutting yourself in a basement for 5 years and then shipping 10,000 copies of it on a CD to all the RadioShacks.
  - 0xferruccio 3y ago
    > You could call this a MVP but I'd just call it building a product people want to use. The MVP term is unnecessary. Isn’t the difference here just semantics From my understanding the premise of the article is that over the years there’s too much negative sentiment around the term MVP. This negative sentiment comes from too many people building a half assed product instead of a kick ass half
gardenhedge 3y ago
TLDR: (from the article) "test and challenge your hypothesis early and often"
- makerdiety 3y ago
  How to test hypotheses? Because I need a framework for testing business hypotheses like how developers need the Angular framework for front end web development.
- 0xferruccio 3y ago
  love it. no need to make it more complex than that!
resource_waste 3y ago
My strong 'Anti-Lean Startup' take. I partially blame that book on my first failed company. I passively maintain that company now. Sure I was 23 years old, but.... >Showing my first, most loyal customers a MVP ruined my image/branding. Instead of looking professional, I looked like a cheap blog. >Selling a MVP to these people made them never return as customers. While I stand by the base quality of the product, it didn't have the shine we see in Apple products. >I see sites in my space that are far worse, and much more popular because of the shine/marketing. I really have the best website from an objective standpoint. The discoverability is a real issue, I mostly grow organically or from SEO. tl;dr I showed my 95% finished product to the thought leaders, they thought I was unprofessional and couldn't be trusted. Still trying to gain that trust back 10 years later.
- Beldin 3y ago
  It sounds as if your MVP wasn't viable... That is: what you thought was the important part of the 95% and what the potential customers thought, differed too much. Sidenote: I wouldn't be surprised if you closely followed what customers stated and still ended up somewhere they didn't care for.
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    There is a lot of luck in figuring out what’s minimum viable. even if you listen closely and deliver what the customers say, there is a good chance they won’t like it when they get it.
  - profstasiak 3y ago
    If you want to redefine MVP in that manner, the term and whole idea carries exactly 0 bits of information. It's a bit like yelling "not real socialism" / "not real capitalism" every time someone gives a good counter example to your prefered ideology
    - christoff12 3y ago
      But this isn't redefining the term. Running experiments to discover what's most important, then focusing on building to solve for that is the whole point. If you get far enough along where you're not able to iterate with well-regarded design partners out of the gate, you've messed up somewhere along the minimum and/or viable spectrum.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
riku_iki 3y ago
I think marketing is more critical choke point in current saturated markets. And if company needs lots of fund to promote product, it doesn't really matter if product is lean or not.
- nradov 3y ago
  What are current saturated markets?
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    All of them. What markets are not saturated in your opinion?
    - nradov 3y ago
      That's such a bizarre take. Innovations are coming out every day that enable the creation of entire new markets. Go invent something.
      - AznHisoka 3y ago
        That's actually a realistic, completely true take IMO. I mean, one look at the real world and it's the only take that makes sense to me
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        Could you give example, so we would have some meaningful discussion?
        nradov 3y ago
        Well since we're on HN just take a look through the latest YCombinator batch. Some are attempting to break into saturated markets but others are entirely novel. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
I think the lean startup method as described in the book doesn't work anymore. It works well at the beginning of a wave when things are unknown. Maybe with ai products it's still doable. In saturated markets what works is marketing and branding. Basically occupying a different part of the mind as all other products. It's also very fun and exciting to do. The biggest thing I learnt before turning my business and making it work is that most business education / videos out there are out of date. The real trick to business and the only example of this is what I heard Paul Graham mentioned once in an interview: doing something naughty. Amazon started off by cheating wholesale book dealers. Facebook started with mass scraping. LinkedIn started with mass spamming. Snapchat started for sexting. YouTube started with piracy. Doing something naughty is what gives you the competitive edge.

