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Why Lean Startup Is Flawed

21 points by t23 11y ago

api 11y ago
I wrote something on this a while back: http://adamierymenko.com/space-mountaineering/ http://adamierymenko.com/space-mountaineering/ The metaphor feels strained... I wrote it after too much coffee and not enough sleep. But the basic ideas come from learning theory and I think are valid. Lean startup assumes that there is a hill to climb, and that gradient descent works in all cases.
volaski 11y ago
I don't think this guy actually read the book (or read but didn't read carefully enough) and based his post on what he read online, and a lot of people online are misinformed about the concept of "lean startup'. Most of the "flaws" he mentioned are his on flaws in how he interpreted the theory. The main takeaway from the lean startup book is that you should be more disciplined with your business instead of just doing it without any measures (which is what most people end up doing and I am also guilty of that), and I can totally sympathize with it. The rest are just details.
- Zombieball 11y ago
  I have to agree. I don't quite understand where the first section "STARTING WITH WRONG ASSUMPTION" even comes from. The book puts heavy emphasis on learning what to truly build and even describes different types of pivots based upon your learnings. In fact the book almost tells you that you will probably never start with the right assumptions. Hence the build, measure, learn cycle.
glimmung 11y ago
There are some points in there worth exploring, but the fact that he misstates so much about the lean start-up concept and processes makes it hard to engage with, and profoundly irritating to read. This could have been the first draft of something interesting and provocative, but in its current form it's a missed opportunity at best.
dgreensp 11y ago
Lean Startup isn't primarily about building things, it's about the process of customer development. To make an analogy, before the advent of the scientific method, people would talk about theories, and maybe perform some experiments, but they did not rigorously interrogate the natural world through a cycle of experiments and theories. Some "flaws" in Science one might point out are: "It's all about doing experiments based on hypotheses, but what about discussing theories?" (In practice, scientists do both.) "Science doesn't tell you what hypothesis to test." (True, not directly; you have to build up a model of what past experiments are telling you and get a bit creative.) "If you run five experiments to test five theories, the only thing you can possibly learn is whether one of those five theories is true!" (Also true, to a point, though you might come up with other ideas along the way. Time is finite; you have to choose something test and not test something else.) To rebut the article more directly, it is absolutely in line with Lean Startup to build cheap prototypes, or even build nothing and use humans to run a service at first. It's also necessarily to have a dialogue with the customer, but because of the very point raised in the article that customers don't know what they want until they see it, it is not just a single conversation but a series of conversations over time. As the entrepreneur (like the scientist), you develop hypotheses that you can only test by putting something in front of the customer. When you think of yourself as building the business model, not the product, it becomes even more clear. If a potential customer says, "Heck, I would pay you $X/month just to be able to do ABC," don't take their word for it -- see if you can get them to actually pay for some minimal thing that does ABC, even if it doesn't scale and you are playing Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. That's the spirit of Lean Startup. If they don't make any statements of that form, but you have a strong hunch, then you really need to test it.
shalmanese 11y ago
If I had to summarize lean startup, it would be: speed is magic, speed is expensive. It's hard to convey to someone who's not had the epiphany just how much speed magically solves so many different problems in so many different domains for free, it's kind of amazing. But every incremental gain in speed is pretty expensive which is why people so often shy away from pressing on the gas pedal and dick around. As an example, the OP brings up that most founders are non-technical and it would cost them $50,000 to build an MVP. His conclusion from this is that MVPs are not worth it. Instead, the correct conclusion is that if building an MVP costs $50,000 and a few weeks of project management, you should instead invest your time in learning just enough prototyping skills so you can bring that down to a week and $200. And then you should invest another big chunk of your time in bringing that down again to 4 hours and $0. Is that hard and scary and look like it will take a lot of time? Yes. That's why so few entrepreneurs are successful, they want to believe there's an easy path to success which allows them to shy away from hard and scary things. The successful entrepreneurs are the ones who just put on their boots and attack the mountain until it's worn down.

