Is the Lean Startup Dead? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#171

Post by mjfern » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

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…

Did you read the article? Blank is saying that the lean approach is still highly relevant unless you have a huge amount of risk capital available to essentially throw away on mistakes.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#172

Post by JangoSteve » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #31

TekMol wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition many unicorns that are seen as prototypes of successful startups would never have been startups. I think you have been tricked by YC and other VCs to accept this definition of 'built from the start for hyper-growth'. That's how they get their share of young promising companies. To me and most people I know, a startup is a project or company in the growth phase.

> By that definition many unicorns that are seen as prototypes of successful startups would never have been startups. I don't think that's true? Which unicorns are not companies that were pursuing high-growth, or that were trying to build a unique product business model? > I think you have been tricked by YC and other VCs to accept this definition of 'built from the start for hyper-growth'. I haven't been tricked int…

I think you both are arguing two different things.

You seem to be saying that there are a lot of businesses, which will never be startups.

While that's true, they seem to be saying that being a startup is not an immutable trait of a company, but rather a phase, and that any side project or solo business could enter the startup phase at any time.

Sure, most people wouldn't consider a law office to be a startup. Most people also wouldn't consider a consultancy like 37Signals a startup. Most people wouldn't consider a novel URL-ranking algorithm like Google's a startup, or any number of other projects or businesses that didn't begin as startups.

That's not to say that a restaurant is likely to turn into a bootstrapped startup or anything. I think their main point was that not all startups started out with intentions of high growth. Your initial response was that "Solo entrepreneurs are not starting a startup, not as I (and most people) understand the term." To that, I think what they are saying is, "they could be."

You could then argue that startups which aren't yet startups are outside the scope of the OP's original statement that, "For every Startup raising $X million in funding there are probably a thousand solo entrepreneurs bootstrapping their way into profitability." Because, when they do become a startup, then they'll be raising money just like everyone else.

However, even that rebuttal would ignore all the startups that became startups aimed at high growth driven by profitability instead of raising millions at the outset. [1]

Honestly, I think the reason funded startups get more media coverage than bootstrapped startups comes down to simple numbers. There is a large but finite amount of demand for news on successful startups. There aren't enough successful acquisitions, IPOs, or openly successful companies to fill the demand, so we have to dip into indicators of future success, such as funding, to satisfy the demand for news on interesting new businesses. However, as many startups as there are getting funding, there are even more side projects and small businesses being started. Most aren't successful yet, and if they are, they're too busy being successful to proactively reach out to the media with an interesting story.

In other words, I think funding rounds are just an easy source/filter for journalists to publish on, and which require little effort editorializing to be considered interesting by the masses.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/01/invisible-unicorns-35-big-...

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#173

Post by Dowwie » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

It's a collection of ideas and tools.

Osterwalder's business model canvas lives on in its original form and variations of it. Use it to organize important ideas on paper.

Get "out of the office" early in the process and speak with prospective customers.

Create a product that does the minimum required to achieve your goals.

How could these ideas possibly be dead? Maybe "Lean Startup" as a turn-key solution to entrepreneurship has died and it has become more difficult for the Ries and Blank to monetize. However, they promoted many valuable ideas and practices that live on.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#174

Post by nradov » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

awvcs wrote: post #37

I wish it wasn't so but I do think to the degree you can declare something dead the lean startup is. The problem is that lean startups requires a number of things that aren't accessible anymore. 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. B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulat…

Since talent is basically just a myth, why compete for it?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#175

Post by nradov » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

dgudkov wrote: post #107

I'm not sure I understand this. You can't skip finding product/market fit. No matter how much money you have, if you have no product/market fit you're toast. If you're not desperate to find product/market fit (as Lean startups are) because you have tons of money -- you may never find it. To me, Lean startup is not about money. It's about building the most efficient process of finding product/market fit. Once you've f…

Sometimes a visionary founder with an instinctive understanding of the target customers can skip product market fit. Those people are rare, though, and it's not a skill that can be taught or written down in a book.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#176

Post by s73v3r_ » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

megaman8 wrote: post #136

s73v3r_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"C) And then there is just competition, especially for things like talent." I feel startups did this to themselves. It used to be that you'd work for a startup and the equity was supposed to pay off if the startup was acquired or took off. Now, even though a startup may sell for several billion or go public, most employee's equity has been diluted to hell and back, barely making up for the lower salary.

When equity and total compensation go down that's a sign of oversupply of talent, not undersupply.

That's not what I'm talking about, here. The number of shares isn't necessarily going down. Its the crappy way that most startups handle the awards and the outstanding shares, making it so that the only people who actually get anything out of them are the founders and the investors.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#177

Post by pofilat » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:36 PM UTC

nicodjimenez wrote: post #125

ryandrake wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Programs are big because peoples needs are big.

Parent is downvoted but I recall it as an epigram (and I agree) but can't find references discussing it.

Users wouldn't tolerate WordStar and Pac-Man today.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#178

Post by pofilat » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

CalChris wrote: post #73

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…

A more concrete example is MS-DOS which wasn't written by Gates+Allen. It was purchased for $75,000 in 1981 ($207,925.74 in 2018) and a job.

And was allegedly plagiarized from QDOS.

https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-o...

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#179

Post by sizzle » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:43 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…

"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."

This has been my experience as well with lean in the enterprise SaaS world. We are currently toying with "design sprints" from Google [1] which is basically a faster version of lean to get to an MVP. I feel that design sprints are tangible and can get a group of people to creatively solve a problem in a short amount of time, however it seems you run into the local maxima hill climbing problem.

1. http://www.gv.com/sprint/

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#180

Post by pofilat » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:43 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 the name that gatekeeps, it's the necessity of having the network in order to access capital. The name is honest. These days, at least you can try kickstarter.