[MrEfficiency]

The whole 'Lean Startup' trend was such a feel good gimmick.

Sure if you arent sure about your product and havent done any market tests, a minimum viable product is fine.

However, I had/have a service that was already popular and my circle of friends were obsessed with MVP and Lean Startup. They pressured me and when I began mainstream marketing the response was that my service was low quality.

Those people were wrong, but minimal HTML/css bugs was all it took for people to question me.

[yathern]

I think the "Lean Startup" trend is very useful for a large amount of entrepreneurs, who suffer similar issues. Primarily being afraid of launching their product until it's "perfect".

It's very, very easy to just keep working on things indefinitely, never quite being perfect - a backlog that adds two new items for every one you finish. And the longer you work on something, the more pressure there is for it to be "perfect" at launch. Additionally, if in all this time, you're not getting feedback - you may be developing something that is not quite what people want. Feedback is crucial, and launching your project is a surefire way to get real, useful feedback.

Getting something out there is half the battle for a lot of people. Myself included. It's a very large psychological barrier to launching something. And the more work you put in, the larger that barrier grows - which is paradoxical sounding, but true. With a smaller, proof-of-concept launch, you can change your product direction more easily - if it turns out the feedback isn't great. With a larger more polished product, you have already invested so much into the current direction. There's momentum and emotional attachment (for people like me, that is) which makes it unwise to proceed like that.

But if you don't suffer from these problems of seeking false perfection before launch, and you get feedback throughout development from non-launch sources - you don't need to subscribe to the "lean" mentality.

[CPLX]

I disagree, though what you're saying is true I don't think it's the primary reason for why the lean startup model was so effective.

The lean startup mentality was fundamentally a product of the era of entrepreneurship that birthed it, and the market environment for software.

About 10-15 years ago the web was clearly here to stay and maturing, but literally huge problem spaces had been very lightly explored with software. So it made sense to do something, anything, to solve a problem that software was good at, because the alternative was almost always a legacy approach. Which means even an MVP was likely useful for customers. The only real danger was moving too slow.

It's the equivalent of buying up residential real estate in Brooklyn or San Francisco 20 years ago. Or whatever metaphor you prefer, where a market is growing so quickly that nearly all entrants have the ability to thrive if they are at least somewhat aligned with a consumer problem and willingness to pay.

Thing are different now. There's a software solution for almost everything, maybe not a great one but there's something out there. People are overwhelmed and exhausted by their options, have subscription fatigue, and likely have the experience of adopting a fledgling poorly supported MVP type solution that didn't live very long and regretting it.

People are pretty much the same. But the market environment has shifted.

Nobody gives a fuck about your landing page with two sentences and an email capture box any more. The world has moved on from this model.

[ryanwaggoner]

Nobody gives a fuck about your landing page with two sentences and an email capture box any more. The world has moved on from this model.

Good thing the lean startup was never about this.

The lean startup movement actually grew out of the work by Steve Blank, best summarized in the (unfortunately titled) book 4 Steps to the Epiphany. Eric Ries basically made it more accessible and catchier-sounding, but a LOT of the ideas from that movement are things we take for granted today in the startup world. They didn’t stop working, they just became the default instead of a new way of doing things.

The whole smoke test thing where you setup a shitty landing page and collect emails as validation is more from Tim Ferriss and The 4 Hour Work Week.

Oh, and for the record, it still works. Look at presales, Kickstarter, etc. Same idea: demand validation.

Finally, I reject your idea that everything that people want and need has been built and we’re all just bored and fatigued. Doesn’t match my experience as a business owner, consultant, or consumer. There’s more opportunity for innovation than ever before.

[canadapups]

I run an online business with my wife. Her background is in marketing. When I explained the MVP idea to her, she thought it was the dumbest idea ever. In her eyes spending expensive marketing dollars to bring people to see anything but a full featured product is a disaster. You only have 1 shot and 5 seconds of their attention so you better make sure they like what they see.

