Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup

> I like the term "minimum desirable product". Minimum viable product suggests something that barely works, while minimum desirable product alludes to something people actually want.

I think "minimum viable product" works, and is better than "minimum desirable product" at describing the goal, since to be viable as a product something must not only be desired, but be desired by customers willing to pay for it sufficiently to meet the marginal costs of delivering it.

Of course, an MVP can fail to be viable as a product and still deliver validated learning (as I understand, the original definition of the purpose an MVP) that progresses you toward something viable as a product, but the goal at each iteration should be to have something valuable as a product (and this is consistent with the more general lean methods which lean startup draws on, where each iteration aims to do the minimum work that will produce independent business value.)

Right off the bat, it looks like the problem lies in 'we built a software product that simplified how nonprofits plan and measure their social and environmental impact.'. It just seems nothing was built that people wanted to pay for. The product wasn't marketed to people that have the money to pay for it and see the value in doing so. Also they got confused by thinking 'viable' is different to 'desirable'. It's the exact same thing. MVP doesn't mean what's the smallest piece of junk you can throw together and call it software. It means if you strip everything out of your idea and product, what is the one feature that customers would find useful and pay for.

  * Development costs too much to afford iterating.
  * Mobile app that customers didn't ask for.
  * Language customers didn't understand.
  * MVP not actually being viable.

I'm sure there are more, but my take-away is that this was not a lean startup.

If your development costs are such that you can't iterate on new ideas, you might not have a lean startup.

If you are presenting features that your customers aren't asking for, you might not have a lean startup.

If your customers can't understand what you are showing them and you aren't immediately changing it, you might not have a lean startup.

If you are trying to target big and little customers at the same time (or don't know who your customer is), you might not have a lean startup.

If your minimum viable product isn't viable, you...well, you don't have a minimum viable product. The point of the MVP is to provide enough value that customers see more value in using it than it costs. Anything less than that is just some features thrown together.

In the end, I'm not sure if OP agrees with me or not, but this sounds like a focus problem: trying to do to much instead of focusing in on the pain that gets you in the door.

Another note on MVP: It changes over time. Initially, an MVP may just be some powerpoint slides that show your idea. That may be enough to get you some conversations. Later, when targeting your initial customers, it may be a feature or two that helps them solve their immediate needs. Later still, when you want to start mass-marketing, it needs to be something more.

A key takeaway: Just because Lean is simple doesn't mean it is easy. It takes a lot of discipline to keep from putting the cart ahead of the horse.

I'm voting this up. It has so many problems that everybody should know and talk about them.

"...First, the minimum viable product preached by Lean Startup has limited practical use. Customers aren’t interested in funding your “learning.” They want reliable software that delivers value consistently. You must build the minimum desirable product, and if you don’t have a good understanding of what’s desirable before you start, then, don’t...."

What value and growth hypotheses are you testing? Seriously, nobody is expecting your customers to put up with crappy development. What we're saying is that you must clearly explain what you are trying to learn before each rev. Just coding up some minimalist POS and irritating a potential customer with it doesn't take you anywhere down the learning road. Pro tip: irritating people will not give you good results in your quest for learning.

Lean startup stuff says everything you do should be geared towards proving a value or growth hypothesis. You should have a disciplined way of testing, and numbers that mean success or failure -- ahead of time. Yes, you do it in loops. Yes, there's all kinds of other stuff. Yes, you're always focusing on eliminating waste. But I think this guy missed the point completely. The MVP is where two proven hypotheses are deployed in tandem to a target market.

I could go on, but I don't want to be mean. We learn much more from watching people misunderstand things than we do watching successes. Thanks to casca for posting it.

> Knowing what's viable and building it is the difficult part, but isn't that what lean methodology is supposed to help with to begin with?

Lean approaches (including, but not limited to, lean startup) provide basic rubrics about where to focus your efforts to optimize return for effort. They aren't, however, a magic wand that substitutes for skill, judgement, and domain expertise (well, perhaps a little for the last, since inherently lean uses the scientific method to grow domain knowledge in a highly-focussed way, but unless you've got a deep reserve of resources to fund failures that you learn from, or get really lucky, you are still likely to fail without domain expertise going in.)

The biggest problem with lean now is it is being treated as if it were a formulaic, recipe-driven methodology that substitutes for specialized skill, when lean is pretty much an anti-recipe approach that is all about everything you do being part of a continuous hypothesis-test-review improvement cycle, including the kind of things you might get from a book discussing practices that others developed via lean, which may provide a starting point for your practices, but not a fixed methodology.