
The Lean Startup Frenzy - DanielRibeiro
http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/12/the-lean-startup-frenzy
======
dasil003
The problem with Lean Startup is the same as the problem with Agile, which is
that they are born from extremely smart people with great ideas, but
inevitably as they become popular a massive cargo cult grows around them.
Eventually there is so much noise and misinformation from bandwagon hoppers
that even using the official term (Lean or Agile) becomes a bozo bit.

It's been that way with Agile for awhile, and I'm starting to feel that way
about Lean Startup as well. When someone talks too much about Lean Startup I
start to think they read a lot but don't have much experience actually
executing.

The bottom line is that building startups requires adaptability and awareness
at all junctures. There's no cookbook for success. Instead you must have a
keen sense of what's working, what's not, and an intuition for pursuing
promising ideas. Lean Startup strikes me as some useful lessons Ries learned
the hard way, but nothing substantial enough to guide a whole generation of
entrepreneurs, and certainly nothing that will save any entrepreneur from his
own school of hard knocks.

~~~
hello_moto
Some people make products. Some people teach others how to run a company, how
to make a product, how to make a profitable small business.

For the latter group of people, their words is the product.

~~~
lucisferre
So what you are saying is that "those who can't do, teach?" No offence but I
think people are right to be somewhat skeptical of consultants with little
practical experience and no proven track record. Not to say there isn't value
there sometimes, but there is a lot of smoke and mirrors and snake oil too.
People are smart to be skeptical of so-called "teachers".

~~~
swombat
To be fair on Eric Ries, he can and he did before he taught.

It actually looks like most of the people that teach entrepreneurship via
blogs and books are entrepreneurs themselves, with successes that speak for
themselves.

~~~
hello_moto
I am by no mean questioning Eric Ries. I read his blog posts pre-Lean Startup
days and his engineering methods fit with me.

I think it was accidental for him to do the Lean Startup (something along the
line of him being pushed by other to "hey, why don't you write more about
this?")

He definitely has the experience already. 1 failed startup. 1 successful (not
sure how far, but up to the reader to decide the range of success) company.

If he chose to venture out to public-speaking business, it's up to him to
diversify his value.

------
davidw
From the article: "Eric Ries greatest venture may be the Lean Startup movement
itself."

The top ranked review of his book on Amazon seems fairly dubious about the
value of the book:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R3287ICLQ9STI3/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R3287ICLQ9STI3/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B004J4XGN6&nodeID=133140011)

I have a weakness for business books and am tempted to buy it anyway, but I'm
still not convinced; I'm trying to cut back on books that don't actually leave
me with anything.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I bought Ries book and made it most of the way through.

The problem here is that the Agile/Lean startup field is still in its infancy.
The ideas are just now congealing.

That's good news because it means the field is wide open -- there are going to
be a lot of cool new developments. But it's also bad news because every book
you get is going to be hit-and-miss: a few good ideas, a few ideas that sound
wacky, and a lot of noise. Agile is like that. It's a collection of best
practices around iterative and incremental technology development. That's why
it drives some folks nuts: different people can give you different answers and
in the end it's all about custom tailoring and results-oriented process. What
we're seeing now is this agile/best-practices idea extended to the startup
world. That's a good thing! There's really good stuff in there. But it's going
to evolve over many years, and just like Agile in the end you're not going to
end up with a recipe book as much as a place to start, a lot of good material
to absorb, and some guiding principles. It'll probably be something like the
learn-do-adapt process we see in Scrum (Obligatory plug: just blogged about
this the other day and posted about it on HN.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3404085>)

So I like the Lean Startup idea. I'm just not sure what it is yet. I don't
think anybody is.

~~~
davidw
I'm fairly convinced that there is some good stuff behind 'lean startups', and
that it's not just a fad.

What I'm a bit more skeptical of is how much of it can actually be distilled
into practical advice, and how much of it would fit just fine in a one page
summary.

Here's another way of looking at it, for fans of the book:

What concrete things did you do after having read it that you might have
overlooked previously? Let's measure something:-)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Here's one for you. Last year I tried an experiment where I developed a new
website or app every two weeks. At the end of two weeks, I switched and
started on something new.

"Normally," you're supposed to spend years on one idea, slogging away. I said
"screw that" and decided I try an iterative shotgun approach. I put out a lot
of things, talked about them all, and then let each one of them compete for my
attention. hn-books was one of these ideas (<http://hn-books.com>)

This was extreme iterative behavior, and I don't know anybody that recommends
it. But I had a really good experience doing this and plan on starting back up
in January. I found it's a better experience learning about the entire process
of business model creation over and over again than just doing it one time and
trying to get it perfect. If I were at YC, I'd probably pick up on a lot of
that through social contacts with all the other folks, but on my own I found
that iteration on something real and tangible was really the best way to
learn.

EDIT: My comment seems very ironic considering that a couple of the other
comments on this thread are basically along the lines of "it's really smart
people and theory, but nothing that practical" In fact, in this experiment
found it to be extremely practical.

------
hello_moto
There are tons of business books these days and I felt that most of them have
become a "Self-Help Business" books as opposed to understanding/textbook-y
kind of books.

I have no problem at all with "Self-Help Business" type of books. But authors,
could you please reduce the number of pages to the very essentials?

Can "Lean Startup" book be reduced to 100-150 pages instead of 338 pages?

Can "The Checklist Manifesto" book be reduced to 80-100 pages?

What's the essentials of your words? I don't need reams of "here's a story to
convince you more". These are called "Use-Cases" or "Business-Cases". Separate
them to another book, or put them in your website as a pay/free PDF download
PER business-cases (or bundle them, whichever).

Those "stories that try to convince the theory works" sound too fluffy when
the author cherry-pick a specific event/case that match with the point they're
trying to deliver.

