At the risk of rehashing an argument, there is an ongoing misconception that creating a company under a lean startup approach is incompatible with a big entrepreneurial vision. Paul Higgins recently published an article in Entrepreneur Country Magazine based on his blog post again suggesting that the lean and big vision were incompatible.
Some of the reasons were worth thought and response:
Customers Don’t Know What They Want
Henry Ford allegedly once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
So if customers can’t be trusted to know what they want, what hope is there for building a company on ‘lean principles’ through experimentation and constant customer feedback?
This quote is often thrown in the face of the lean startup advocates, but it is hugely misunderstood. No one in their right mind says you should do what the customer tells you to do. You don’t go out and build faster horses…instead you listen for the real need.
Customer: My horse doesn’t go fast enough
Entrepreneur: Why do you want to go faster?
Customer: It takes a long time to get to the supermarket.
Entrepreneur: Aha! No need for a faster horse…the key is faster transportation. Or alternatively, some sort of home shopping network powered by a series of interconnected tubes.
Early Adopters aren’t the Late Majority
Proponents of ‘lean’ would say that having a vision – as Ries calls it, a “true north” – doesn’t stop you testing user behavior in small batches. Twitter’s use amongst friends and family in its early days was said to be wildly addictive…
But I’d argue that no user experience within a small, like-minded group of Twitter fans can prove much about the likelihood of it becoming a global communication and publishing standard.
Admittedly, the only thing that’s going to conclusively prove that a product can go global is going global. So I would tentatively agree with the second statement, but that says nothing about the value of early testing in a sample population.
The point of early user testing is not to prove that you’re 100% right, but to prove that you’re not 100% wrong.Twitter is a great example of this. Had the founding team not tried Odeo’s podcasting concept and flailed, they never would have bothered with Twitter. Evan Williams and Biz Stone would have perhaps continued to build and build for years before releasing to customers and figuring out it was a waste of time.
Releasing the product early, while they still had time and cash to try something new, allowed them to succeed after what could have been a catastrophic failure.
Early user experiments should be designed specifically design to fail.The harder they are, the better. Then if you still see some sliver of an early adopter community saying, “Hey…this thing is cool…” now it’s time to buy a year’s worth of ramen and buckle down for some work.
So if you’re going to do a lean startup, go out there are build a test you can fail. You learn nothing by creating a test you know you’ll pass.
Cheers,
Tristan
Follow @TriKro
I have a funny story about that – building what the customer wants vs. needs – once i was meeting with a prospect and he told me he was going to spend $1M on a new backbone for his facility – it was a big facility but still…having qualified him thoroughly I pointed out that his problems were not getting his servers to talk to one another – but rather his end users talking to the servers in the data center. His last mile was old school and he needed new devices that would support a faster speed in a star config on each floor – and maybe each department. We redesigned his solution giving him fatter pipe on the floors which is what he needed. I remember him well – he called me “little lady” when he announced what he was gonna do, and when I spoke back – I said Well, Bubba – I am not sure that is gonna fix your problem…nice guy – good illustration of what you talk about here.
lol….That’s pretty awesome. Never too old to be a chauvinist.