What I was trying to say is that I don't try and answer those two questions by "pivoting", in the Lean Startup sense.
I do answer those questions, but I do it in an optimistic, deterministic way, which is to create a narrative for our company, its product, sales, service, pricing, etc. and then step back and evaluate the narrative. I run the narrative by people I know (not strangers), and see how they respond. This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust.
I iterate like crazy, and I'm constantly tweaking things (as anyone who knows me will tell you). But I do it from the worldview, if you will, that I can risk many years and capital and release a product or service into the world, iPhone-like, and get the result I anticipated in my narrative.
I'm confident that's true because I'm constantly developing narratives on a smaller scale, and testing them. I'm not always right, but I'm right about enough things, enough of the time, that I feel confident basing my company's vision on that.
I thought so too when I first heard about Eric Reis' Lean Startup, and even went and implemented a bunch of his stuff.
I ended up eliminating his practices, because they didn't fit. I think the resemblance is superficial, but it could just be me who did it wrong. I do know that when I dropped his approach, my process improved a lot.
If I had to guess, I'd say that his approach is too reliant on past-looking data (e.g, the results of an A/B test), and not reliant enough on the ability to project an outcome into the future and actually hit the outcome with any kind of confidence.
I work far better, and have far better success, when I bring the outcome I want into reality, vs. testing a bunch of hypothesis and trying to divine which worked, without any understanding of why, other than the A/B test indicated people liked this shade of blue.
Also, orienting my company so that it could "pivot" based on the analysis essentially crippled productivity, because so much energy is spent on being able to pivot (e.g. huge unit test suites, continuous deployment, etc.) that very little business value is being created for the end user. The whole thing was actually a huge waste, the opposite of what "lean" is supposed to be about, ironically.
Since we use everything we create in house, it's very obvious when actual value isn't being created, and pivoting, A/B tests, and the like gave essentially useless results, or at best, trivial results, and produced no value.
That's why we dropped it.
I didn't understand why it didn't work for us until I read Thiel's axis of startups, and discovered that Reis' approach isn't targeted at companies or people like me.
I think his goals are fine (really, does anyone disagree with them?), but his practices only apply to specific kinds of people/companies, in my experience. You can keep the goals, change the practices, and it'll remain relevant for people like me and the companies we run.
Because it's pretty clear that people can and do project without any data. For example, Apple hadn't sold a single phone, and Steve Jobs went up on stage and said that Apple expected to sell 10 million iPhones.
Apple did ZERO market research. It was basic Jobs saying, "yeah, this'll sell" based on his own estimation. And it did.
I'm not Steve Jobs, but I also don't need historical data to project sales into the future, and be reasonably accurate when doing so.
What I do, and what I suspect Jobs did, is (a) see if the product/service resonates with me personally, and (b) most importantly, see if there is a narrative for the product/service that can be communicated to, and accepted by, large numbers of people. If I can't develop a narrative, I don't believe the product/service will succeed and I work on something else.
The ability to determine a narrative that'll work ahead of time is what makes the forward-looking approach work. If you can't do that with any kind of consistency, you should do Ries' approach, IMO.
I'm a writer/filmmaker at heart, and have spent many years getting good at story/narrative. So that's a really comfortable way to do things for myself and my company.
According to my world view, this is suicidal. Can you explain it to me from your world view?