89 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

One of the most important life lessons I've learnt is to not conflate the model for the reality it tries to capture but also not waste a good model because it doesn't perfectly capture the underlying reality. In this case, poor understanding of both the model and the underlying reality means that people will dismiss both the lean startup methodology and MVP as a technique when both are incredibly powerful tools aimed at exploring if and how a product might be successful.

soulofmischief 3y ago
The map is not the territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation > The point is not that all maps are useless; rather, the point is simply to maintain critical thinking about the discrepancies: whether or not they are either negligible or significant in each context, how to reduce them
drc500free 3y ago
Absolutely. It's become almost trite at this point to note that "all models are wrong; some models are useful," but it's true and the MVP is one of the better ones. The difficulty is the same one Agile has - the model has become more useful as an excuse to avoid rigor than as a way to get better outcomes or understand the world. If you say you're "doing agile," you don't have to put the effort into writing rigorous requirements. If you say you're "doing an MVP," you don't have to put in the effort into building a rigorously-engineered product. Neither model is supposed to be about being lazy. They're supposed to be about making trade-offs between different kinds of rigor. Agile is supposed to unlock the ability to truly re-plan after each sprint and make very different decisions about your product direction. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are being rigorous about looking at your results, generating alternative paths, and assessing them. Otherwise you just end up with no documentation and a shitty architecture. MVPs are supposed to be prototypes that reveal the answer about a specific hypothesis that is critical to your strategy. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are rigorous about what knowledge you don't have about your customers and technology, and build exactly the thing that will answer the question. Otherwise you just end up with a half-baked and buggy product. Together, they give you the information you need to head in the best direction and the means to do so. But only if you're taking all that time you were originally spending on system design, rigorous documentation, and product quality and putting it towards stuff that tech teams aren't usually as comfortable doing.
- Beldin 3y ago
  > MVPs are supposed to be prototypes that reveal the answer about a specific hypothesis that is critical to your strategy. It's only a positive tradeoff if you are rigorous about what knowledge you don't have about your customers and technology, and build exactly the thing that will answer the question. Put differently (to put the misunderstanding to rest): MVPs aren't alpha- or beta-versions of software; don't treat them as such.

iAkashPaul 3y ago

Those slanted underlines on hyperlinks was really cool though

rqtwteye 3y ago
To me they look like separate links.

baxtr 3y ago

The lean startup approach will regain relevance in a non-ZIRP world where money truly costs money once again.

hgomersall 3y ago
Why should money cost money? It's created literally out of bits being flipped in a computer. It's marginal cost is essentially zero. The only thing affecting its price should be the risk profile it's loaned against, not the cost of obligated associated liquidity.

ggeorgovassilis 3y ago

So essentially MVPs need to demonstrate higher quality now, attesting not only to the product, but to the capabilities of engineering organisations. Team topologies [1] is an organisational paradigm that solves a major issue with tribes locking themselves up in silos, while contributing to quality on both product- and platform- levels. [1] https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2022/07/10/team-topologies-fix-the-spotify-model/ https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2022/07/10/team-topologies-f...

webinar 3y ago

"I believe some folks in tech love to make simple things sound complex, maybe to seem more impressive." Seems to apply here

nadam 3y ago

"What Ries and the Lean Startup advocate is picking an X value so that you have to build as little as necessary to validate your long-term assumptions. Neither the book nor the method prescribes whether the “X value” should be high or low on the spectrum. This decision is entirely up to you, influenced by your market and your criteria for evaluation." For exactly this reason, although the lean method still works, it is no longer a 'revelation' or an 'edge'. It was a revelation when the cost of validation was low. Now using the lean method is just a triviality: you constantly need to validate your ideas. As the cost of validation increases dramatically the importance of other success factors (like insight, strategy, deep knowledge) increase.

mikehollinger 3y ago
Y - the concept of frequent validation differentiated the stuff I’ve worked on that’s done well from the stuff that didn’t. Put a different way: the items that we didn’t get good validation on had to landed with a thud in market, or needed to make sizable changes before they were accepted. The items we validated effectively had to make the same changes, but we got there in smaller steps with less pain. Also: don’t forget business model validation. Having great tech that sellers won’t sell, or customers can’t buy is a tremendous waste.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

