[irjustin]

A number of the comments are saying this is bad because from Facebook, numbers are unrealistic ($100mm?!), signs tell you nothing.

Personally, I've done startups longer than I want to admit (10+ yrs). If I was to start another one, the play book would look basically like this article.

Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build.

The problem I had when I started and why so many founders get it wrong is the steps usually look like - Idea => Build or just ... Build.

There is a lot of good advice here. Sure the numbers might appear insane (just replace, $1m, $300k, $300), but don't let that stop this from being a good framework. The goal is to remove as many assumptions about what you're supposed to build as fast as possible because chances are, more than not, the assumptions are wrong from Idea => Build. This is a good way to validate a number of assumptions and it's only just the beginning

The only thing I would have added is - ask for Money.

Ideas will iterate very quickly (or die) once money is involved.

[onion2k]

Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build.

This is a common strategy if you just want to 'do a startup' but it misses the need. Every successful business I can think of started with a founder needing a product to exist. All the startups I've been involved in have been products I wanted to exist because I needed them myself, or I had a close relationship with someone who needed them. Turning them in to something that could make money was a key goal, but I'd have built some form of them anyway even if it wasn't.

If you're just thinking up things people might want and throwing up a landing page to see if people claim they're interested I suspect you're going to get bored quickly, and you'll move on to the next even better idea very quickly.

That's not to say it can't work if you're making something just because 300 people signed up to your Launchrock page, but I think the motivation to succeed won't weather the storms that your startup will face if that's the only reason you have to build something.

[invalidOrTaken]

This is a really good point.

Everything I've built on my own has been something I wanted. In some cases they were more complicated than I thought so I never got to the customer validation stage, but that wasn't quite the disaster it could have been, because cash wasn't the (only) motivation.

Except...when it was, and yeah, my bad. So on the one hand I look back and kick myself for not first probing the market, but then I also remember that I did probe it, found there wasn't one, and didn't really care.

It can be a fine line between building a "me-too" product and something that no one wants.

[mpfundstein]

the whole Lean Startup methodology is snake oil IMO. it is used primarily by consultants to lure big corps into "innovation methodologies".* While its certainly an improvement over status quo, results were mostly meh anyway. you just cant force good ideas

the best startups are the ones mentioned by OP. visionary founder who needs that stuff himself.

* i was director at a small 7mm/yr consultancy and did precisely that

[webmaven]

The main point of lean startup isn't to have better ideas, it is to identify and discard bad ones faster, and focus your limited resources on the wheat among the chaff.

[mdorazio]

I'd caveat this with the note that many unicorns, including a couple I've worked with, didn't solve any problem that a solution wasn't available for - they instead solved it better/more cheaply or in a new way. This is especially true in the B2B SaaS market where any large addressable market likely has incumbents you'll be fighting against, even if only tangentially.

[GoatOfAplomb]

There's a lot to be said for working on solutions to problems you have yourself. But I think that also leaves a lot of very fertile ground untouched - the problems that startup founders tend not to have, but many other people do.

[azinman2]

I don't know that this advice is so realistic anymore, or at least the target click thru rates should be adjusted. Ads on FB now have very low click-thru, and even then, I'm not sure how much that ultimately tells you about your product or market. You can spend a lot of money going through all kinds of different customer segments on FB, or you could recognize that there are other ways to attract customers than social media ads.

This book looks into other techniques to do so: https://www.amazon.com/Bullseye-Marketing-Grow-Business-Fast...

Of course none of these can tell you the 'why' -- it might be something simple that you would never have thought of, but you end up pivoting too early. Or perhaps your marketing isn't polished. Or you're way early/late to a field. If you knew the 'why,' that can be worth far more than blowing a huge cash load on FB. I feel like techies flock to such techniques because it's easy and fits into the scale techno-narrative. It means that many will be mislead.

[irjustin]

Absolutely, we're in agreement.

"Test" doesn't necessarily mean spend on FB/G Ads. It means devise a test feedback signal is quick, low cost and yields a meaningful/measurable metric.

An idea selling a more efficient ship engine to ship owners is never going to do well in Ads, but there is a test that is more cost effective than build engine => sell engine.

> Of course none of these can tell you the 'why' -- it might be something simple that you would never have thought of, but you end up pivoting too early.

This is a founder dilemma and the thing founders need-to/should worry about. Don't build until you've got at least a decent, objective signal the idea is worth the cost of building, but how you get there is a doozy.