Thoughts on The Lean Startup
Analyzing Eric’s brainwaves
I woke up early this morning, walked to a nearby park, and read Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup from cover to cover. It’s well-written and well-paced, and contains what may be the single most important set of lessons that any entrepreneur needs to internalize. In fact, I believe that the content of this book is so crucial to a startup’s success that for as long as I’m working at a startup I plan to read this book regularly - at least every couple of months - just to keep it fresh in my mind.
Eric has done a terrific job at not casting judgement on the behaviors he criticizes. In fact, he knows from his own personal experience that the predictably irrational behavior of entrepreneurs is entirely natural. It’s far too tempting to have hour long meetings about which logo or color palette to use, and it’s scary to leave the comforting space of your success theater to visit a customer and see if they are willing to pay you for the product you plan to sell them.
The book contains example after example illustrating how not validating core assumptions tends to lead to wasted time, and often outright failure, whereas validating these core assumptions helps startups adapt and evolve more quickly with less wasted time. Eric doesn’t need to resort to clever rhetoric or ideological posturing. The evidence alone speaks for itself.
There are dozens of passages from the book worth remembering. Here’s one in particular that stood out:
There are two ever-present dangers when entrepreneurs conduct market research and talk to customers. Followers of the just-do-it school of entrepreneurship are impatient to get started and don’t want to spend time analyzing their strategy. They’d rather start building immediately, often after just a few cursory customer conversations. Unfortunately, because customers don’t really know what they want, it’s easy for these entrepreneurs to delude themselves that they are on the right path.
Other entrepreneurs can fall victim to analysis paralysis, endlessly refining their plans. In this case, talking to customers, reading research reports, and whiteboard strategizing are all equally unhelpful. The problem with most entrepreneurs’ plans is generally not that they don’t follow sound strategic principles but that the facts upon which they are based are wrong. Unfortunately, most of these errors cannot be detected at the whiteboard because they depend on the subtle interactions between products and customers.
These aren’t necessarily two mutually exclusive problems. Often the over-analysis of small details makes entrepreneurs feel like they are analyzing their strategy, when they are really just shuffling deck chairs. In fact, even seasoned startup veterans can fall victim to this temptation.
A prominent recent example is Color.com, founded by Bill Nguyen, a founder with a track record that is just about as good as it gets. They clearly put a lot of attention into branding (buying an incredibly expensive domain) and design (hiring world-class designers to create a beautiful UX). But they didn’t spend enough time validating their core assumption that people wanted a location-based implicit social network for photos, and as a result when people like me checked out their product we saw a beautifully designed and branded app that we had no interest in using.
Color.com has just relaunched with an entirely new product concept, private live broadcasting, and perhaps they’ll be more successful this time around. Although this also wasn’t a product I’ve already been looking for, so perhaps not.
Eric doesn’t really explore the underlying psychology of why most entrepreneurs tend to not sufficiently test their assumptions. I think that fear plays a huge role. I always struggle with facing my fears, especially the fear of failure, and this makes me hesitant to confront failure head-on.
The irony is that by not confronting failure early and often, entrepreneurs are unwittingly allowing their fear of failure to be realized.
