Katzenberg's business idea cannot be explored without lots of capital. I bet you could find startups like it (i.e. raising lots of money before product-market fit) even when investment money is scarce, just fewer of them.
Is the Lean Startup Dead?
211–220 of 246 posts
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#212The idea for short subject videos is actually pretty good but here is what I don’t like: Netflix, HBO, and Amazon rock because they spend a ton of money making their own material. I don’t see getting the same quality by farming out production to contractors.
Regarding the main point of the article: I always liked the idea of lean and sometimes bootstrapped startups. The current trend of mega financing perhaps comes from all of the money slushing around in markets looking for investments. Part of the effect of increasing wealth disparity is the the very rich have much more capital than they need to live and want to invest.
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to share?
Consumables. The big players are brain dead in terms of product innovation which means you get successful small companies entering all the time. Greek yogurt, deodorant, energy bars (Hi! I'm the cofounder of Mealsquares!), coffee, you name it. Tech founders don't want to touch this stuff.
That's because those things are flooded with competitors and margins don't scale nearly as well as pure tech. Every time I walk through my local farmers market I see a new brand of Kumbucha or Flat Tummy Tea.
But, there is competition everywhere, and it gets fiercer by the day. So pick something you're truly interested in and roll with it until the wheels fall off. That's really your only chance ( if you have one at all ).
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do Google Docs have more features than WordStar?
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#215Earlier 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…
Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry. The gaming industry still has room for lone coders to make a difference. Many of the top indi games…
> Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers
It depends. You could say the same to Igor Sysoev when he started to write Nginx, for example.
So, e.g. web browser with all the main Chrome or Firefox functions but working 2x faster on mobile and eating 3x less memory would disrupt the browser market indeed.
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#216Overfunding 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…
current business model - $50M (pretty lean by today standards) VC investment with ratchet (it is the key element here) to $150M, do something SaaS-y and hire 50-100 people, in a 1-2 years if it isn't becoming a unicorn then sell it at least for $150M+ (a crowd of 50-100 engineers plus whatever they spent these 1-2 years on) to one of a BigCo with FOMO syndrome wrt. latest tech trend. Tripling money in 1-2 years is no…
Relatedly, and I don't know if this is actually valuable, but if you build a strong engineering or product team, I could see that itself being a valuable asset (not unicorn valuable, but perhaps recoup some or all investments valuable). Esp. selling to a company that does have products but not enough talent. Not the hand I'd want to play, but maybe its a thing people do?
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#217Overfunding 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…
Could you define PMF for me please?
PMF is when the startup has i) identified which users are desperate for the product, ii) made a product that customers can’t get enough of (demand feels exponential), and iii) found a business model that works
https://a16z.com/2017/02/18/12-things-about-product-market-f...
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#218If there's no product/market fit, too much capital is a death sentence. If they don't go out of business in a giant explosion, NewTV surely won't build anything innovative or disrupt anyone. Too much pressure and too many expectations at the wrong time/place.
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#219A 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…
Eric Ries was Co-Founder and CTO of IMVU which had 4 million active users and $40M in annual revenue at one point.
I assume you knew that and just felt like bashing him without adding any nuance to your point. That's a bad habit and you shouldn't do it.
Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?
#220The problem I see with the Lean Startup is that Eric Ries isn’t actively promoting, defending and explaining it. On Mixergy, I interview founders who try to make their bones or get attention for their messages by disagreeing with the Lean approach. Eric doesn’t debate, correct or engage with them. So they get to make statements without anyone credible taking them on. Listen to my latest interview it’s Rand Fishkin an…
Thanks for pointing this out Andrew. I founded Lean Startup Machine, the first training/bootcamp on Lean Startup in 2010 which since held events in over 100 cities around the world.
I like Eric, but I think your comment is very true and it's too bad.