The Lean Startup is a terrible book for founders
The Lean Startup isn't just outdated — most of its core principles were bad advice even when it came out in 2011.
It's built on two very incorrect assumptions:
(1) Customers can't tell you what they want
(2) The best way to validate a product idea is to build it
Don't read it.
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tell me you did not understand a book without saying you did not understand the book
I've read The Lean Startup 3 times cover to cover and spent a couple of years teaching it to founders. If there's something you disagree with from the post, feel free to share.
Wow! So you read a book 3 times, decided most of its core principles were bad (even back then), and you spent years teaching it to founders?!!
*I disagree with everything you said in the post.
#1 it is not outdated.
#2 It is not built on the assumption that customers can't tell you what they want. It is built on the FACT that customers can tell you what they want - which is why it advocates that you go out and show people what it is your building. What it does say however is that, those people won't come up with the solution for you. These are two different things. Using the car & faster horse thing as an example; Customers will say "I want to arrive where I am going fast" NOT "I want a car"!
Or in modern times,
"I want a way to connect with my friends" NOT "I want Facebook"!
#3 The best way to validate an idea IS to indeed build it. But build it in an incremental and lean way (literally in the title) so you don't run out of money and/or other resources. A lean product can be a simple landing page that collects emails. The only thing leaner than that is talking -- but so many founders will tell you how during talks people said they loved the idea ---until it was made and not even half of them signed up. Building it allows people to truly see what it is you are pitching, as opposed to "imagining" it.
by the way - it's okay to make a post
" The Mom Test, why I love it and why you should too".
Can you provide your awesome alternative solution to number 2?
Yep! The approach I use when coaching founders is (1) mapping their current assumptions, (2) using a customer discovery method called The Discovery Sandwich to validate those assumptions (combines The Mom Test, quantitative prioritization and pre-screened in-depth interviews), and then (3) repeating this process in iterative cycles through the 5 pre-traction ingredients of a successful startup: persona, problem, proposition, product, positioning (some info on what I mean by that here).
Let me know if you want more info/context around this
What's your rate for coaching?
Hey Emre, I do pretty cheap coaching for founders. Can you send me a little more info about what kinda help you need to daniel@opinionx.co?
I don't need coaching. Just wanted to be sure that you sell the stuff you shared above which is almost never useful for indie hackers or new startups. The "strategies & tests" you shared that you coach takes month(s) of work that could have been invested in building the MVP and trying and sell the stuff. But obviously, there is no "coaching money" there.
I coach our product's customers (mostly founders/PMs) specifically on using stack ranking to make their customer discovery and roadmap prioritization faster and more data-driven. The methods don't take months, they take hours/days. But thanks for trying to troll and show me in a bad light for no apparent reason :)
Ah, I love The Lean Startup and its principles. It's something we follow quite heavily at EmailOctopus, and I've done throughout my career since I first read it in 2013 or so.
What do you think the best way to validate a product idea, if it isn't to build it?
My view is that even with the deepest research, you still essentially – on Day 1 – have a series of untested hypotheses around whether this business will work. If your suggestion is not to build/market/ship it, then how do you test whether the business will work?
I think the best place to start is with customer discovery interviews via The Mom Test approach. Personally think you can learn a lot through experimentation and interviews if you know what order of ingredients to research/build (ie. persona, problem, proposition, product, positioning -- in that order). Here's an example of why that order is important using an example of a $930M exit startup called WeatherBill (TL;DR -- the key is understanding the dependencies between those 5 ingredients and therefore which you need to validate/understand first).
I beg to disagree. Money talks. Customer survey interviews are fluff by themselves
The only way to reallt validate a business is to secure a paying customer for your product/services.
Yeah, that's pretty obvious -- I never said that money isn't the best validation. I just said that customer discovery research is a better first step than building an MVP, which is one of the most common takeaways people get from TLS.
The trouble with market research and customer discovery research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, they don't do what they say. We simply don't have access to our genuine motivations, because it's in our interest not to know.
That is a great resource. Really like the comparison of initial and pivoted statements in the Startup Bowtie!
Glad you liked that!
And do you think Customer Discovery Interviews alone are sufficient to know whether the business will work? What are the next steps after those interviews, do you follow the MVP approach or build out a full fledged solution?
I said interviews are a better first step, not that they alone are sufficient to know whether the business will work. You're obviously still doing to have to build a product. But jumping straight into building MVPs in order to uncover the customer need afterwards is putting the cart before the horse and will waste a lot of your time and money.
I'm not sure jumping straight into the MVP (without a single clue about the problem space) is exactly what the Lean Startup or Eric Ries recommends? The MVP is there to prove/disprove the hypothesis, which comes from the initial speaking to customers – does it not?
Maybe I completely misunderstood the process.
Agreed to some extent. The sandwich methodology is awesome.
Definitely! The Mom Test and Obviously Awesome are much better options now for early projects, whether at a startup or an established company. When the Lean Startup gained traction (2011ish?) it did help to get stakeholders to talk about iterative approaches and try to measure outcomes better. However, the MVP thing was so vague and way behind what was already being done in the HCI/UX/IxD world as to be laughable, except then business stakeholders started parroting LS as an excuse to launch bad product. Doing discovery and rapid prototyping were and still are way more effective for speed to product-market-fit.
