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The Lean Startup Frenzy

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38 pointsDanielRibeiro28 comments

The problem with Lean Startup is the same as the problem with Agile, which is that they are born from extremely smart people with great ideas, but inevitably as they become popular a massive cargo cult grows around them. Eventually there is so much noise and misinformation from bandwagon hoppers that even using the official term (Lean or Agile) becomes a bozo bit.

It's been that way with Agile for awhile, and I'm starting to feel that way about Lean Startup as well. When someone talks too much about Lean Startup I start to think they read a lot but don't have much experience actually executing.

The bottom line is that building startups requires adaptability and awareness at all junctures. There's no cookbook for success. Instead you must have a keen sense of what's working, what's not, and an intuition for pursuing promising ideas. Lean Startup strikes me as some useful lessons Ries learned the hard way, but nothing substantial enough to guide a whole generation of entrepreneurs, and certainly nothing that will save any entrepreneur from his own school of hard knocks.

I have this fear, too. For what it's worth, I think Eric Ries has learned a couple of important lessons from the Agile train wreck[1].

First, he's trademarked "Lean Startup" and has been diligent in keeping snake oil salesmen from using the name to peddle their usual bullshit.

Second, he doesn't seem inclined to start a certification program. Those are vast money-spinners, but I think they were a major contributor to the rotting of Agile.

I also think the startup focus will help. Startups don't have much money, and are mainly filled with DIY types. The real money in selling software process bullshit is in clueless large companies, not startups. It's also much easier to do cargo cult things at large companies, because there the cargo keeps arriving.

[1] http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...

Some people make products. Some people teach others how to run a company, how to make a product, how to make a profitable small business.

For the latter group of people, their words is the product.

So what you are saying is that "those who can't do, teach?" No offence but I think people are right to be somewhat skeptical of consultants with little practical experience and no proven track record. Not to say there isn't value there sometimes, but there is a lot of smoke and mirrors and snake oil too. People are smart to be skeptical of so-called "teachers".

To be fair on Eric Ries, he can and he did before he taught.

It actually looks like most of the people that teach entrepreneurship via blogs and books are entrepreneurs themselves, with successes that speak for themselves.

I am by no mean questioning Eric Ries. I read his blog posts pre-Lean Startup days and his engineering methods fit with me.

I think it was accidental for him to do the Lean Startup (something along the line of him being pushed by other to "hey, why don't you write more about this?")

He definitely has the experience already. 1 failed startup. 1 successful (not sure how far, but up to the reader to decide the range of success) company.

If he chose to venture out to public-speaking business, it's up to him to diversify his value.

That was my point, but perhaps I misunderstood the parent. The comment he was responding to simply pointed out how much cargo culting happens once a serious concept turns into a buzzword. Consultants and "teachers" start showing up at conferences and companies hawking their wares, which are long on platitudes and short on substance. Quite frankly it's tedious, you just have to attend any Agile conference today to observe this. The people who coined concepts like Agile and Lean Startup did so out of real world experiences and don't expect their ideas to be taken and applied literally, but understood by and interpreted primarily those who have or are going through similar experiences. Only people who attempt to grow and learn through experience can expect to effectively apply and teach other these concepts. Personally I've never believed that those who "can't do" have ever made very good teachers.

I have no problem with that business model "can't do, will teach".

People who make products can be questionable too. MLM is a product. Affiliate is also a product. Ponzi Scheme is a product. Online Gambling and Rakeback are products. Online dating is a product. Christian Mingle (online dating for Christian) is also another product. Lavalife and other Hotlines are also products.

At the end of the day, it is up to the customers to wisely choose.

At the end of the day, it is up to the customers to wisely choose.

I honestly don't think that's a scalable answer. The creator of a product spends years thinking about the product. Customers often spend mere seconds before purchase. Given the number of purchasing decisions people have to make, I don't think it's realistic to depend on customer wisdom. Just look at how many consumer decisions about technology were terrible from the perspective of we nerdy experts.

I think the first responsibility is on creators to create wisely. Then I think the community of entrepreneurs and makers has a responsibility to call out bad products and bad producers. With that accomplished, customer wisdom might have a chance.

