'The Lean Startup' is a terrible book for startup founders // OpinionX — Free Stack Ranking Surveys
According to The Lean Startup, the best way to figure out if your product idea is any good is to jump straight into building a prototype. This is terrible advice. Here's what founders should do instead...
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The author doesn't know what an MVP is.
Ouch, tough one. Why are you saying that?
( didn’t finish the book for now )
I think he means with "the author", the author of the article and not the author of the Book (Eric Ries) :)
Zero-to-One & The $100 startup are better than this one. Just determine what's outdated and apply it to today!
I would agree. I did not LOVE the lean startup.
Great books for early-stage startups that I personally liked better:
+1 These are some of my favorites.
I haven't read this book. but I think Peter Theil also criticized the lean startup method in his zero-to-one book.
Sorry but I don't agree with most of these points. The author just makes 4 bullet points with each 1-2 sentences and doesn't really give arguments.
I don't love The Lean Startup, but these arguments sounded more like a misunderstanding of the book. Makes me question whether the author wrote this in bad faith or if they even read The Lean Startup.
IMO I think The Lean Startup overcomplicates things. Yes, it's a good idea to minimize risk, but at some point, you've got to go build something. You can spend forever trying to figure out if someone would be willing to buy your product before you make it, but this information is always approximate. People will say they would buy and then won't, and vice-versa. Until your product is on the market, it's always going to be a mystery. Instead of wasting time building something no one wants, you can get paralyzed in the early stages, waiting for an idea that seems perfect and risk-free. The advice in The Lean Startup is sound, but its usefulness has its limits.
Fair points, but the problem with this "if someone would buy" approach that many seem to follow here, i.e a product looking for a market, or a solution looking for a problem. Looking around on IH (i'm quite new), it would seem few are following the audience first approach [See Embedded Entrepreneur - Arvid Kahl], i.e find a market > identify problems > validate a solution > then build it. It's many years since i read Lean Start Up, so i can't honestly remember, but if it's saying "audience/market first" then the more i observe here, the more sensible this approach looks to me. The problem is we often start with a "great idea", when in fact we might be better off starting without one.
Ok, enough, I'm confusing myself now.
Lean Startup ideologies are good, but some of the tactics mentioned naturally can't be explicitly followed as time goes on. Technology and consumer behavior evolve so businesses need to as well.
I did find some useful advice in this book, but overall it did miss the mark for the reasons you mention. Found a lot of it irrelevant to me as a new founder as I needed to make the mistakes to really 'get it'. I found the Startup Checklist the most helpful book for me as a new founder.
I agree. It did had some useful advice for first time founders, as a new founder many of things were not practical.
The book is giving tons of valuable info on starting, validation and iteration of the product, you can't call it terrible it's way more than that. Some of the aspects we can't apply on the very early stage startup but it's still very valuable book.
As someone that's read and studied The Lean Startup, applied the methods of it across 2 startups for the last 15 years (Eric's blog preceded the book), and has had the fortune of talking with Eric Ries ... this "article" is trash.
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Based on my reading of the book, this person has a very weak to non-existent understanding of the original materials, because their summary is based on what people tweet or say about it, not based on what it actually says. Kind of like if someone summarized Frankenstein and didn't know that Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the monster.
If you want more insight you should really read Eric's book!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
great
Yup! Completely agree with this. Any advice that focuses on strategies in the startup sector needs to be current and relevant and The Lean Startup is neither of these things.
The Lean Startup is a concept of how to reach out to potential customers and get their feedback and improve the product, in which world is that not a strategy to build and manage your product?