Any pivoting in the business strategy means you don't know your business space. Business opportunities and the required value-add features should be painfully obvious if you have experience and know the industry/niche.

[mindcrime]

In her eyes spending expensive marketing dollars to bring people to see anything but a full featured product is a disaster.

The lean startup approach doesn't advocate spending a lot of marketing dollars showing people your MVP. It advocates being, well, lean, until you have a good reason to believe that you have "product/market fit". It's then that you crank up the marketing/promotion stuff.

After all, wouldn't it be a disaster to spend a lot of expensive marketing dollars showing people a product that they don't want or need?

[canadapups]

There are a couple definitions of "marketing". Most people's definition of "marketing" is "advertising". However, in business school, "marketing" is knowing product fit even before building anything. Knowing the product niche, pricing, market size, competitive advantage... all in the business plan ahead of time. You would not spend any money on advertising (or engineering) without knowing all this. Lean startup is backward in this sense.

EDIT: i guess my point is, engineering isn't cheap either. Shouldn't be OK spending that money ahead of product fit either.

[mindcrime]

Knowing the product niche, pricing, market size, competitive advantage... all in the business plan ahead of time.

The whole point of the lean startup approach is to posit that the "business school approach" is wrong, exactly because you don't know all this stuff ahead of time, and that "business plans" are an outdated idea.

And if what you're doing is a truly novel product, then you almost certainly don't. If you're using the "fast follower" strategy to be the nth company doing a product in a certain space, then sure.

OTOH, even Steve Blank says that there are certain areas where you don't need to do Customer Discovery / Customer Development... like, if you're creating a cure for cancer, it's pretty much all engineering. If you build it (and it works) they will come. But I think that kind of scenario is the exception, not the rule.

[jgreaser]

There is a lot of confusion created when we start pushing Lean Startup for non-startup situations. It isn't meant to be a universal/one-size-fits-all approach to building a business.

A startup is "an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty" (quoting the insider cover of Eric Reis's The Lean Startup). If there isn't extreme uncertainty, then it isn't a great fit as an overall strategy.

On the other hand, the LS counterpoint would be that you'll miss considerable insights if you rely on existing knowledge/research (Ford's classic "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse" quote....)

[PebblesRox]

Reminds me of Joel Spolsky’s “Marimba Phenomenon” concept. His argument is that the amount of marketing and PR you do has to stay in proportion to the amount of polish and sophistication in your product, so you don’t end up giving everyone a bad first impression that they never revise.

“The Marimba Phenomenon is very hard to avoid when you spend too much money trying to launch a new product. It’s easy to spend on marketing and PR, since that just takes cash, but it’s hard to spend on software development, because that actually takes time and talent.”

“By contrast, small companies that don’t have great marketing budgets are in a great position to launch early and often.”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/02/massive-frontal-pr...

[JoeAltmaier]

But we're not talking about rebranding dog food. We're talking about creating a new way of leveraging technology to {something internet}. Maybe the old Detroit way of marketing cars isn't quite applicable?

[canadapups]

I guess, but he's doing a note-taking app. I think that niche is as old as Detroit.

[worldsayshi]

I think that MVP should be about features, not quality. Things need to work to make people want it.

[jgreaser]

> However, I had/have a service that was already popular and my circle of friends were obsessed with MVP and Lean Startup. They pressured me and when I began mainstream marketing the response was that my service was low quality.

Some friends exist just to give us bad advice. There are problems with Lean Startup, but this feels more like "people that don't understand a thing, giving advice about that thing."

[GarrisonPrime]

I thought the whole point of MVP and lean startup was to be able to finely hone a core service, making errors less likely. I also think there is a disconnect between that path and mainstream marketing.

Are you saying you should have waited until it had more robust features? Seems like the chances of bugs would go dramatically up.

The point of MVP is to avoid wasting time and resources on ideas that will never get enough traction to be worth it. (Even the best market research can be disastrously wrong.) Lean startups don’t plan to launch a marketing campaign for a half-done product.