A product being good enough isn't enough. At some point you also need to price it, and communicate it's existence persuasively to the market and win market share, and it has to be distributed effectively.
We call this marketing, and most marketers are crap at it. It's not taught well, and in most places it's implemented worse.
Most businesses fail because they solve for the relatively easy bit (product) and then have no idea about the rest.
As a side note for this, I've written a book on everything I've learned practically over 21 years in marketing everything from tech SaaS companies to watches to salt to cars to pharmaceuticals to insurance. If you're involved in running or starting up a business, it'll help.
If anyone would like to read it and provide feedback for where I can improve it before I take it to market, I'd be happy to ping them a copy. pete at watson-wail dot es.
The Lean Startup methodology is likely applicable only within a very narrow niche: a newly discovered green field with plenty of low-hanging fruit. Web apps in the late 90s and 2000s. Mobile apps after that. Agent integrations now. These are areas where the barrier to entry is low, problems are plenty, and there's space for a thousand flowers to bloom.
In contrast, for a company that can't be started by a single app developer - getting out of the building won't help. Nobody in the space worth talking to will talk to you, for starters.
Interestingly, this suggests that the Lean Startup methodology is basically a suboptimal strategy that produces acceptable outcomes only in the most fruitful circumstances. You can start a Lean Startup that makes a little bit of money, but if you'd really bet big and put your back into it, you would've done 1000x better.
Fooled by Randomness talks a good bit about this, and argues it’s true - except you don’t know what to bet on. Hence the outlier successes will be from extreme risk takers, and for each such person there will be 1,000s of other gamblers that bet on the wrong thing.
Taleb does the math as well IIRC, assuming there are x hundred thousand extreme risk takers, and outlier “correct bets” are y% chance, then you will have a surprisingly high number of people with a long series of “correct” bets behind them looking like business geniuses, from pure chance & basic statistics.
It also forces you to focus on some extremely narrow problem definition. Often, these narrow problem definitions turn out to be features of existing platforms or in the ai age - artifacts of the current model generation.
> Nobody in the space worth talking to will talk to you, for starters.
There’s a skill issue there. I know a founder who’s able to get people to talk to him. As a result, his startup had F500 customers almost from the beginning.
But that’s the kind of thing that no amount of documented strategy and tactics is ever doing to be able to teach. I’ve watched it happening, but I can’t do it.
> The New Pundits have been around long enough, and are widely known enough, that their relevant books have collectively sold millions of copies and are taught in virtually all university entrepreneurship courses.[4] If they worked, it would show up in the statistics. Instead, there has been zero systematic progress over the past 30 years in making startups more likely to survive.
For me, this is where it breaks. There are two assumptions that the author must be challenged on.
1. Enough people know about these methods
2. Of those people enough use the methods properly
Judging from my own experience I can’t confirm neither of these. Even those people that know the approach rarely have the rigor to treat startups as a series of experiments. Ego plays a large part.
If you believe that an achievement involves skill, and that people can hone than skill, then I think you should believe the people who have done it know on average good advice about how to do it. You don't have to believe this, you may believe that many people simply got lucky, and no skill is involved. I think most of us do believe that skill is involved in starting a business, so let's just assume it is. I think this implies that successful and well-intentioned business-starters should on average be able to give good advice. Not that they all will give correct advice every time, or that their advised approach will be correct for you every time. But that they on average "know something". My impression is that they largely agree with the method put forward in the lean startup. I haven't read all these other book that tfa is dissing, but I think it's basically arguing a very difficult view. Why should I believe this random guy when the people that have done it many times are telling me he's wrong?
Survivorship bias. For every success you describe there are nine or so failures.
Skill being involved doesn’t exclude being lucky, and I believe being lucky (some people call it timing) is of utmost importance.
Ya, I respect this view. It is not the view I have, but I understand how you can have it. Eg, this is how I feel about most famous portfolio managers. Really my comment is addressed to the other view -- if it _isn't_ luck, then I think we should put some weight in what the successful practitioners say, and the ones I've heard do endorse the lean startup & co.
Methods improved the baseline, but also increased competition, keeping outcomes flat. Totally underweights systems and then blasts into methods not working. “Just do something different” is not a strategy... In fact, many great businesses look conventional early, and only later reveal their advantage.
Startup punditry is a business niche being capitalised on and it's being regarded in this article like a commune of knowledge. It's mildly insightful entertainment literature, with customers. On a philosophical level it's absolute value is tainted by its existence in the market. Most things are, but it living in the context of entrepreneurial endeavours, it taints it substantially more than most.
