Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup

I could quote lots of parts, but here's one of the funniest ones:

>> But intelligent iteration wasn’t possible because of our obese development costs, which left us without any funds to product iterations.

>> We wasted money democratically across developers, patents, e-mail platforms, and a sales pipeline tool

>> Hidden inside our minimum viable product was a separate mobile application to gather data on logic model performance.

The sad part in it is how they blame the process for their failure when they got it all wrong.

However, one thing I've got from this article is how hard it is to create a good mvp. The balance between Quality vs Learning vs Minimum is tricky and highly dependent of your customer. I.e. You create MVPs to learn fast so you can iterate faster.. but since you're still trying to validate your hypothesis, it's hard to decide what is really minimal or valuable.

I guess MVPs is an over-used word.. I prefer prototype: A first or preliminary model of something, esp. a machine, from which other forms are developed or copied. Basically, you use prototypes to iterate really fast and test your assumptions, and then, you build a mvp from what you've learned.

I prefer prototype because it's clear on both side that it's not the real product. It's a temporary phase to test the ideas. But again.. way easier to say than to do. I'm currently in that "prototype vs MVPs" phase and I'm struggling on determining the best next step. The fact that I'm working with health professionals with sensitive and highly important information clearly doesn't help.

That would be amazing if a lean expert reading this would feel generous enough with their time to help me with that "next important step" (phzbox at gmail).

Anyhow, thanks to Casca for sharing his experience.. Learning from failures is more often than not better than trying to copy a successful strategy.

But if you want a more traditional success story, I'd suggest Boxbee:

https://boxbee.com/

I was a mentor at a Lean Startup Machine event ~18 months ago where I met the founder. He had a very hazy idea, and over the course of the weekend refined it into something more focused. He then used the Lean Startup techniques to build a business that had revenue from the first month, and was quickly in the black. Relentlessly refining both the user experience and the back end, he found product-market fit and came up with a sustainable plan. And he did this all in his spare time, mainly with his own money.

A month or so ago he pitched it at Jason Calcanis's LAUNCH conference and took first place. Now he's raising money to build an infrastructure well beyond the initial MVP-grade product.

But you can also look at historical examples. It's important to note that none of the Lean Startup techniques are new. It's meant to be a crystallization of things that some people were doing before, but that had never really been talked about. At the local Lean Startup Circle event, we had the founders of Dropbox and Cafe Press talk about how they worked, and it was very much in the start-small-and-iterate-relentlessly style that the Lean Startup folks are promoting.

For example, you have likely heard of "Facebook killer" apps and "New way to organize your inbox"-type ideas in the past and the general reaction is "Oh ffs, not another clone" but most ideas still have some merit even if their initial briefs are rather ambitious and somewhat tenuous.

Your Facebook killer may be too ambitious but with a bit of focus you may be able to come up with a smaller, more niche product that benefits a particular demographic given feedback and some direction.

This is what WTF provides: Sure, it will not give you a definite "If you build it, they will come" answer but it might just be able to help you salvage something that doesn't look like it is going anywhere.

In addition to helping you shape a project, it may also prevent you from spending time and money on something that just will not work as a result of feedback so you will know fast if it has any potential before spending time and money on it.

AS to stealing your idea, this is rarely the case. The thing that sinks most projects is lack of focus and aiming in the wrong direction - something WTF is designed to help prevent.

Thanks very much for your insight... this is exactly what WTF was designed for.

Mick

It's a B2B product that has a couple substantial value adds over the competition. I created the MVP and got a core group of people in a paid beta. There were tons of bugs, but because of the unique value add I offered everyone was more than willing to put up for it and pay for it (and they knew they would get locked in at beta pricing for when it improved).

I was then able to quickly and easily iterate fixes and improvements, based on my vision as well as what I heard from my paying customers.

So on launch day I was already profitable, I knew what my users wanted, all the major bugs were completely sorted out, and I had ~100 paying beta users (all of whom were referred directly by me or by word of mouth through a beta user) who felt like they had a vested interest in the success of the product who helped me reach a critical mass.

With that being said I don't consider my company to be a lean startup (I hate labels like that), and I didn't set out to do a lean startup, but a lot of what I did is consistent with the lean startup approach.