There are a few problems with the approach: - Technical debt /migration costs when mvp matures / more bugs - High support costs, since MVP often doesn't solve everything lot of manual work needs to be done. - Often making promises of future features to close sales - This leads to high emotional costs, continue asking of clients when promises are fullfilled. Now of course you can create a very stable solid product, properly tested with perfect data structure. But that's highely unlikely to happen with an MVP, due to the nature of the approach. Also very hard to get exact feature set right. These things are solvable, but I don't think they are always properly adressed by the advocates of the approach.

hresvelgr 3y ago
> Now of course you can create a very stable solid product, properly tested with perfect data structure. But that's highely unlikely to happen with an MVP, due to the nature of the approach. I think this is more to do with "move fast and break things" than MVP specifically. > Now of course you can create a very stable solid product, properly tested with perfect data structure. But that's highely unlikely to happen with an MVP, due to the nature of the approach. The interpretation I've always had is that an MVP is the smallest subset of useful features to take the product to market. How you reach that subset is entirely up to you, and in my opinion, you should take time and do a good job, not rush. In my experience, if you solve only the problems you have, you'll be fine as far as long term maintenance goes. Hacks and corner cutting are inevitable but you'll be doing a lot less of it if you can stave off the desire to invent new abstractions.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  Yeah but those ideas don't work well together, the whole idea of MVP is to move fast, since you don't know if it's worth investing time in those features yet. So it also doesn't make sense to fully develop it to maturity in that line of thought. So practically that's what happens.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  Your definition is incomplete: an MVP is the smallest subset of useful features to take the product to market in order to prove or disprove its viability and the reason you want to keep it to the minimum is to minimize the time and money invested in it so that you can throw it away if it doesn’t work and then try a different product. You’ll probably have to do this several times before succeeding so your budget for each should be about 1/10th of your available time and money.

peterhadlaw 3y ago

While I'm a huge fan of the lean startup method, Ries was heavily associated with the R E S I S T movement and ultimately ended up creating resistbot. Kinda lame imo.

RamblingCTO 3y ago

If someone from the company reads this: for gods sake, limit the width of text. This is horrible on wide screens.

punkspider 3y ago
And for some reason the scrollbar doesn't display on Chrome (tested with multiple profiles and latest Chrome 122.0.6261.95)
- 0xferruccio 3y ago
  Oh thanks for reporting this just pushed a fix!
0xferruccio 3y ago
Does it look better now? I just pushed a fix for larger screens! We just redesigned our blog so there's still some rough edges :)
greenie_beans 3y ago
does your browser not have a reader mode that fixes typography problems like that?

ryukoposting 3y ago

The author argues that the notion that an "MVP is an outdated idea" is a misunderstanding of the definition of MVP, but I think the author is missing the the point that those folks are trying to make. As the minimum viable product approaches the complexity of a complete product, the difference between the two shrinks to the point that the concept of MVP isn't all that useful anymore. That's the actual case against Lean Startup in 2024. To be clear, I personally think MVP is still an immensely useful concept, but Reid's own 0-100 scale makes it hard to understand that. There is no 100. Most SaaS, and user-facing software in general, must be developed and maintained perpetually. It's not about approaching 100, it's about approaching a limit at infinity. Today's MVP identifies a local maxima that's a composite of two axes: user experience, and technical debt. If that sounds surprisingly similar to the original definition, that's because it is.

enra 3y ago
> As the minimum viable product approaches the complexity of a complete product, the difference between the two shrinks to the point that the concept of MVP isn't all that useful anymore. That's the actual case against Lean Startup in 2024. I think this is an excellent way to summarize this. I'm one of the anti-MVP persons out there, and my point is that more often than not people tend to use MVP as practice ship something half baked, not truly trying to build something viable or trying to validate anything. Then the response is crickets. In many professional domains, people are busy and not willing to spend time or evaluate solutions that are half way there to provide any value. For startups with limited resources, more practical advice would be focus on building great core experience for a specific user group. You narrow the scope, build less but something better and different and shows the value for that group fast, whatever it takes. You could call this a MVP but I'd just call it building a product people want to use. The MVP term is unnecessary. Some ways maybe the success of Lean Startup also means that it's just a normal to build things iteratively. I don't think anyone is recommending here go back to the days shutting yourself in a basement for 5 years and then shipping 10,000 copies of it on a CD to all the RadioShacks.
- 0xferruccio 3y ago
  > You could call this a MVP but I'd just call it building a product people want to use. The MVP term is unnecessary. Isn’t the difference here just semantics From my understanding the premise of the article is that over the years there’s too much negative sentiment around the term MVP. This negative sentiment comes from too many people building a half assed product instead of a kick ass half

