
Lean Startup "Marketing Bullshit" - hshah
http://giffconstable.com/2010/05/lean-startup-marketing-bullshit/
======
plinkplonk
I personally find Steve Blank has some interesting things to say and Eric Ries
not so much, comparitively. The latter _seems_ to be trying to turn a simple
idea (combine agile engineering practices with Steve Blank's "customer
discovery/validation" idea") into a consultingware "movement" with kool-aid
conferences and such, just as with all business fads. The jury is still out on
the eventual success of such efforts.

The nearest analogy is the whole "Agile" movement. There was a
useful/interesting kernel of ideas but it was soon overrun by scammy
consultants (e.g the hwle "Scrum Master" certification scam). I suspect "Lean
Startups" are on the same path.

I do think Mr.Ries has some (mildly) interesting things to say, but (and this
is probably blasphemy for at least a subset of HN readers) my "marketing
bullshit" filter _is_ on at high when I read or listen to him these days. I
believe that the whole "lean startup" movement is in its _early_ stages of
being overrrun by scamsters so there are still interesting ideas there.

So yes, (imo) at least some part of the "Lean Startup" (the phrase is
copyrighted by Mr Ries btw!) stuff _is_ marketing BS. As always you as the
consumer of such fads have to use your intelligence to discard the marketing
fluff and find the useful core. And every fad generally has a (sometimes tiny)
useful core.

Caveat Emptor. Useful idea, especially as it applies to methodology salesmen,
irrespective of whether said methodology applies to sw dev (agile) or
building/running a business ("lean startup").

~~~
giffc
I believe that Eric's heart is in the right place and he truly wants to help
more entrepreneurs. I don't disagree that born-again evangelism and "scammy
consultants" is an unfortunate side effect of what is going on.

While people will like or dislike my op-ed as they will, I'd just like to say
that in writing the blog post, I had no such motives (consulting, that is) --
I'm just another startup guy trying to build a company.

I do agree with the other commenter that there is a new set of "buzzwords"
floating around, like MVP, product-market fit, pivot, etc. These phrases
emerge as shorthand.

But still I do believe that these authors are more rigorous, more into
measurement and results, and more down-to-earth practical than the kinds of
biz-consulting blowhard that turned everyone off business speak in the first
place.

~~~
plinkplonk
" I'd just like to say that in writing the blog post, I had no such motives
(consulting, that is) ".

I never said you did (just in case it wasn't clear :-)). It is obvious you
honestly believe that there is a lot of valuable insight behind the "marketing
bullshit" enveloping the "lean startup" buzz.

I don't agree (or at least I don't agree about the ratio of hype to substance,
but that is all right, differences of opinion are _good_ ).

I do think (as I indicated above) that Steve Blank's books and blog posts are
worth reading as are _some_ of Eric Ries's _early_ blog posts (before he got
onto this "evangelism"/paid conferences kick). I am not claiming they are
stupendously new insights but definitely worth reading and thinking about.

I think 700$ "lean startup conferences"
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1179623>) are very like 700$ "I will
teach you to be rich" scams. People who are really rich don't go around
holding seminars on How to Be Rich and charging people money for those.

I believe you could get much more value from reading patio11 's posts here and
on his blog, Paul Graham's essays and mixergy interview transcripts of startup
founders than attending these vague conferences (unless you are into heavy
duty echo chamber networking), thus avoiding paying good money to be initiated
into "A New Era of Enterpreneurship that is dawning" [ from the marketing
spiel at [http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/03/new-
conference-...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/03/new-conference-
website-speakers-agenda.html) ]

Is there something to the "lean startups" idea? Definitely. Is there a lot of
borderline scammy hype right now (in other words a lot of "marketing
bullshit") around those ideas? Definitely.

~~~
patio11
Not that Eric Ries et al need validation from me, but I nearly went to that
conference. (The timing just did not work for me.) You think $700 is a lot of
money? I was getting ready to buy a plane ticket across the Pacific. I thought
it was likely to be cheap at the price, given the quality of the novel
insights Eric Ries et al have been writing about.

Take Minimum Viable Product, for example. It is similar to 37Signals "do
less", but it doesn't end there: you're eliminating parts of the product which
don't provide value, but you're also strategically deferring parts which do
provide value until you've got a handle on the big business risks. I think
that is a pretty powerful idea. Hugely powerful.

I've talked on the Business of Software forums for literally years now on how
important polishing the first five minutes of interaction with your product
is, but it never occurred to me to get that five minutes out before building
the rest of the product. The story about spending 6 months to make the IMVU IM
client being wasted because no one downloaded it, and how you could have
gotten the same information without actually coding the IM client simply by
putting up a download button and having nobody click it, was a lightbulb
moment for me. Hey, wait a second: instead of building the whole product and
then optimizing the living daylights out of the first five minutes, I can
build the first five minutes and see if that knocks socks off. If so, then
invest in building the rest of the product. (If not, figure out why it isn't
knocking socks off and recalibrate. I'm not sure I like "pivot.")

This was hugely influential in my choice of Appointment Reminder over a
notebook full of other ideas for my next product. There are probably a few
decent ideas in there (amidst a lot of drek and random scribblings), but
Appointment Reminder was the one that had an obvious opportunity for a very
compelling demo implementable in a few weeks. And I think it will work fairly
decently for me.

Heck, I think I stole three ideas just from watching the videos.

