Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
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Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#2Your blog looks like it's owned by Twitter. The twitter logo is in the usual location of the owner's logo. I suggest you repair this. Among other things, it's probably against their policy.
Also, I had exactly the same experience, but the difference here is the enterprise nature of the startup. Enterprise demands power, and investment, and capital. You can't do it lean.
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#3As someone who works in the Canadian Government I'm not surprised at all that a deputy minister would have no interest in helping you iterate your product, at that level it's all about politics and to have a product fail in front of them and their coworkers is a big problem it makes them look bad which could have a negative effect on their job.
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#4> 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.
Oh, how I wish I could tell myself this five years ago. Maybe it's the industry I do most of my development for, but users I interact with very rarely want to hear "that will be in 2.0!" The ones that even let you finish the sentence before hanging up/walking out usually respond with "That's great. Let me know when it's done, then we can talk about signing up."
MVP and incremental development is great when you're a VC-funded startup in Mountain View, but when you're a real business you either have a working product that people want, or you don't.
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#5Great share to hear the more realistic side of some of the MVP pieces.
Certainly one of the biggest challenges I hit almost daily with my saas is what feature is critical to success, and which can be 2.0, especially in light of the comment than they might not want to wait for a 2.0. Customer research only gets you so far.
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#6Sorry, this doesn't add up. Lean doesn't mean your product breaks or is pushed out functionally incomplete. If no one wants it it's not viable.
The article says give your customers what they want. Unfortunately they thought the customers wanted a mobile app... but they didn't! Wait, what startup methodology could have prevented this...
The article is honest about their mistakes and that must have been hard to do and props for trying but don't try and pass the failure buck to a methodology you didn't even do right.
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#7Lean Startup theory can be pain in the ass for many kind of startups. I think it's wrong that Lean Startup doesn't encourage sales from the very beggining. Sales are the best validation of your idea, not feedback from customers who doesn't pay for your MVP anyways. Build a product for people who pay for it - that's my advice. It's not universal eighter, but more than 50% of startups can start sales before coding anything.
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#8I think you guys misunderstood the purpose of MVP, since your lessons learned part explains pretty much what we can find in Lean approach books. MVP is not a product, it's a learning process. Bugs have nothing to do with being lean (or not), it's sloppy developers.
Not trying to be a wise-ass, but I still think your mistakes are avoidable while still following lean principles. Good luck on your next venture!
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#9I worked for a enterprise software company where we practiced incremental development. The quality of software was hardly stellar but they had a great sales team. By the time I left, they had 6000 customers, lot of them Fortune 500. It is also worth mentioning that they were completely bootstrapped until recently.
Our customers were always ok with us informing them that features will be in x.0, as long as we delivered on them.
Maybe, it was your market that prevented the lean startup methodology from being applied?
Re: Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
#10I like the term "minimum desirable product". Minimum viable product suggests something that barely works, while minimum desirable product alludes to something people actually want.