We rarely see funding announcements for anything interesting anymore. And I blame Lean Startup.
The Lean Startup methodology, as we all know, suggests that technology startups must validate a market for their product before developing it. Build your MVP and push it out the door as fast as you can and see how the market responds. Better yet, just put up a landing page and throw a hundred dollars of AdWords at it. If people click on your page you’ve found yourself a market! Now throw a dev and a designer at it for a month and find an angel investor and you’re off to the races. Wait.. people didn’t click on your ad or didn’t do anything when they got to your landing page? Well there must be no market. Try something else.
I exaggerate a bit, but the internet is awash in companies who have followed essentially this model and whose contributions to society are essentially pretty interfaces to databases. Because that’s all you can really do in the few weeks or months the Lean Startup methodology gives you to test your market.
The problem of course is some new ideas can’t be explained in a landing page. Some products people don’t know they need until they see them. And of course, real technological development can’t be thrown together in a couple months.
And so we’ve entered the era of the UX startup. We aren’t developing technology anymore, we’re developing interfaces. Actual technology takes too long and costs too much. It’s not lean. There’s too much risk.
Worse yet, Lean Startup has conditioned investors to think if a company can’t produce a functional product in a few months and show traction before approaching them they’re not worth looking at. I’m certain this mindset has dissuaded startups from trying really ambitious projects.
In the last bubble individual companies might have blown through a lot of money, but at least many of them developed really cutting edge stuff in the process. This time around we get 200 companies doing local coupon apps and photo filters. It's pretty disappointing.
So I put it to HN: Is Lean Startup Hurting Technology Development?
That's a very good point. While there were some standout companies that survived the first boom and bust (e.g. eBay, Amazon), what really made an impact was the technology that was left over when the dust settled (e.g. online maps, mp3, online trading, better browsers). When the dust settles on the current boom and bust, we will have seen basically iterations on the same theme: niche search, local deals, and social networking/sharing.