
The Lean Startup: A contrarian view - saurabh
http://khitchdee.forumatic.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=329
======
benjaminsull
>That assumption is that you have something to learn from the market that you
don't already know.

In the Lean Startup book, Eric Ries defines a startup as "a human institution
designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme
uncertainty". "That you have something to learn from the market that you don't
already know" isn't an assumption, it's a premise. If you already know about
the market, then you aren't facing conditions of extreme uncertainty and you
aren't, by Ries' definition, involved in a startup.

Lean startup doesn't claim to be the solution to every business' problems in
the world. It's a solution that works really well when you're dealing with a
lot of unknowns. One way that entrepreneurs deal with unknowns is by
speculating and acting on assumptions, which often turn out to be wrong
resulting in waste. Ries argues that this excessive waste is avoidable by
taking a more scientific approach: identify your assumptions, validate them
through measurement, adjust your product/strategy according to results, and
let that process of validated learning pave a clear path for your business
through the shadowy unknowns.

~~~
khitchdee
If you're planning to startup, what you'll here from most people is how you
should follow lean startup principles. The point of this writeup is to give
some breathing space to those entrepreneurs who have a top down idea. It's to
encourage them to go for it instead of questioning themselves. Typically, the
game changing ideas come top down and not bottom up. If you want to change the
game everyone's playing, you have to step out of it first.

~~~
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.

------
dasil003
The Lean Startup took off when it did because it represented a new way of
building a business. Before the open source stack got deep enough and servers
got cheap enough, there was no room for low-capital startups. Then we hit an
inflection point where it became increasingly possible to bootstrap highly
scalable businesses.

The Lean Startup is simply an old world entrepreneur discovering the
possibilities in the new world. It's not that it's better, it's just been more
fertile ground over the last several years. However, as more and more smart
kids show up on the scene, I think the pendulum will swing back because the
stuff that can be done without capital or investment is going to get tapped
out by armies of ramen-eaters. There's always room for a great new idea, but
if you have access to capital a little barrier to entry is not a bad thing.

~~~
codyZ
I also feel like The Lean Startup really isn't anything new. Its just
articulated and repackaged in a different way that's more sexy, or tech-y.

God forbid any of my peers start reading Drucker...

~~~
jacques_chester
I was actually reminded of Peter Senge's _Fifth Discipline_.

~~~
codyZ
That's a good one too - luckily they had a second edition or it may have been
totally lost in the endless abyss of time. I'd be really surprised to find
someone of my generation to have read about it though...

------
ricardobeat
If there is no market for it, it will die. There's a bit of arrogance in the
idea that you know better and can do things from the "top-down". Getting user
feedback doesn't mean replacing your ideas with whatever John Doe thinks he
likes, but finding out how your ideas fit (or not) the users' needs.

Before someone starts misquoting, even Apple did user testing, although not in
the traditional format; there is no point in building someone that suits
nobody.

~~~
paul_f
This is correct. Without customer interaction, there are no good ideas, only
lucky ideas and failed ideas.

~~~
skanga
So you contend that Apple must be one helluva lucky company since ALL of their
popular products are famously built without customer interaction.

------
noelwelsh
The opening two sentences are this:

"The basic idea is that to get a startup of the ground, you don't need much.
In particular you don't need much money and its possible and even desirable to
grow your startup organically from the ground up instead of trying to get a
cash infusion from a VC."

This is incorrect. The basic idea is that you can apply the scientific method
to a startup. It has absolutely nothing to do with avoiding investment.

------
doctorwho
The top down approach requires you to have deep domain knowledge to build a
successful product around your idea. The bottom up (lean) approach starts the
same way but is based on measurable feedback. In both approaches, you still
start with the idea. Domain knowledge MAY improve your odds of creating a good
product but plenty of people have done/tried this and failed miserably. The
lean approach improves your odds of success by actually trying to measure
success whenever possible and use those measurements to validate or improve
the process. The days of "if you build it, they will come" are numbered in the
face of more data driven methodologies.

~~~
khitchdee
On the flip side, the lean approach typically results in a new product that is
only incrementally different than the one it replaces whereas in a more top-
down approach, there is the possibility of creating something game changing.

------
jacques_chester
Some context here:

[http://khitchdee.forumatic.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=297](http://khitchdee.forumatic.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=297)

(The site is a forum being used as a blog / CMS.)

I have my own reservations about the Lean Startup book -- but most of it comes
down to an allergy to it that I developed from reading HN. I got around to it
last week on a personal recommendation and it wasn't half bad.