From the article: "Eric Ries greatest venture may be the Lean Startup movement itself."

The top ranked review of his book on Amazon seems fairly dubious about the value of the book:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3287ICLQ9STI3/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...

I have a weakness for business books and am tempted to buy it anyway, but I'm still not convinced; I'm trying to cut back on books that don't actually leave me with anything.

I bought Ries book and made it most of the way through.

The problem here is that the Agile/Lean startup field is still in its infancy. The ideas are just now congealing.

That's good news because it means the field is wide open -- there are going to be a lot of cool new developments. But it's also bad news because every book you get is going to be hit-and-miss: a few good ideas, a few ideas that sound wacky, and a lot of noise. Agile is like that. It's a collection of best practices around iterative and incremental technology development. That's why it drives some folks nuts: different people can give you different answers and in the end it's all about custom tailoring and results-oriented process. What we're seeing now is this agile/best-practices idea extended to the startup world. That's a good thing! There's really good stuff in there. But it's going to evolve over many years, and just like Agile in the end you're not going to end up with a recipe book as much as a place to start, a lot of good material to absorb, and some guiding principles. It'll probably be something like the learn-do-adapt process we see in Scrum (Obligatory plug: just blogged about this the other day and posted about it on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3404085)

So I like the Lean Startup idea. I'm just not sure what it is yet. I don't think anybody is.

I'm fairly convinced that there is some good stuff behind 'lean startups', and that it's not just a fad.

What I'm a bit more skeptical of is how much of it can actually be distilled into practical advice, and how much of it would fit just fine in a one page summary.

Here's another way of looking at it, for fans of the book:

What concrete things did you do after having read it that you might have overlooked previously? Let's measure something:-)

Here's one for you. Last year I tried an experiment where I developed a new website or app every two weeks. At the end of two weeks, I switched and started on something new.

"Normally," you're supposed to spend years on one idea, slogging away. I said "screw that" and decided I try an iterative shotgun approach. I put out a lot of things, talked about them all, and then let each one of them compete for my attention. hn-books was one of these ideas (http://hn-books.com)

This was extreme iterative behavior, and I don't know anybody that recommends it. But I had a really good experience doing this and plan on starting back up in January. I found it's a better experience learning about the entire process of business model creation over and over again than just doing it one time and trying to get it perfect. If I were at YC, I'd probably pick up on a lot of that through social contacts with all the other folks, but on my own I found that iteration on something real and tangible was really the best way to learn.

EDIT: My comment seems very ironic considering that a couple of the other comments on this thread are basically along the lines of "it's really smart people and theory, but nothing that practical" In fact, in this experiment found it to be extremely practical.

I'm still reading it, so not had the time to truly practice it, but one important idea I've taken out of it is the idea of the growth and value hypotheses being the key assumptions in a startup's infancy.

I already believed that a startup is a series of hypotheses to be checked out, but focusing on the value hypothesis (will this product deliver value to its customers/users) and growth (will we be able to grow the user base as we expect) first is a good insight.

I have found customer discovery section of Steve Blank's Four Steps book and Business Model canvas from Business Model Generation book to be very invaluable tools for evaluating new ideas whether my own or of other new potential entrepreneurs. I actually converted customer discovery section into one pagers like canvas. It allows me to quickly go through evaluating any new idea, document different aspects, and identify holes in my understanding and where to focus. none of the stuff listed is unique but it provides a easy step by step actionable structure. I find just documenting business model canvas, product and customer hypotheses enough to figure out potential and challenges involved in pursuing an idea.

I think some of the fundamental bits can be distilled down. The highly iterative nature of it and the rigorous hypothesis testing is pretty clear to explain, and it really grabs people who get it.

A while back I mentored at a Lean Startup Machine event. Basically you take a weekend, come up with a product idea, and then tackle it in the Lean Startup fashion. One team came up with an idea for a photo-related product. Saturday morning they were arguing endlessly about the right features in the typical product meeting fashion.

