There are so many things they did that are obviously wrong from the Lean Startup perspective. And then he goes and blames the Lean Startup material, rather than their understanding of it.
For example, his notion that product management is supposed to be casual and erratic is not what the Lean Startup approach suggests. The essence of the approach is in proving that customers really need something before you invest in it. It's a disciplined, data-driven approach. But he says they built half-assed features that nobody needed, and somehow blames that on the Lean Startup stuff.
Also, he preaches about controlling expense. The word "Lean" in "Lean Startup" comes from Lean Manufacturing, the heart of which is relentlessly discovering and eliminating waste. How in the world did he get from that to being free-spending and wasteful?
And then this makes me crazy: "By this stage, Lean Startup theory told us we should be scaling up." No. No, no, no, no, no. No! The Lean Startup theory is that you start scaling if and only if you have achieved product-market fit and have a sustainable way to deliver. He described nothing to suggest they were close to product-market fit. Indeed he says they were limping.
Or his sudden too-late realization that software quality is important. The Lean Startup stuff is basically Extreme Programming plus Customer Development plus some Lean philosophy. Extreme Programming is one of the most quality-focused methods. At my Lean Startup, we had high unit test coverage, strong acceptance tests, lots of code review, and very high quality. 18 months ago I gave a talk on how quality practices were vital when using the Lean Startup approach:
And it's not like I was the first, or even the 10th person to talk about this. Rather than blaming the Lean Startup approach, he should blame his poor understanding, and his cargo-cult adoption of various rituals he apparently couldn't fathom.
It's a B2B product that has a couple substantial value adds over the competition. I created the MVP and got a core group of people in a paid beta. There were tons of bugs, but because of the unique value add I offered everyone was more than willing to put up for it and pay for it (and they knew they would get locked in at beta pricing for when it improved).
I was then able to quickly and easily iterate fixes and improvements, based on my vision as well as what I heard from my paying customers.
So on launch day I was already profitable, I knew what my users wanted, all the major bugs were completely sorted out, and I had ~100 paying beta users (all of whom were referred directly by me or by word of mouth through a beta user) who felt like they had a vested interest in the success of the product who helped me reach a critical mass.
With that being said I don't consider my company to be a lean startup (I hate labels like that), and I didn't set out to do a lean startup, but a lot of what I did is consistent with the lean startup approach.
But if you want a more traditional success story, I'd suggest Boxbee:
I was a mentor at a Lean Startup Machine event ~18 months ago where I met the founder. He had a very hazy idea, and over the course of the weekend refined it into something more focused. He then used the Lean Startup techniques to build a business that had revenue from the first month, and was quickly in the black. Relentlessly refining both the user experience and the back end, he found product-market fit and came up with a sustainable plan. And he did this all in his spare time, mainly with his own money.
A month or so ago he pitched it at Jason Calcanis's LAUNCH conference and took first place. Now he's raising money to build an infrastructure well beyond the initial MVP-grade product.
But you can also look at historical examples. It's important to note that none of the Lean Startup techniques are new. It's meant to be a crystallization of things that some people were doing before, but that had never really been talked about. At the local Lean Startup Circle event, we had the founders of Dropbox and Cafe Press talk about how they worked, and it was very much in the start-small-and-iterate-relentlessly style that the Lean Startup folks are promoting.
I don't mean to imply that there aren't any, but I just haven't heard of any.
The client never cares about what methods you use. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use any methods.
I agree that experimenting is dangerous: any powerful tool is dangerous. But it has worked for too many people to call it a delusion.
Regarding "couldn't fathom", I'm glad to substitute "didn't fathom". But you certainly didn't understand them, and many other people did.
"Nevertheless as devout Lean Startup followers, we kept building, measuring, and learning. Hidden inside our minimum viable product was a separate mobile application to gather data on logic model performance. This mobile app mystified our customers. Why didn’t we let them input data online at their desks as a starting step?"
On what planet can you be doing Lean development and get as far as building an entire app that not one of your customer wants with features that none of them needs? How can anything be "hidden"?
Wow. Was this published April 1st?
Segue to edit of my standard rant on this subject: (originally posted on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3429906)
MVP != half assed, cheap, shitty product. It is exactly what it says: a minimum viable product, key word being viable. An MVP for a mission critical application or a cutting edge piece of research isn't going to be cheap or easy, because it needs to be viable.
Because of the name, many people make the assumption that doing a Lean Startup means not taking the time or money necessary to execute properly, this is not the case. Lean means conserving capital by focusing on iteration until you each product market fit, and only then ramping up sales or marketing, but again, if you're cracking a new market, untested technology, or going up against mature competition, even that phase of conserving capital and focusing in product may require a lot of capital.
Your product, when released to customers, needs to be usable, and needs to scratch an itch for them, otherwise it is inherently not viable. That's why customer development is so essential, it prevents you from making the worst mistake possible-- building a robust product no one wants. Even if you have the best product idea in the world, the only way to know if the features you add are having a positive impact is to measure the behavior of real, live, human users.
That being said, it's still your responsibility to stay relentlessly focused in your core value proposition. You can't build every feature you're customers ask for, only the ones that make sense for your product.
What we're seeing now is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean,.
The Lean startup movement is a powerful set of lessons that can empower entrepreneurs and save us from wasting our time and effort building the wrong things and chasing the wrong metrics, but I guess some of the lessons just have to be learned painfully through experience (it was certainly true for me).