I'd say the biggest problem with how people approach it is that they fixate on
the _MVP_ rather than the _cycle_. The MVP is just a particular cycle.

As benjaminsull pointed out, the Lean Startup disclaims coverage of domains
with well understood product models and mature feature-development ecosystems.

~~~
adrianhoward
_I'd say the biggest problem with how people approach it is that they fixate
on the MVP rather than the cycle. The MVP is just a particular cycle._

It's even worse than that. The problem I see is folks who focus on particular
forms of the MVP. Not every damn product starts best with a launch page of
some Google Adwords.

Lean Startup is neat. I'm finding a bunch of ideas from it stupidly useful.
But it's going throught the Hype Cycle
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle>) amazingly quickly.

~~~
jacques_chester
Yeah, it's not half bad. Like I said, I tend to instinctively avoid whatever
book is being waved like a bible in HN circles.

So as I say, it was a surprise to see how different the expressed vision of
MVP seems to be from what I got from the book. I got the impression that it
was the first thing you could actually give to a user and have them use. Even
if it was buggy and had a single feature.

The launch-page "MVP" isn't actually a product. It's market research.

~~~
adrianhoward
I know this is somewhat heretical - but I don't actually like The Lean Startup
book that much.

I was pointed to Lean Startup back in 2010 as a solution to some of the
problems I was looking at. The folk I talked to, places like the LSC mailing
list, and reading the online/offline writings of Steve Blank, Eric Ries and
many others helped a lot.

I was really looking forward to Eric's book - but it didn't really hit the
spot I was hoping it would hit. It's very much aimed (I think) at explaining
the ideas to the world in general - rather than being a guide to folk who want
to apply the ideas. There's nothing wrong with the former, but I was hoping
for the latter.

~~~
jacques_chester
Well if I had a complaint about Eric's book it's that there's a ton of
undergraduate-essay padding at the front end. It could have been about 2/3rds
as long and said all the same stuff.

------
rmoriz
If you do a copycat with the sole goal to copy a business model that works for
someone else or might work for someone else in the future (exit driven) it
might be a "top-down" situation.

Let me make an example: There is Stripe.com and some German clone called
paymill. Of course the clone didn't need to start lean because Stripe already
validated the market for them. On the other hand beeing non-lean and non-agile
will be very painful, when the "original" pivots or expands into new
markets/offer products that are not validated yet)…

------
yurylifshits
Top down is also covered in Peter Thiel's course under the name of
'determinate optimism'.

[http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-
cs183-...](http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-
cs183-startup-class-13-notes-essay)

Big multi-year projects like Tesla Model S or Tony Hsieh's Downtown Project
are much more top down than bottom up.

~~~
DividesByZero
This is merely a reflection of the amount of resources required to build a
valid MVP of a product like an electric car, revitalising an urban space or
building a space launch vehicle.

~~~
ericb
So, no true Scotsman?

~~~
DividesByZero
In what sense? No true scot would be excluding these examples from
consideration based on unrelated information. If anything, I'm skirting
whether or not the lean startup model is actually falsifiable (it is).

------
aytekin
This is actually a pretty traditional model. It even has a name: waterfall. :)

If you have a great team you can probably pull it off with a waterfall method.
Team almost always beats the methodology used. A bad team will still fail
following the latest leanest meanest methodology.

------
doctorwho
No methodology is going to be perfect in every situation. Take what can (if
anything) from every new methodology you encounter and mold it into something
that works for you and your team. The key concept I took from the lean
movement was "continuous validation" for your ideas, like continuous
integration for your code. Also known as fail faster, ship often, etc. If
you're going to do something risky, measure the results and react as quickly
as possible. The sooner you discover you're heading down a dead end, the
sooner you can perform a course correction.

------
basicallydan
There's a place for every approach and the one you mention works well in many
situations. Look at Apple!

However, Lean handles one of the great problems with this one (which is quite
traditional as aytekin has already pointed out): it can take more resources
than your typical startup might have. Sure, they can raise capital somehow,
but that too could require more resources than are available.

Often, an entrepreneur will want to start from scratch, and may have no
experience building a product or a business. That's where the Lean Startup
approach does well.