~~~
swombat
The huge problem with taking out all the stories is that the book becomes
quicker to read, but much drier and less memorable.

Stories make things stick in the reader's mind, as well as providing
additional angles to explain complicated concepts by example.

As a simple example, I could explain that you shouldn't call for help when you
don't need it, because people will start to ignore you and then you won't get
the help when you do need it... or I could tell you the story of the boy who
cried wolf. Which one do you think you'll remember in a year?

Stories are powerful stuff.

~~~
hello_moto
I hear you and agree to what you said given the context (complicated concepts,
etc).

But somehow I doubt these books (Lean Startups, Checklist Manifesto, Agile)
are complicated concepts. Derivatives and HFT might be considered complicated
concepts.

Quicker to read but if it is to the point (especially bullet points) might
lead to quicker to remember.

I've seen many bloggers claimed they read a 350 pages book in 2 sessions, 1
session, a flight to Chicago (5 hours?) and claiming that they "get it" is a
bit questionable. Perhaps they know where the points are and skip the
irrelevant parts? If that's the case, why not make the book slimmer? :D

But, it is what it is: there's probably a demand from society expecting their
money to be worth.

I'm asking for a separation of the theory and the application. Start the book
with the theory first and finish it with the application (business-case, use-
case) to avoid intermingling the concept and the examples.

------
earbitscom
For the past year+ I have heard people talk about lean, read articles about
lean, and generally felt that I had an idea of how to run lean - and we were
doing it. We ran surveys to ask our customers for feedback, and tried to only
build things that we had validated they wanted. That seemed lean.

Several weeks ago, one of our investors, a three-time successful entrepreneur
(his last company is doing close to $50MM in revenue this year) told me that
his current endeavor was failing and he couldn't figure out why. After reading
Lean Startup, he realized he had been lucky three times in a row, succeeding
despite himself. He encouraged me and my team to read the actual book.

Long story short, @dasil003 is right, the problem with the explosion of Lean
is that everyone writes tidbits about it and most people read those tidbits
and think they're being "lean", but most, including myself, were misinformed
about how to actually be lean. Not to mention, applying the true principles of
lean is _not easy_. In fact, it's quite painful. But doing it half-ass leads
to potentially even worse decision making than just operating a hunch-based
business.

Earlier this week, after taking a step back and identifying our true core
metrics, we launched a real lean dashboard with cohort testing and deep
analytics into the health of our company. We have already run one successful
cohort of 3 variations on a feature that we thought might help improve
engagement, most of it was a relative smokescreen. All three implementations
were nearly the same, but only one actually had a noticeable impact.
Previously, we would have built one of them, seen that people used it (but not
necessarily known the impact it had to company health) and would have moved
onto the next feature. There would have been a 2 out of 3 chance that it was
an unsuccessful implementation. And in those 2 out of 3 cases, even though
maintaining that worthless feature would take ongoing resources, we would have
kept it because it appeared people were using it, even though the impact to
metrics that matter was close to zero.

It's safe to assume that the majority of our features have worked at a
fraction of what they could have. Without identifying the true metrics that
are going to make your company great, without real cohort testing, and without
trying things in _literally_ the lowest resource way possible, you are wasting
massive amounts of energy and money. I can already tell that we are going to
learn more about our product and business in the next 3-4 months than the
whole previous 2 years.

Talking about Lean is a fad. I believe truly being Lean can change the way
people build startups.

------
andrewtbham
Steve Blank said in Four Steps something to the effect that he is simply
articulating the steps that most successful startups have always followed.

------
jrodgers
I could have sworn that 37 Signals did this 'first' in that they popularized
the idea of 'lean' or iterative product design around a SaaS model in 2004ish.
It is the whole philosophy around the birth of Rails as I remember it. If you
go way back into their blog archives it is likely there:

<http://37signals.com/svn>

I will give them 'first' because they built a framework around the idea of
building fast and cheap.

Because startups are hot (again) and trendy (again) people are just looking
for 'the right way' to do it. The real secret is that it is really hard work
and knowing that you don't know everything while holding true to your vision.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Many of the ideas in Lean Startup are not new at all. And Eric Ries even admit
to this!

Paul Graham wrote many of them on his essays[1] (one example: _Launching Too
Early_ , from 18 Mistakes[2], is rephrased as _iterate_ on Lean Startup), and
so did 37 Signals (the core of the MVP concept is outlined on _Half, not half
assed_ [3]).

Lean (which is usually placed along with Agile methodologies) and startups'
synergies were mentioned 4 years ago by infoQ (the same site where the article
on this post is from)[4], which also made the connection between the works of
pg, Jessica Livingstone and 37 Signals.

The metric and funnel anayslis (an important piece of the measure part of the
build/measure/learn loop) come from 500 Startups head Dave McClure's recurring
presentation _Startup Metrics 4 Pirates_ (which nowadays borrows from Lean
Startup ubiquitous language).

The Lean Startup does bring some new ideas to the table (innovation accounting
for instance), but the most important part is that it outlines some really
overlooked ideas (like using cohorts[6] as a way out of the Vanity Metrics[7]
pit).

[1] <http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

[2] <http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>

[3]
[http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Half_Not_Half_Assed.ph...](http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Half_Not_Half_Assed.php)

[4] <http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/02/agile-startups>

[5] [http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-
pir...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-
brazil-nov-2011)

[6] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/11/are-you-building-the-
right-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/11/are-you-building-the-right-
product/)

[7] <http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/>

------
wpietri
_is Lean Startup just a fad or does it generate real value for venture
capitalists and founders?_

Why hello, False Dichotomy! I haven't seen you in so long. Must be the US
presidential run that's been keeping you so busy.

