Is the Lean Startup Dead? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#161

Post by awvcs » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #93

simias wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. >B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to…

> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. As software professionals, this is a problem of our own making. Nobody is asking for software to be complex. Users don’t want complexity. Development companies don’t want costly complexity. Software developers don’t even want complexity. Who has sat down at the start of a project and…

While I get what you are saying, I mostly disagree. You have to differentiate between if the problem exists and whether the solution is any good. When computing became really mainstream we were standing on the shoulder of giants. A lot things had trickled down from things like research and were really good for the time. But they also lacked in a lot of things we care about today like encryption, automation, design, cross-platform and security. Today these things aren't coming out of research, nor necessarily large companies, but some random person who can see the problem. It would be a lot better if something like authentication was included in HTTP, but that isn't happening for various reasons, so it is going to be a job for a framework. That isn't necessarily a good solution, but it a solution to a problem that exists.

It really seems like things like PARC was an anomaly. Companies eventually figured that it was just better to "be part of the problem" and make a lot of money like in many other industries.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#162

Post by bborud » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

A movement fueled by a book promoter with no notable track record of success for what he is preaching? Yeah, it was a fad.

To be fair, Ries stole a lot of nice bits from different schools of thought. There's stuff his books that actually works.

But you would have to be soft in the head to think that his book represented wisdom. In fact, wisdom does not come from a book – it comes from reading a lot of books, making a lot of mistakes, working with a lot of people, building a lot of stuff, and still understanding that this does not necessarily represent something that can be distilled into bullet proof heuristics. There's always unseen and uncounted factors that you will miss.

In contact with large, established organisations this book tends to produce cargo cults. Simplistic management self-help literature combined with institutional mediocrity, stupidity, fear of change, and hard-shelled delusion is a horrible mix.

The good thing is that these cargo cults tend to die after a few years. The bad thing is that anything associated with them then gets tainted.

The Lean Startup was a management fad and it didn't make people any smarter. It just gave them different ceremonies to perform in order to feel good about themselves. And as all fads, it has now passed. It is okay to move around the cabin and think for yourself again.

I would recommend "Functional Stupidity" by Mats Alvesson as a form of inocculation against this type of self-pleasuring heuristic-seeking.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#163

Post by enjayz » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

bborud wrote: post #162

A movement fueled by a book promoter with no notable track record of success for what he is preaching? Yeah, it was a fad. To be fair, Ries stole a lot of nice bits from different schools of thought. There's stuff his books that actually works. But you would have to be soft in the head to think that his book represented wisdom. In fact, wisdom does not come from a book – it comes from reading a lot of books, making a…

damn.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#164

Post by mvpu » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

Investors aren't stupid - they won't fund millions of dollars (series A and above) unless they see a working product that customers are raving about, a large market opportunity, and a clear go-to-market - general indications of product-market-fit (although the definition of PMF depends on the space and product). We have seen rare cases of outsized seed rounds w/o a product, but they are extremely rare (even today). So this notion of "go big or go home" isn't vaporware - most founders cannot get that kind of investments, and few that can (reputed, second time founders for example) think 100 times before they jump in.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#165

Post by dcosson » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #93

simias wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. >B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to…

> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. As software professionals, this is a problem of our own making. Nobody is asking for software to be complex. Users don’t want complexity. Development companies don’t want costly complexity. Software developers don’t even want complexity. Who has sat down at the start of a project and…

Users absolutely want complexity. Obviously most people would never say it in those words but lots of things they do ask for come with a lot of inherent complexity. Things like "it should just work", or remembering a preference for later, or automatically linking to some related data, or streamlining a workflow because in this situation you should know my intent so you should just default to the thing I probably want to do and save me a few clicks, etc.

Sure, there are lots of times where you're better off ignoring these user requests, and where scope creep or bureaucracy or tech debt or just sloppy coding introduce unnecessary complexity. But even if we could always build exactly what users want and always build things cleanly starting from a blank slate, software would still be complex.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#166

Post by pjlegato » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

dpeck wrote: post #110

Liron wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common approach is to have friends and family invest $50-250k using a SAFE note with a ~$2M cap (e.g. five $10k checks)

calling early investors "friends and family" does so much to keep out and alienate potential founders who don't come from wealth.