After hearing the "get outside the building" mantra about 7000 times, they finally did it. They went down to Fisherman's Wharf and did quick interviews with actual people. They discovered that almost everything they were arguing about didn't matter to real potential customers. So they came back and produced some mockups of a very different product, one based on what real people said they wanted. They went back out again with the mockups, did more interviews, and revised again.

Then they took what they had learned, built a simple landing page, and drove traffic against it. They did A/B tests to see what price people liked and how to pitch it. By Sunday afternoon, they had a list of people who were ready to pay money for their product. In a weekend, they had made progress that would have taken many companies months just by eliminating a lot of pointless bullshit.

It was amazing to watch, and they totally got it. One of the people on the team went back to work, endured a couple of idiotic product meetings, and quit his job. Last I heard he was building iPad apps and loving it.

Ries book is very interesting, and Running Lean is more product focused and pragmatical[1], and less about the theories behind it. And the book was a result of testing Lean Startup Ideas, and taking a very skeptical look into it (which is, in itself, a very lean approach).

For me though, it seemed like a refreshing refocus and evolution of Agile into a more customer centric product development[2]

[1] http://www.runningleanhq.com/

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/HackerChick/lean-startup-how-devel...

There are tons of business books these days and I felt that most of them have become a "Self-Help Business" books as opposed to understanding/textbook-y kind of books.

I have no problem at all with "Self-Help Business" type of books. But authors, could you please reduce the number of pages to the very essentials?

Can "Lean Startup" book be reduced to 100-150 pages instead of 338 pages?

Can "The Checklist Manifesto" book be reduced to 80-100 pages?

What's the essentials of your words? I don't need reams of "here's a story to convince you more". These are called "Use-Cases" or "Business-Cases". Separate them to another book, or put them in your website as a pay/free PDF download PER business-cases (or bundle them, whichever).

Those "stories that try to convince the theory works" sound too fluffy when the author cherry-pick a specific event/case that match with the point they're trying to deliver.

The huge problem with taking out all the stories is that the book becomes quicker to read, but much drier and less memorable.

Stories make things stick in the reader's mind, as well as providing additional angles to explain complicated concepts by example.

As a simple example, I could explain that you shouldn't call for help when you don't need it, because people will start to ignore you and then you won't get the help when you do need it... or I could tell you the story of the boy who cried wolf. Which one do you think you'll remember in a year?

Stories are powerful stuff.

I hear you and agree to what you said given the context (complicated concepts, etc).

But somehow I doubt these books (Lean Startups, Checklist Manifesto, Agile) are complicated concepts. Derivatives and HFT might be considered complicated concepts.

Quicker to read but if it is to the point (especially bullet points) might lead to quicker to remember.

I've seen many bloggers claimed they read a 350 pages book in 2 sessions, 1 session, a flight to Chicago (5 hours?) and claiming that they "get it" is a bit questionable. Perhaps they know where the points are and skip the irrelevant parts? If that's the case, why not make the book slimmer? :D

But, it is what it is: there's probably a demand from society expecting their money to be worth.

I'm asking for a separation of the theory and the application. Start the book with the theory first and finish it with the application (business-case, use-case) to avoid intermingling the concept and the examples.

Can "The Checklist Manifesto" book be reduced to 80-100 pages?

Oh, certainly. I read that book either last year or early this year, and while it had some interesting points it felt highly padded.

It made me wonder, though, if the inclusion of a lot of touchy-feely content with emotional resonance was a technique to make things more memorable. That is, people respond to stories more so than just facts, so wrapping your bare facts in a story leads to a more lasting impression and (hopefully) action.

I still think most books could cut out a lot of their True Stories but it may not be all fluff.

My own true story: A few years ago at a local Ruby user group I was passing around some books, and one of them was about 100 pages and cost US $40. I commented on the price/page ratio, and a friend remarked that he would pay twice as much if they author could have made the book half the length.

My theory is that it's an audience problem.

Most buyers of business books are managers. Managers spend most of their time focused on people. So I suspect they will only feel like they really understand something when they understand it in terms of people.

For those of us who are more oriented to fact and data, it's just the opposite. Thus every business book seems to us like it's padded with bullshit and light on facts.