gardenhedge 3y ago

TLDR: (from the article) "test and challenge your hypothesis early and often"

makerdiety 3y ago
How to test hypotheses? Because I need a framework for testing business hypotheses like how developers need the Angular framework for front end web development.
0xferruccio 3y ago
love it. no need to make it more complex than that!

resource_waste 3y ago

My strong 'Anti-Lean Startup' take. I partially blame that book on my first failed company. I passively maintain that company now. Sure I was 23 years old, but.... >Showing my first, most loyal customers a MVP ruined my image/branding. Instead of looking professional, I looked like a cheap blog. >Selling a MVP to these people made them never return as customers. While I stand by the base quality of the product, it didn't have the shine we see in Apple products. >I see sites in my space that are far worse, and much more popular because of the shine/marketing. I really have the best website from an objective standpoint. The discoverability is a real issue, I mostly grow organically or from SEO. tl;dr I showed my 95% finished product to the thought leaders, they thought I was unprofessional and couldn't be trusted. Still trying to gain that trust back 10 years later.

Beldin 3y ago
It sounds as if your MVP wasn't viable... That is: what you thought was the important part of the 95% and what the potential customers thought, differed too much. Sidenote: I wouldn't be surprised if you closely followed what customers stated and still ended up somewhere they didn't care for.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  There is a lot of luck in figuring out what’s minimum viable. even if you listen closely and deliver what the customers say, there is a good chance they won’t like it when they get it.
- profstasiak 3y ago
  If you want to redefine MVP in that manner, the term and whole idea carries exactly 0 bits of information. It's a bit like yelling "not real socialism" / "not real capitalism" every time someone gives a good counter example to your prefered ideology
  - christoff12 3y ago
    But this isn't redefining the term. Running experiments to discover what's most important, then focusing on building to solve for that is the whole point. If you get far enough along where you're not able to iterate with well-regarded design partners out of the gate, you've messed up somewhere along the minimum and/or viable spectrum.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

riku_iki 3y ago

I think marketing is more critical choke point in current saturated markets. And if company needs lots of fund to promote product, it doesn't really matter if product is lean or not.

nradov 3y ago
What are current saturated markets?
- riku_iki 3y ago
  All of them. What markets are not saturated in your opinion?
  - nradov 3y ago
    That's such a bizarre take. Innovations are coming out every day that enable the creation of entire new markets. Go invent something.
    - AznHisoka 3y ago
      That's actually a realistic, completely true take IMO. I mean, one look at the real world and it's the only take that makes sense to me
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      Could you give example, so we would have some meaningful discussion?
      - nradov 3y ago
        Well since we're on HN just take a look through the latest YCombinator batch. Some are attempting to break into saturated markets but others are entirely novel. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

I think the lean startup method as described in the book doesn't work anymore. It works well at the beginning of a wave when things are unknown. Maybe with ai products it's still doable. In saturated markets what works is marketing and branding. Basically occupying a different part of the mind as all other products. It's also very fun and exciting to do. The biggest thing I learnt before turning my business and making it work is that most business education / videos out there are out of date. The real trick to business and the only example of this is what I heard Paul Graham mentioned once in an interview: doing something naughty. Amazon started off by cheating wholesale book dealers. Facebook started with mass scraping. LinkedIn started with mass spamming. Snapchat started for sexting. YouTube started with piracy. Doing something naughty is what gives you the competitive edge.