A product being good enough isn't enough. At some point you also need to price it, and communicate it's existence persuasively to the market and win market share, and it has to be distributed effectively.
We call this marketing, and most marketers are crap at it. It's not taught well, and in most places it's implemented worse.
Most businesses fail because they solve for the relatively easy bit (product) and then have no idea about the rest.
As a side note for this, I've written a book on everything I've learned practically over 21 years in marketing everything from tech SaaS companies to watches to salt to cars to pharmaceuticals to insurance. If you're involved in running or starting up a business, it'll help.
If anyone would like to read it and provide feedback for where I can improve it before I take it to market, I'd be happy to ping them a copy. pete at watson-wail dot es.
The Lean Startup methodology is likely applicable only within a very narrow niche: a newly discovered green field with plenty of low-hanging fruit. Web apps in the late 90s and 2000s. Mobile apps after that. Agent integrations now. These are areas where the barrier to entry is low, problems are plenty, and there's space for a thousand flowers to bloom.
In contrast, for a company that can't be started by a single app developer - getting out of the building won't help. Nobody in the space worth talking to will talk to you, for starters.
Interestingly, this suggests that the Lean Startup methodology is basically a suboptimal strategy that produces acceptable outcomes only in the most fruitful circumstances. You can start a Lean Startup that makes a little bit of money, but if you'd really bet big and put your back into it, you would've done 1000x better.
Fooled by Randomness talks a good bit about this, and argues it’s true - except you don’t know what to bet on. Hence the outlier successes will be from extreme risk takers, and for each such person there will be 1,000s of other gamblers that bet on the wrong thing.
Taleb does the math as well IIRC, assuming there are x hundred thousand extreme risk takers, and outlier “correct bets” are y% chance, then you will have a surprisingly high number of people with a long series of “correct” bets behind them looking like business geniuses, from pure chance & basic statistics.
It also forces you to focus on some extremely narrow problem definition. Often, these narrow problem definitions turn out to be features of existing platforms or in the ai age - artifacts of the current model generation.
> Nobody in the space worth talking to will talk to you, for starters.
There’s a skill issue there. I know a founder who’s able to get people to talk to him. As a result, his startup had F500 customers almost from the beginning.
But that’s the kind of thing that no amount of documented strategy and tactics is ever doing to be able to teach. I’ve watched it happening, but I can’t do it.
> The New Pundits have been around long enough, and are widely known enough, that their relevant books have collectively sold millions of copies and are taught in virtually all university entrepreneurship courses.[4] If they worked, it would show up in the statistics. Instead, there has been zero systematic progress over the past 30 years in making startups more likely to survive.
For me, this is where it breaks. There are two assumptions that the author must be challenged on.
1. Enough people know about these methods
2. Of those people enough use the methods properly
Judging from my own experience I can’t confirm neither of these. Even those people that know the approach rarely have the rigor to treat startups as a series of experiments. Ego plays a large part.
If you believe that an achievement involves skill, and that people can hone than skill, then I think you should believe the people who have done it know on average good advice about how to do it. You don't have to believe this, you may believe that many people simply got lucky, and no skill is involved. I think most of us do believe that skill is involved in starting a business, so let's just assume it is. I think this implies that successful and well-intentioned business-starters should on average be able to give good advice. Not that they all will give correct advice every time, or that their advised approach will be correct for you every time. But that they on average "know something". My impression is that they largely agree with the method put forward in the lean startup. I haven't read all these other book that tfa is dissing, but I think it's basically arguing a very difficult view. Why should I believe this random guy when the people that have done it many times are telling me he's wrong?
Survivorship bias. For every success you describe there are nine or so failures. Skill being involved doesn’t exclude being lucky, and I believe being lucky (some people call it timing) is of utmost importance.
Ya, I respect this view. It is not the view I have, but I understand how you can have it. Eg, this is how I feel about most famous portfolio managers. Really my comment is addressed to the other view -- if it _isn't_ luck, then I think we should put some weight in what the successful practitioners say, and the ones I've heard do endorse the lean startup & co.
Methods improved the baseline, but also increased competition, keeping outcomes flat. Totally underweights systems and then blasts into methods not working. “Just do something different” is not a strategy... In fact, many great businesses look conventional early, and only later reveal their advantage.
I don't think this article is very good, at all.
Startup punditry is a business niche being capitalised on and it's being regarded in this article like a commune of knowledge. It's mildly insightful entertainment literature, with customers. On a philosophical level it's absolute value is tainted by its existence in the market. Most things are, but it living in the context of entrepreneurial endeavours, it taints it substantially more than most.