If people need a framework, look at a good one like Design Thinking or the Double Diamond.
I'm so glad to hear this comment. The essay I shared a link to in the original post got almost universal agreement across our newsletter list, LinkedIn and Twitter. I was quite surprised to see so much of the Indie Hackers community not understand the type of points that you mention in your reply. Thanks for restoring my faith here!
On its face, this post reads like a flippant middle finger to something that has become really meaningful and important to me (and helped me achieve a seven figure exit).
After reading through your article I see that there is some nuance and thoughtfulness as well as experience leading you to make those statements, and while I'm genuinely appreciative to learn about new resources I was unfamiliar with (the two books you mentioned), the bluntness of your approach just seems careless.
What do you really want in writing this? To help startup founders by directing them to better resources? Or to get attention and be polarizing by shitting on sacred cows?
Eric and Steve's books might be outdated or imperfect, but I feel confident I can trust them since they want something other than just my immediate attention...
As to the merits of your specific argument:
Do you really think Eric Ries doesn't understand the semantic difference between customers' "wants" and "unmet needs, pains, and desires"?
Are you arguing that he's just telling founders to ask customers what they want at a surface level and then go build it? That's silly.
Since Eric clearly understands the difference between customer wants and needs, I have to assume you're just being argumentative here and using semantics to say something polarizing.
And if you just wanted polarity - than you win!
(2) The best way to validate a product idea is to build it (I agree... this isn't noteworthy)
But more broadly speaking:
In my experience as someone outside the VC world, while both The 4 Steps To The Epiphany and The Lean Startup were really challenging to understand and make practical, I learned some important concepts (that might seem obvious to you) that created AHA moments for me and made me feel like I had at least a rudimentary road map.
That was the magic sauce for me... the ideas about building MVPs, becoming customer centric, and a big one - the difference between startups and large enterprises.
Maybe the books you're referring to say it better, but "don't read it" just doesn't fly for me. Plenty of founders are smart enough to not throw out the baby with the bathwater and learn what they can from those that came before them.
Sometimes building a working prototype is the easiest way forward. A good way to capture your idea, pull it out of your mind and show it to other people. Twitter started this way.
I actually fully agree with this. I've also had my run-ins with founders, who read this and then used it to justify poor planning of resources and fostering a burnout culture. Especially in "pre" product-market-fit companies.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. People read The Lean Startup and take it as a free ticket to build an over-scoped MVP to validate their idea, but end up building so much that "validation" gets thrown out the window.
I mostly agree with this. I think the book is educational and should be read. It should not be closely followed. Everyone I watched religiously follow it failed. Building a business is part science, part art, and mostly perseverance. Just keep going - try a lot.
Nevertheless they are great read to get started in the overall mindset.
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Is achieving Product-Market Fit even possible without a product in some form? How do you know you've achieved PMF if you just have ideas, have just talked to customers, or have only researched a market's needs?
PMF is definitely not possible without a product. While I did say in the essay "pre-PMF", I actually think it would be even more accurately described as pre-traction startups. When you haven't got any users, adopting a "build measure learn" cycle is not useful, and Lean Startup tends to be the first book people read, which is why I felt it was important to write about this.
But also worth noting that PMF is a vague topic. I think it's more important to talk about it in its three stages: pre-traction, pre-PMF and post-PMF.
Lean Startup is most valuable post-PMF, but some elements are kinda useful pre-PMF too. But it has some bad advice for pre-traction founders, which is when it's most often read.
--
Quick edit: just to clarify, my own startup is very much in the pre-PMF stage of that three-part model I described, but I work with product teams across all stages on their discovery research and roadmap prioritization efforts.
to the point 2 if you can validate cheaper than building a scrappy MVP:
By all means go for it !
Maybe a figma / moquaps design would do.
It's worth mentioning that these prototyping tools are just next level compared to where they were in 2011.
Yeah maybe the post was a little unclear because I'm not advocating for MVPs to be replaced by prototyping tools (although I think, when used properly, that is in fact a better way to validate product assumptions). I'm saying that customer discovery research is the appropriate first step for de-risking a startup idea rather than building a product to find that you're chasing a problem nobody has/cares about solving.
Well, it is not necessarily "incorrect". It is more about the environment that that advice can applicable: Lean Startup, similar to most startup books, focuses on the Visionary approach(1). In the visionary domain, you are on the bleeding edge. In that domain, customers really can't tell you what they want (consider Ford's comment on "faster horses"). And without building the actual product, you can't validate it (consider, how can you validate the idea of a car without building one).
The issue is that since the goliaths we know today were all starting on an inflection point and utilized a visionary approach to success, we assume that is the best way forward. But a visionary approach requires a point of inflection. You need to understand the environment you compete in.
When you don't consider the environment, all advice is bad advice.
What do you think about the so-called "Anti-Lean Startup" of Peter Thiel, then, Zero to One?