~~~
plinkplonk
"You think $700 is a lot of money?"

Sure it is, for the _differential_ in the information you can get by paying it
and attending the "New Age Of Entrepreneurship Dawning" seminar vs reading,
talking to people who actually run startups today, reading HN and so on.
Obviously there are people who think otherwise.

Doesn't change my views on the essential _marginal_ value of Ries's offerings
and "insights" vs Steve Blanks' originals. As to extracting lessons for
startup experience, one can do that from any startup story without buying into
the whole "lean startup" filter.

"Take Minimum Viable Product, for example. It is similar to 37Signals "do
less", but it doesn't end there: you're eliminating parts of the product which
don't provide value, but you're also strategically deferring parts which do
provide value until you've got a handle on the big business risks. I think
that is a pretty powerful idea. Hugely powerful."

Sure. Why do you need to pay 700$ to understand that idea? Sure you _could_
pay. It is your money. I am just saying _I_ wouldn't. And I don't believe in
"I will tell you how to get rich" type seminars. If you have the money to
spare Mr Ries has (had?) a $180,000 for 3 days of wisdom sharing deal too.
([http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/introducing-
lea...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/introducing-lean-startup-
cohort.html)). On that thread I defended his right to price his wares any way
he wanted to. I still do. I am just saying I don't think it is worth that kind
of money, which is a different thing.

As I said, Caveat Emptor. Listen to opinions. Then do what you will with your
money and time.

~~~
dbinetti
Your missives on the value of the conference would carry more weight had you
actually attended it. The majority of the presentations were from people
actually running startups -- exactly what you recommend.

Conferences like this will help bring structure to a concept that continues to
be quite amorphous. Scammy consultants have a greater ability to flourish when
there isn't someone or something guiding what the term means. You may quibble
with the marginal value of Eric's insights, or disagree with his fees, but I
would hope you'd agree that his is trying to bring people to together to
consolidate these ideas and concepts in a wholly transparent way. Kudos for
that.

------
klochner
The author is lacking an understanding of business jargon. Very little jargon
was vacuous when coined. It is the endless repetition by the uninformed that
renders it meaningless.

Ries is trying to change the way people think about startups, and as a part of
that effort he is consciously promoting neologisms that capture the principles
of the lean startup. I like those principles, I understand that he wants to
create language to concisely express those principles to help grow awareness
of his philosophy.

I think "Tipping Point"--which the author cites as true "Marketing Bullshit"--
is a good analogy. The general public (people who hadn't read _Complexity_ or
_Chaos_ ) didn't understand complexity before Gladwell, and so the phrase
"Tipping Point" was coined and used to capture the principle. It worked:
pretty much everyone understands it now. It's just that the term "Tipping
Point" is now slightly irritating to anyone who "got it" a long time ago, and
it has been (predictably) misused enough to place it in the Business Jargon
Pantheon.

That's how business jargon works. Just consult your Buzzword Bingo scorecard
for examples.

~~~
mkramlich
Gladwell didn't invent that term 'tipping point'. I remember seeing it and
using it long before his book came out, which according to Wikipedia was
around 2000.

~~~
klochner
Please send me a link if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he coined the non-
scientific, or at least popular usage. I don't remember having heard the
phrase tipping point before the book came out, even though I was fairly
familiar with the idea.

~~~
georgieporgie
Dictionary.com lists Gladwell in the etymology. However, Wikipedia's entry for
"tipping point (sociology)" (which, to my knowledge, is effectively the same
as Gladwell's use) says, "The phrase was coined in its sociological use by
Morton Grodzins, by analogy with ..."

The page on Grodzins says, "He is known for coining the term "tipping point"
in studies of white flight, such as The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem
(1958)".

No doubt Gladwell popularized the phrase, but I don't think he coined it by
any means.

~~~
davidw
Perhaps one could say that his book was a tipping point in the wider diffusion
and knowledge of the term? :-)

------
gfodor
I'm admittedly short on my knowledge of this newfangled "lean startup" notion.
But, it sounds to me like the fundamental principle is "lazy product
evaluation." Ie, instead of building anything up-front, go out, find out what
people want, and build _that_ , MVP, reacting to markets that you know,
provably, to already exist.

At the risk of getting told I don't "get it", this sounds like a great way to
build a very successful but horribly boring startup.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Would you rather build a very successful & boring startup, or work on
something super cool, with no clear way of turning a profit?

~~~
jteo
Success is success. The details are secondary.

~~~
giffc
this attitude doesn't prevent successes, but it does lead to unnecessarily
high failure rates

------
klochner
Here's a snippet from a HN submission currently ranking about as well as the
Lean post:

"Introducing, Braintrust, my bootstrapped lean startup . . . Braintrust is
hosted in the cloud, works in real-time, and provided as a SaaS offering."