~~~
DividesByZero
Apple is smart in that they let everyone else do the iterating for them, then
extract the parts that work best with a laser beam focus. Apple have no
original, 'top down' ideas.

~~~
basicallydan
Ah yeah, good point - that's mostly true yeah :)

------
gfodor
The biggest problem with the lean startup stuff is it results in this
ridiculous false dichotomy. There is no "top down" or "bottom up" thing. If
you assume you are in one of these two buckets you already lose because you
either are abandoning your creative thinking (bottom up) or abandoning
listening to what customers are telling you (top down.) I realize the common
retort to this is that all startups need to have top down thinking ("vision")
but the bottom line is the lean startup philosophy is at the very least poorly
communicated because the large takeaway from all the writing on it is that
startups should simply perform customer development and let the market dictate
most of the actions they take and the products they build.

It's always a matter of deciding when to ship and how much time and resources
to commit between data collection points (ie, releases.) This is a higher
order function and changes as well in reaction to how you explore the solution
space. Different domains have different constraints as to how fast you can
iterate. Tesla, for example, is forced to iterate much more slowly than your
average social gaming app can. Shipping too early, or shipping too late can
result in wildly different outcomes. Drawing the line correctly is a matter of
experience, taste, common sense, and luck.

Everyone knows you should try to minimize waste. Everyone knows you should
prefer iteration over big releases. The question is always what constitutes
"viable". A car that has three tires is not viable, and would be a market
failure. The fourth tire takes a little more effort but makes the difference
between success and failure. The problem is it takes some intuition to know
people need all four tires to be willing to pay for a car. It also takes
intuition to know that the three-tired car being a failure does not mean you
should throw in the towel. I don't care how many metrics you measure, you
can't use metrics to determine where an asymptote is going to appear because
it's not going to be a part of any logical predictive model. Disruption is
just that, disruption, and usually comes about due to a synergy of several
things that were previously unknown to have magical properties when combined.
You generally can't hill climb to find to these things, unless you set your
step size (alpha) to a "Goldilocks" value: not too large and not too small.

I understand the appeal of creating a mental framework and slapping a label on
it to help people think about and communicate ideas clearly. I think there are
definitely some important ideas contained in the lean startup philosophy. But
in the interest of creating a conceptual framework of absolutes like any other
dogma the lean startup philosophy has large gaps in it's methodology that fail
to explain for the large number of startups that launched products that many
people would consider well beyond "viable", but were successful because their
definition of "viable" happened to be the right one.

~~~
lmm
>If you assume you are in one of these two buckets you already lose because
you either are abandoning your creative thinking (bottom up) or abandoning
listening to what customers are telling you (top down.)

I find I write better code when I deliberately abandon my creative thinking.
It's counterintuitive but it works.

~~~
gfodor
Yes, but do you build better products? In my own experience success or failure
is essentially non-correlated with applying deep creative thinking or raw
hypothesis hill climbing. Both seem to work in different circumstances. The
lean startup method claims that it's anti-correlated since you will fall into
the trap of acting on poor assumptions. But guess what, sometimes your
assumptions are right and you have a unique perspective to create something
almost nobody else would think to.

Also, in my experience it's the subset of successful products that involved
more creative thinking that I am most proud of and look back on my time
working on more positively. Hell, this is even true for some of the failures.
The raw hypothesis driven successes were high-five worthy, but not pride-
worthy (other than perhaps a pat on the back for demonstrating my faith in the
Church of Science), and the failures tended to be fairly painful since the
work itself was unrewarding intrinsically and the outcome was negative.
Nothing is really worse than hacking out code in misery because, counter to
your intuition and your gut, signals point to it potentially driving a metric
up, and seeing it fail anyway. You have to resign yourself to the process and
tell yourself that, despite being right, your intuition is meaningless -- not
a fun exercise as a human.

It turns out, in my experience, that the most successful creators are talented
at both: trying lots of stuff and learning from their failures, but also
having that sense of empathy, intuition, and taste to simply "not be wrong"
more times than your average person. You can't A/B test your way to having an
opinion. And you can't let an A/B test let you change your opinion on the
things that matter.

~~~
jasallen
I agree with both. I tend to have Red Days and Blue Days. Red Days are coding
days, working from my plan, no creativity allowed - that's the enemy of lean
code.

Blue days are creative days, very little coding - maybe a bug fix if creative
me says that bug is _really_ impacting experience. These days I plan big
picture, I talk to potential customers and testers. I draw big picture plans
on the whiteboard that Red me will implement.

Can break up a day too, but you can never _ever_ be creative and engineer well
at the same time. At least I can't, nor can most people I've observed.

