[mindcrime]

Following the Lean Startup approach isn't incompatible with scratching your own itch, or with having passion or whatever. It's just a way to avoid wasting a ton of time and money building something that ultimately fails because nobody wants it.

Now if you look at a project through the lens of "even if it fails as a company, I win anyway because of the lessons I learned from building it" or something similar, then I could see the argument for disregarding this approach. But the idea really just reduces to "build what you want to build, but do it iteratively and combine some validated learning about your market along with your development."

[segabach]

Indeed, the lens is what I'm talking about. I'd go so far as to argue that you should never approach a new project as a potential company and instead just build things you find fun/useful/novel. The greatest successes (financially, world impact) I've seen have been from developers making cool projects. These eventually got traction and the developer had investors... beating down the door. At that point the project turned into a company (although not one that had revenue). Growth continued because the products were awesome and eventually led to massive acquisitions.

You could argue that they hit their MVP and that's when everything took off but the mindset was definitely "I'm going to build something cool" opposed to "I'm going to build an MVP so I can have a startup".

These founders eventually left post-acquisition and have since continued to crank out new projects without regard to commercial viability. Not what the business schools teach but they have "won" so I don't think they care.

[mindcrime]

That's not so different from the way I'm approaching the startup I'm working on. It did start as something that I just thought would be cool to work on, and everything is open-source, and I definitely figure that I win from doing the project no matter whether it becomes commercially successful or not.

That said, I feel like it is something that has a chance commercially, and we are actually employing the Customer Development / Lean Startup model to things. I don't necessarily see that as incompatible with "doing cool stuff." I'm just prioritizing the "cool stuff" a little, based on feedback from potential customers. That's a sacrifice that I, personally, can live with. YMMV. :-)