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Whether or not you should adopt a lean startup/pivot approach is based on your view of the world, and how you fit in it. Peter Thiel wrote a great article[1] a

Whether or not you should adopt a lean startup/pivot approach is based on your view of the world, and how you fit in it. Peter Thiel wrote a great article[1] about this. In a nutshell, for the purpose of this topic, you can divide the world into two axis: optimistic/pessimistic & determinate/indeterminate. If you are optimistic and indeterminate, then the Lean Startup method is for you. You think there is an answer (somewhere), but you don't think you can know it ahead of time. Your company won't create products like the iPhone, but it will discover niches like AirBNB did through trial and error. My own company, Fohr, is firmly in the optimistic/deterministic camp, as am I. Trying to "find" a market, pivoting endlessly, etc. are not for us. We already know what we want to build, and the only "customer" we have to please, ultimately, is me, and I've known the essence of our company/product since the late 90s, when I first came up with the idea at Siggraph. The only "pivoting" we've done is to accomplish that vision in technical terms (aka, R&D), not to determine if "people want it" or if there's a market. Maybe I'm just too stubborn to pivot, but I'd like to think it's because I'm optimistic and believe the world is knowable and the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so that's what I'm doing. I suspect Elon Musk feels the same way. [1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-13-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels...

ScottBurson 14y ago
That Peter Thiel essay is brilliant! I can't resist a brief quote: Any company with a good secret plan will always be undervalued in a world where nobody believes in secrets and nobody believes in plans. The ability to execute against a long-term secret plan is thus incredibly powerful and important. I did not know Thiel had such interesting things to say. I will seek out more of his writings now.
9oliYQjP 14y ago
I know there are different definitions of pivoting going around, so much so that it has essentially lost its meaning. But I just wanted to point out that most lean startup definitions of pivot I have read involve the overall vision remaining consistent. That sounds a lot like what you've been doing, although your pivots are dictated primarily by what you want, and lean startup pivots would be dictated primarily by previous experimentation. Put another way, your pivots are more offensive in nature (i.e. charging toward the goal) and lean startup pivots are more defensive in nature (i.e. mitigating risk when an initial charge doesn't pan out). EDIT: It turns out the definition of lean startup pivot I was aware of is just Eric Ries' interpretation. So I'm wrong.
pbiggar 14y ago
> not to determine if "people want it" or if there's a market. According to my world view, this is suicidal. Can you explain it to me from your world view?
- erichocean 14y ago
  What I was trying to say is that I don't try and answer those two questions by "pivoting", in the Lean Startup sense. I do answer those questions, but I do it in an optimistic, deterministic way, which is to create a narrative for our company, its product, sales, service, pricing, etc. and then step back and evaluate the narrative. I run the narrative by people I know (not strangers), and see how they respond. This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust. I iterate like crazy, and I'm constantly tweaking things (as anyone who knows me will tell you). But I do it from the worldview, if you will, that I can risk many years and capital and release a product or service into the world, iPhone-like, and get the result I anticipated in my narrative. I'm confident that's true because I'm constantly developing narratives on a smaller scale, and testing them. I'm not always right, but I'm right about enough things, enough of the time, that I feel confident basing my company's vision on that.
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    > This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust. This iteration (or small "pivot" if you will) seem identical to the "lean" idea.
    - erichocean 14y ago
      I thought so too when I first heard about Eric Reis' Lean Startup, and even went and implemented a bunch of his stuff. I ended up eliminating his practices, because they didn't fit. I think the resemblance is superficial, but it could just be me who did it wrong. I do know that when I dropped his approach, my process improved a lot. If I had to guess, I'd say that his approach is too reliant on past-looking data (e.g, the results of an A/B test), and not reliant enough on the ability to project an outcome into the future and actually hit the outcome with any kind of confidence. I work far better, and have far better success, when I bring the outcome I want into reality, vs. testing a bunch of hypothesis and trying to divine which worked, without any understanding of why, other than the A/B test indicated people liked this shade of blue. Also, orienting my company so that it could "pivot" based on the analysis essentially crippled productivity, because so much energy is spent on being able to pivot (e.g. huge unit test suites, continuous deployment, etc.) that very little business value is being created for the end user. The whole thing was actually a huge waste, the opposite of what "lean" is supposed to be about, ironically. Since we use everything we create in house, it's very obvious when actual value isn't being created, and pivoting, A/B tests, and the like gave essentially useless results, or at best, trivial results, and produced no value. That's why we dropped it. I didn't understand why it didn't work for us until I read Thiel's axis of startups, and discovered that Reis' approach isn't targeted at companies or people like me. I think his goals are fine (really, does anyone disagree with them?), but his practices only apply to specific kinds of people/companies, in my experience. You can keep the goals, change the practices, and it'll remain relevant for people like me and the companies we run.

