Lean Startups Are Like Science

We work with a lot of startups, and most of them these days aim to be a "lean startup". The only problem is that folks always seem to misunderstand what a lean startup is or how to apply the techniques. Ultimately, a lean startup is no different from any other business. You need to find a balance between sales, marketing, bookkeeping, customer development and building your product. The right balance depends on your product, your personality and your staff.

If you're spending all of your time building your product, you're likely ignoring what your customers have to say. You're probably building exactly what they don't need, resulting wasted effort and missed revenue.

If you're spending all of your time talking to your customers, it's likely not providing a very clear focus for what you need to build and deliver. Are you sure you're asking the right questions? Running a lean startup doesn't mean letting the customers make your decisions for you. It means building something they value and want to pay you to use. As the old Henry Ford quote goes, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

At LessEverything, we achieve a balance by acting like scientists. We treat our business and our client's businesses as a set of scientific experiments. We don't just test things randomly and see what happens; we use the following process:

Rinse and repeat. Every time you repeat this process, you will have a more refined idea of what your customers expect, and an idea of what they might like but haven't asked for.

Notice that we aren't spending all of our time in any one of these steps. In reality, they're all happening in parallel. Also, in a successful business this process never actually ends. So long as you have customers, you have improvements to make.

1 Comment

Dana R said on June 27, 2012

Startups feel more like art than science to me. Yes, you should be utilizing metrics in a scientific manner to measure all kinds of variables and test out the ROI on different things that you do, but it’s really all about knowing what to focus on. That’s the bit of art you need some experience in to see for yourself. I think that startups generally face 3 big problems – coming up with a quality minimum viable product, finding customers, and settling on the right business model. No product is ever really finished, so you have to have some judgement about when a product is viable in the market and learn to trust your own instincts. Finding customers is really hard, but between search ads, social media, the wealth of options available at http://www.buyfacebookfansreviews.com for example, and all of the other dozens of means of promoting yourself through content marketing and blogs, there’s ways to go around getting customers through hard work even if you don’t have the money for a PR agency. The last step is also quite hard because many startups want to give away everything for free and rely on selling ads to make money. This is a risky move for most companies and an easy way to kill your company if you’re not making any money. Without startup experience, even though some of this stuff is obvious in retrospect, there’s no good way to know what to measure and analyze and focus on first. I think startups are a left-brain/right-brain mix of art and science to be honest.