One of my own endeavors was to create a site for 'squeezing' books: http://www.squeezedbooks.com

It never really got anywhere, but I think business book summaries are a good idea; they're a direct response to all the added fluff.

For the past year+ I have heard people talk about lean, read articles about lean, and generally felt that I had an idea of how to run lean - and we were doing it. We ran surveys to ask our customers for feedback, and tried to only build things that we had validated they wanted. That seemed lean.

Several weeks ago, one of our investors, a three-time successful entrepreneur (his last company is doing close to $50MM in revenue this year) told me that his current endeavor was failing and he couldn't figure out why. After reading Lean Startup, he realized he had been lucky three times in a row, succeeding despite himself. He encouraged me and my team to read the actual book.

Long story short, @dasil003 is right, the problem with the explosion of Lean is that everyone writes tidbits about it and most people read those tidbits and think they're being "lean", but most, including myself, were misinformed about how to actually be lean. Not to mention, applying the true principles of lean is not easy. In fact, it's quite painful. But doing it half-ass leads to potentially even worse decision making than just operating a hunch-based business.

Earlier this week, after taking a step back and identifying our true core metrics, we launched a real lean dashboard with cohort testing and deep analytics into the health of our company. We have already run one successful cohort of 3 variations on a feature that we thought might help improve engagement, most of it was a relative smokescreen. All three implementations were nearly the same, but only one actually had a noticeable impact. Previously, we would have built one of them, seen that people used it (but not necessarily known the impact it had to company health) and would have moved onto the next feature. There would have been a 2 out of 3 chance that it was an unsuccessful implementation. And in those 2 out of 3 cases, even though maintaining that worthless feature would take ongoing resources, we would have kept it because it appeared people were using it, even though the impact to metrics that matter was close to zero.

It's safe to assume that the majority of our features have worked at a fraction of what they could have. Without identifying the true metrics that are going to make your company great, without real cohort testing, and without trying things in literally the lowest resource way possible, you are wasting massive amounts of energy and money. I can already tell that we are going to learn more about our product and business in the next 3-4 months than the whole previous 2 years.

Talking about Lean is a fad. I believe truly being Lean can change the way people build startups.

Steve Blank said in Four Steps something to the effect that he is simply articulating the steps that most successful startups have always followed.

I could have sworn that 37 Signals did this 'first' in that they popularized the idea of 'lean' or iterative product design around a SaaS model in 2004ish. It is the whole philosophy around the birth of Rails as I remember it. If you go way back into their blog archives it is likely there:

http://37signals.com/svn

I will give them 'first' because they built a framework around the idea of building fast and cheap.

Because startups are hot (again) and trendy (again) people are just looking for 'the right way' to do it. The real secret is that it is really hard work and knowing that you don't know everything while holding true to your vision.

Many of the ideas in Lean Startup are not new at all. And Eric Ries even admit to this!

Paul Graham wrote many of them on his essays[1] (one example: Launching Too Early, from 18 Mistakes[2], is rephrased as iterate on Lean Startup), and so did 37 Signals (the core of the MVP concept is outlined on Half, not half assed[3]).

Lean (which is usually placed along with Agile methodologies) and startups' synergies were mentioned 4 years ago by infoQ (the same site where the article on this post is from)[4], which also made the connection between the works of pg, Jessica Livingstone and 37 Signals.

The metric and funnel anayslis (an important piece of the measure part of the build/measure/learn loop) come from 500 Startups head Dave McClure's recurring presentation Startup Metrics 4 Pirates (which nowadays borrows from Lean Startup ubiquitous language).

The Lean Startup does bring some new ideas to the table (innovation accounting for instance), but the most important part is that it outlines some really overlooked ideas (like using cohorts[6] as a way out of the Vanity Metrics[7] pit).

[1] http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

[2] http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

[3] http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Half_Not_Half_Assed.ph...

[4] http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/02/agile-startups

[5] http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...

[6] http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/11/are-you-building-the-right-...

[7] http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/

is Lean Startup just a fad or does it generate real value for venture capitalists and founders?

Why hello, False Dichotomy! I haven't seen you in so long. Must be the US presidential run that's been keeping you so busy.

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