ScottBurson 14y ago

That Peter Thiel essay is brilliant! I can't resist a brief quote: Any company with a good secret plan will always be undervalued in a world where nobody believes in secrets and nobody believes in plans. The ability to execute against a long-term secret plan is thus incredibly powerful and important. I did not know Thiel had such interesting things to say. I will seek out more of his writings now.

9oliYQjP 14y ago

I know there are different definitions of pivoting going around, so much so that it has essentially lost its meaning. But I just wanted to point out that most lean startup definitions of pivot I have read involve the overall vision remaining consistent. That sounds a lot like what you've been doing, although your pivots are dictated primarily by what you want, and lean startup pivots would be dictated primarily by previous experimentation. Put another way, your pivots are more offensive in nature (i.e. charging toward the goal) and lean startup pivots are more defensive in nature (i.e. mitigating risk when an initial charge doesn't pan out). EDIT: It turns out the definition of lean startup pivot I was aware of is just Eric Ries' interpretation. So I'm wrong.

pbiggar 14y ago

> not to determine if "people want it" or if there's a market. According to my world view, this is suicidal. Can you explain it to me from your world view?

erichocean 14y ago
What I was trying to say is that I don't try and answer those two questions by "pivoting", in the Lean Startup sense. I do answer those questions, but I do it in an optimistic, deterministic way, which is to create a narrative for our company, its product, sales, service, pricing, etc. and then step back and evaluate the narrative. I run the narrative by people I know (not strangers), and see how they respond. This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust. I iterate like crazy, and I'm constantly tweaking things (as anyone who knows me will tell you). But I do it from the worldview, if you will, that I can risk many years and capital and release a product or service into the world, iPhone-like, and get the result I anticipated in my narrative. I'm confident that's true because I'm constantly developing narratives on a smaller scale, and testing them. I'm not always right, but I'm right about enough things, enough of the time, that I feel confident basing my company's vision on that.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  > This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust. This iteration (or small "pivot" if you will) seem identical to the "lean" idea.
  - erichocean 14y ago
    I thought so too when I first heard about Eric Reis' Lean Startup, and even went and implemented a bunch of his stuff. I ended up eliminating his practices, because they didn't fit. I think the resemblance is superficial, but it could just be me who did it wrong. I do know that when I dropped his approach, my process improved a lot. If I had to guess, I'd say that his approach is too reliant on past-looking data (e.g, the results of an A/B test), and not reliant enough on the ability to project an outcome into the future and actually hit the outcome with any kind of confidence. I work far better, and have far better success, when I bring the outcome I want into reality, vs. testing a bunch of hypothesis and trying to divine which worked, without any understanding of why, other than the A/B test indicated people liked this shade of blue. Also, orienting my company so that it could "pivot" based on the analysis essentially crippled productivity, because so much energy is spent on being able to pivot (e.g. huge unit test suites, continuous deployment, etc.) that very little business value is being created for the end user. The whole thing was actually a huge waste, the opposite of what "lean" is supposed to be about, ironically. Since we use everything we create in house, it's very obvious when actual value isn't being created, and pivoting, A/B tests, and the like gave essentially useless results, or at best, trivial results, and produced no value. That's why we dropped it. I didn't understand why it didn't work for us until I read Thiel's axis of startups, and discovered that Reis' approach isn't targeted at companies or people like me. I think his goals are fine (really, does anyone disagree with them?), but his practices only apply to specific kinds of people/companies, in my experience. You can keep the goals, change the practices, and it'll remain relevant for people like me and the companies we run.