| The "Lean Startup" is about risk mitigation, and proof of market. If you are trying to get something going, so that it can be acquired this is a good model. "Hey Amazon would be way better if it were more social, and the products were in a Magazine layout, let's be an Amazon affiliate and mock up how it looks, and get a bunch of users.... " (Pinterest) Sometimes (like pinterest) the feature becomes enough of a draw the Lean model becomes a company, but even if it fails to reach profitability, a company could acquire it to get the user base, and avoid looking like they just knocked off a smaller site. Occasionally the Lean Model works because a startup starts as a hobby, and the founders just need to raise marketing dollars because they have day jobs. But if you are a company building something with a significant amount of IP, and is truly going to be disruptive the model should be hybrid. Start Lean, then go big. My company, http://www.stremor.com is building something much bigger than what an MVP would do. Our product is like a Siri, that actually does what SRI promised Siri would do. And does it for every device with a speaker and a mic. That's a pretty fricking huge MVP. So we put out http://tldrstuff.com to get feed back on summarization, and http://samuru.com to get feed back on search. We even had some short lived experiments to test other parts of the technology that were public, but when we learned all that we could from them, killed them so that they didn't cost money. After our next round we will change modes. We will leave the "Lean Startup" model and move in to a model that favors fully developed product, has a heavy marketing budget, and focuses on not just being "an interesting take" on the space, but a "Serious competitor" with "Industry leading technology". (These are in quotes because because that is the kind of stuff you see in press about MVPs and Full products respectively.) The real challenge for a startup is knowing if the MVP is 1000 lines of code, 10k lines of code or 400k lines of code. You can't have an MVP that competes with Facebook with out having most of Facebook's features plus some new features. But you can an an MVP that changes the way people schedule Dog Poop removal from their lawn with very little code because it is a Business model start up not an IP start up. I guess to really sum it up, You need to know if you are an IP company, A Feature Company, An Innovative business model company, and how mature your competition is, because the maturity of the space determines how Minimal your MVP can be. |