Lean Startup "Marketing Bullshit"

I'm admittedly short on my knowledge of this newfangled "lean startup" notion. But, it sounds to me like the fundamental principle is "lazy product evaluation." Ie, instead of building anything up-front, go out, find out what people want, and build that, MVP, reacting to markets that you know, provably, to already exist.

At the risk of getting told I don't "get it", this sounds like a great way to build a very successful but horribly boring startup.

Your last paragraph has a lot of words but says very little. Can it not all be summed up as "talk to your customers?" Isn't this the foundation of any business? Does anyone actually advocate not doing so?

Obviously you need to be aware of the problems your customers face as a business.

But the notion that anything is the "most important" metric of progress reeks of classic silver-bulletism that plagues software engineering.

I also am not a big believer in "validation." You're never going to "validate" your ideas through customers. You're going to evolve your ideas through seeing people use what you build. But they're never "validated" or "proven right" through intimate customer feedback. Good ideas are "validated" over the course of years, often after much ridicule, resistance, and pain.

I personally find Steve Blank has some interesting things to say and Eric Ries not so much, comparitively. The latter seems to be trying to turn a simple idea (combine agile engineering practices with Steve Blank's "customer discovery/validation" idea") into a consultingware "movement" with kool-aid conferences and such, just as with all business fads. The jury is still out on the eventual success of such efforts.

The nearest analogy is the whole "Agile" movement. There was a useful/interesting kernel of ideas but it was soon overrun by scammy consultants (e.g the hwle "Scrum Master" certification scam). I suspect "Lean Startups" are on the same path.

I do think Mr.Ries has some (mildly) interesting things to say, but (and this is probably blasphemy for at least a subset of HN readers) my "marketing bullshit" filter is on at high when I read or listen to him these days. I believe that the whole "lean startup" movement is in its early stages of being overrrun by scamsters so there are still interesting ideas there.

So yes, (imo) at least some part of the "Lean Startup" (the phrase is copyrighted by Mr Ries btw!) stuff is marketing BS. As always you as the consumer of such fads have to use your intelligence to discard the marketing fluff and find the useful core. And every fad generally has a (sometimes tiny) useful core.

Caveat Emptor. Useful idea, especially as it applies to methodology salesmen, irrespective of whether said methodology applies to sw dev (agile) or building/running a business ("lean startup").

Well, 'talk to your customers' is a little different from 'listen to your customers and make sure you understand exactly what problem your product/service solves for them'. And I think the only difference between evolution (as you've described it) and validation is that seeing how people use what you build, and getting qualitative data on those users is emphasised, rather than something that just happens over time.

At a minor level, that could be making sure that the next feature you implement is the one that will make your software much more usable from their point of view, rather than the shiniest or most technically interesting to implement. (e.g. it doesn't matter if your mousetrap automatically telling your computer when it's caught something, if their local mice just aren't interested in $bait_that_works_best_in_bobs_house )

On the larger scale, if your customers are using your product to solve a problem you didn't expect, you can't optimise your product so it sells even better. If the largest user of your mousetrap is the gremlin-catcher's guild, then perhaps you need to look at building more gremlin-specific features, and changing your marketing a little.

And, of course, the simplest metric for validation is that if they ain't buying it then it ain't doing what they want enough for them to pay for it.

Disclaimer: I have never run a startup, let alone used these principles. They just seem to make sense to me.