[jacques_chester]

The central question of the Lean Startup book is: how do you know that your top down idea is correct? Strictly speaking, until you go to market ... you don't.

There are two basic classes of strategy to doing anything:

* Commit all your resources in advance

* Incrementalism

In situations of uncertainty, the latter is a simple risk management strategy. Armies have scouts, marketers work in test markets, engineers build prototypes.

What Eric Ries is selling isn't strictly new. But it's a cohesive repackaging of extant ideas that in my opinion is useful for making a single universal feedback loop the basis of a business.

[khitchdee]

Going lean and incremental does reduce risk. It also reduces reward.

[jacques_chester]

> It also reduces reward.

How?

[khitchdee]

If you're going to drive your product based on customer feedback, its growth is necessarily going to be slower and more in line with existing conditions in the market. If instead, you drive your product based on a game changing idea, when you hit the market, your product will be completely different than what's available at the time. The statistics will therefore be completely new and in your favor. That's the theory anyways.

[jacques_chester]

Right, creating new markets. That's fine.

But basically the failure rate on it is atrocious. If you find a different new market that is immediately adjacent, what's the smart move?

When I studied nature-inspired computation, my professor quipped at one point that nature-inspired optimisation algorithms usually show what you got wrong about your problem definition.

Markets are the same. Nobody swoops down like Batman with a flawless plan and mastermind insight that turns out to be perfectly correct. The airport business books might give that impression, but it's total bullshit. What actually happens is that millions of men and women swoop down like Batman and discover that they're not backed by Bruce Wayne and a friendly script editor.

Once in a while somebody stumbles onto something good and then their history is rewritten to fit the monomyth.