Re:Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup
by wpietri on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @05:26PM
(#5561013)
Well, it depends on your value of success. At my last startup, as I explain in the linked talk above, we used Lean Startup techniques to kill a number of ideas that we would otherwise have implemented. The startup still didn't make it, so you could call it a failure, but the customer development and iterative market-testing techniques gave us many more tries for the same money, so I am very happy we used them.
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.
But if you want a more traditional success story, I'd suggest Boxbee:
https://boxbee.com/
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.