21 points by t23 11y ago

api 11y ago

I wrote something on this a while back: http://adamierymenko.com/space-mountaineering/ http://adamierymenko.com/space-mountaineering/ The metaphor feels strained... I wrote it after too much coffee and not enough sleep. But the basic ideas come from learning theory and I think are valid. Lean startup assumes that there is a hill to climb, and that gradient descent works in all cases.

volaski 11y ago

I don't think this guy actually read the book (or read but didn't read carefully enough) and based his post on what he read online, and a lot of people online are misinformed about the concept of "lean startup'. Most of the "flaws" he mentioned are his on flaws in how he interpreted the theory. The main takeaway from the lean startup book is that you should be more disciplined with your business instead of just doing it without any measures (which is what most people end up doing and I am also guilty of that), and I can totally sympathize with it. The rest are just details.

Zombieball 11y ago
I have to agree. I don't quite understand where the first section "STARTING WITH WRONG ASSUMPTION" even comes from. The book puts heavy emphasis on learning what to truly build and even describes different types of pivots based upon your learnings. In fact the book almost tells you that you will probably never start with the right assumptions. Hence the build, measure, learn cycle.

glimmung 11y ago

There are some points in there worth exploring, but the fact that he misstates so much about the lean start-up concept and processes makes it hard to engage with, and profoundly irritating to read. This could have been the first draft of something interesting and provocative, but in its current form it's a missed opportunity at best.

dgreensp 11y ago

Lean Startup isn't primarily about building things, it's about the process of customer development. To make an analogy, before the advent of the scientific method, people would talk about theories, and maybe perform some experiments, but they did not rigorously interrogate the natural world through a cycle of experiments and theories. Some "flaws" in Science one might point out are: "It's all about doing experiments based on hypotheses, but what about discussing theories?" (In practice, scientists do both.) "Science doesn't tell you what hypothesis to test." (True, not directly; you have to build up a model of what past experiments are telling you and get a bit creative.) "If you run five experiments to test five theories, the only thing you can possibly learn is whether one of those five theories is true!" (Also true, to a point, though you might come up with other ideas along the way. Time is finite; you have to choose something test and not test something else.) To rebut the article more directly, it is absolutely in line with Lean Startup to build cheap prototypes, or even build nothing and use humans to run a service at first. It's also necessarily to have a dialogue with the customer, but because of the very point raised in the article that customers don't know what they want until they see it, it is not just a single conversation but a series of conversations over time. As the entrepreneur (like the scientist), you develop hypotheses that you can only test by putting something in front of the customer. When you think of yourself as building the business model, not the product, it becomes even more clear. If a potential customer says, "Heck, I would pay you $X/month just to be able to do ABC," don't take their word for it -- see if you can get them to actually pay for some minimal thing that does ABC, even if it doesn't scale and you are playing Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. That's the spirit of Lean Startup. If they don't make any statements of that form, but you have a strong hunch, then you really need to test it.

shalmanese 11y ago

If I had to summarize lean startup, it would be: speed is magic, speed is expensive. It's hard to convey to someone who's not had the epiphany just how much speed magically solves so many different problems in so many different domains for free, it's kind of amazing. But every incremental gain in speed is pretty expensive which is why people so often shy away from pressing on the gas pedal and dick around. As an example, the OP brings up that most founders are non-technical and it would cost them $50,000 to build an MVP. His conclusion from this is that MVPs are not worth it. Instead, the correct conclusion is that if building an MVP costs $50,000 and a few weeks of project management, you should instead invest your time in learning just enough prototyping skills so you can bring that down to a week and $200. And then you should invest another big chunk of your time in bringing that down again to 4 hours and $0. Is that hard and scary and look like it will take a lot of time? Yes. That's why so few entrepreneurs are successful, they want to believe there's an easy path to success which allows them to shy away from hard and scary things. The successful entrepreneurs are the ones who just put on their boots and attack the mountain until it's worn down.