It's not some sort of goal-oriented nefarious plot to keep poor people out of the rich people's club by alienating them through language choice. It's a realist description of how early stage startups actually work empirically, irrespective of whether we approve of the nature of this socioeconomic phenomenon.

When you have no proof at all that your concept can actually become a profitable business, no commercial investors will touch it. It's far too risky compared to their many other options. The only people who get investment in such an extremely high risk scenario are those who happen to have rich friends and family. These investors will take a punt on them just because they like them personally and they can afford to lose the money, which is overwhelmingly likely.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#167

Post by pjlegato » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:49 PM UTC

ben_jones wrote: post #158

You don't have to follow SV stereotypes The lean startup is alive in well in most entrepreneurial ventures. Starting a food truck? Grocery store? Custom t-shirts? Indie video game? Small focused SaaS? The echo chamber is real. "I looked outside and saw no lean startups, its dead!"

The article (and most of HN) refer to the local Silicon Valley jargon definiton of the word "startup": a company that is meant to grow extremely fast through the use of new technology. It's not a synonym for any entreprenurial venture.

What you're talking about is locally called a "lifestyle business" (not a "startup") -- a small business that can provide a comfortable living for the founder and a few employees, but which has essentially zero longer term growth prospects.

This point seems to be the source of much confusion in the comments here.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#168

Post by WalterSear » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #148

salt-licker wrote: post #146

Overfunding is an existential risk for startups. Scaling a team before finding PMF seems like a blunder in most circumstances. Instead of setting your best engineers to work creating the best product, they're busy recruiting and dealing with company growing pains from the get-go. The mythical man-month and scarcity of great people combine to diminish your returns on this hiring. Furthermore, battleships don't turn on…

> Furthermore, huge funding means investors are looking for a huge returns. A $1b sale is now failure?? My gut says this "go big or go bankrupt" pressure encourages tunnel vision among leadership rather than innovation. If you don't take the money, they will go to your competitor, and give it to them instead. If you're in a space where you can be killed by your competitor selling $1 for 90 cents, that will kill you j…

>If you don't take the money, they will go to your competitor, and give it to them instead.

Your competitor is getting funded whether you take the money or not. A failure to have planned for this is a de facto plan to drink the cool-aid.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#169

Post by WalterSear » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #149

cle wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many companies, big complex software is desirable, because of poor incentive structures. I've seen many projects ballon into vastly over-complex nightmares, because engineers are often rewarded for solving "hard" and "complex" problems. So with complicit management (who are also rewarded when their engineers are promoted), they invent complexity and then "solve" it.

Venture capital has corrupted the tech industry to its core. The VC cash machine has brought us nothing except short term thinking, get-rich-quick schemes, social manipulation, herd mentality, idol-worship, media corruption and corporate growth. I look forward to the next tech bubble. I hope they all get wiped out.

Ill winds blow no-one any good

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#170

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

I think the problem with Lean today is that everybody knows about it.

Starting a startup in 2002-2005 was hard, just the mechanics of it. Incorporating took several thousand dollars of lawyer time; there was no Clerky, and online LLC-generators were largely unknown. Accepting payments meant getting a merchant account with a CC; no Stripe, Square, or other payment processors. Payroll meant dealing with ADP or PayChex; benefits meant hiring a person to manage those relationships. There was no YC, generally no seed funding ecosystem other than angels, no AngelList, no gigantic startup blogging scene where everybody gives advice on everything.

As a result, there were plenty of unfilled pain points, and potential customers were overjoyed when someone would actually come talk to them about it rather than assuming they knew what was best, a la big companies or massively VC-funded startups.

Now, everybody and their brother is founding startups, which means that if you do happen across a genuine pain point, there are already 2 dozen startups working on it. Customers get weary of even talking to prospective entrepreneurs because they've had that conversation so many times before. I've done the Lean Startup methodology, and have several friends that have tried it; the most likely outcome today is that you'll talk to a 100 customers (after trying to talk to several hundred more who don't respond), and then discover that there's no actual market need addressable with current technology and you should keep your day job.

Like most knowledge related to markets, once everyone believes it's true, it ceases to be true.