The Lean Startup(Eric Ries) an eye-opener into why my first project failed

Have you ever developed something that was never used by anyone? I certainly did that, a lot! Since I was 14 I have been coding stuff to learn and create. Creating is good, but creating things that are actually used is better! So after I left university I thought, well I can code, so I just make a product and make money. I quickly came to realize that it won’t be that easy. It turns out the hardest part of creating a tech startup is not product development, it is figuring out what to build!

Just do it!

Every company should have a business plan, a solid strategy and thorough market research, right? Well, did you ever try to make a business plan for a company that doesn’t exist yet? Chances are you probably aren’t even sure what product you are going to make yet and don’t know who your customers will be. I tried it a few times, everyone said you should do that, but I couldn’t make a sensible plan! It was just one big waste of words based on solely assumptions to describe a future I would like to see. Not to long after I completely abandoned that and went with the just do it is the strategy!

Chaos

The result of the “just do it strategy” was chaos. I ended up shipping a product with tons of features, for nothing! The product in the end didn't solve a problem customers cared about enough. This mainly happened due to the lack of a well defined problem. In other words due to the lack of a clear destination of what you wanted to achieve for your customers.

Lack of hypothesis

From failures you learn, right? Well, imagine that in science class all you did was just putting random fluids together and see what happens, would you learn a lot from that? Yes, but not whole lot. You will learn that putting some fluids together can be dangerous, some will become a nice color, but it isn’t really an effective way of doing research. Instead you should try to predict the outcome of an experiment using an hypothesis which you form based on theory and prior done experiments. I should have done the same for my project, create hypothesis based on my vision. (Hypothesis Spotify, people want to pay monthly to stream unlimited music online)

What is your take on this, do you think the lessons I took from this are right?

Read the full article here