---
Zero to One is not even a startup book in my opinion. I don't know why it gets recommended so much -- that book is even worse than The Lean Startup. It's about entrepreneurship philosophy and has almost no practical advice for startup founders. I should've titled this post "The Lean Startup is a terrible book for founders, and Zero to One is even worse."
Also, you realise that the whole "Henry Ford, faster horses" quote is retrofitted for both sides of this debate all the time? Customers own the problem, you own the solution. If you're any good at customer discovery, you can realise that customers asking for a faster horse are inventing a solution to the problem of slow travel. Once you know that, it's your job to come up with a good solution. That's part of the problem with The Lean Startup -- understanding the problem you solve is more important than your MVP, hence why I posted this.
The essay I linked in the original post talks about the books that are better for pre-PMF founders than Lean Startup, such as The Mom Test and Obviously Awesome.
Probably because it has Peter Thiel's name on it.
Sorry, didn't wrote your article. Because it is a link post. I am here to read and interact with the posts and not links. I understand it takes away some (or most) of the context away but I consider IH a community and expect the whole content to be included in a post (maybe with a CTA at the bottom). And I act accordingly, i.e. Only comment on the post itself.
Yeah see, this nuance was not in this part of the link. Yes, I am all for the root cause identification and creating a solution accordingly.
See, this is where things get interesting. Because to me those two are marketing books, where Lean Startup is more of a business book. I didn't read The Mom Test but checking its summary it seems to be focused on market research. And Obviously Awesome is definitely about brand positioning (and sometimes it is called the best book in that area since Ries and Trout's eponymous book on the matter).
But still, marketing strategy and brand strategy are hugely different from business strategy in what they look at. Or Marketing Management is as different from Biz Admin, for that matter.
By the way, I am not defending Lean Startup. I don't like most of these second dotcom bubble grimoires (as I don't like most of the first dotcom bubble ones). But similarly, I don't like people saying other people to not read a specific book. People generally don't read as many books as they should as it is.
The Mom Test isn't a marketing book, it's basically a playbook to help founders do customer discovery to validate their ideas before building them. The Lean Startup is pretty broad, so I'd agree that it's a "business" book, but it also has a load of unnecessary stuff about the ideology of entrepreneurship from a market perspective.
I'll give it a go. Thanks for the recommendation.
Yeah, it is kind of common, I think. Whoever "succeeds," thinks they are "it" and helps themselves by pouring down their ideology down everyone's throats.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion.
Agreed. Thanks to you too! Some of the people replying have taken a surprising amount of offence to this post. It's always worth challenging and testing concepts that are almost blanket-accepted (but having the space to openly discuss conflicting views is a pretty important ingredient for that to happen).
Your opinion is clear and bold, and I guess you have some very interesting case study behind it! There is no one and only method to achieve product market fit (fast). Nevertheless, "The Lean Startup" is very popular and can provide many useful guidelines. But of course, when building a business, everything gets more complicated than any book can say.
The assumptions you are mentioning are from the book indeed, but they are very misleading without the context:
(1) Customers can't tell you what they want, because they own their problems, not solutions. You have to carry out a solution to their problem, and the book describes the tools to help you do that (validated learning process, build-measure-learn feedback loop ect).
(2) The best way to validate a product idea is to build it, with the minimum resources needed. A minimum viable product (MVP) is the version of the product you are not proud of, but can still use it to gain feedback. Iterating this way, you will avoid wasting time and money on a product customers do not want. Instead, you will have many opportunities to make a pivot, or preserve and go further.
To be honest, I really think the concept is an MVP in The Lean Startup is too vague to be useful for founders. It ends up being a free ticket to just jumping into building an over-scoped prototype. I think a better approach is validating:
(1) what high-priority problem you intend to solve for a specific and describable customer segment,
(2) what value that would deliver for target customers,
(3) the unique product attributes you'd need to do that (ie. 1-3 features, not an MVP),
(4) the product category that customers would look for a solution in (this clarifies the 'hygiene features' you'd need to deliver in an MVP to meet basic expectations).
Spending your time validating these through iterative research (rather than solutioning via MVPs) will serve you a lot better. Product pivots are painful (as I can attest to, having suffered through multiple first-hand).
Also, to comment on your first point, the build-measure-learn loop only delivers on its promise for post-PMF startups with enough of a userbase to deliver meaningful product data. Yes, you can get some of this from usability testing, but you can get the same insights from usability tests through well planned customer discovery interviews instead (which don't need an MVP as a prerequisite and drive much more honest conversation).
It is a compelling point of view. I will give a thought to the books you recommend in the link, as I've never came across them.
Glad to hear that!
Hey!
Have been wondering which books are a must for entrepreneurs? Haven't read "The lean startup" but had it on a "Musts" list, but if you say so, it could be a good idea deprioritize it
Which books do you recomend?
Yep as mentioned in the essay that was linked, I recommend The Mom Test as a better starting point, Obviously Awesome as a way to formulate your findings, and maybe Deploy Empathy if you're a post-PMF product manager. If you're really keen on Lean, read Running Lean instead of Lean Startup.
Thank you Daniel!
I’m about to buy The Mom Test 💪
Glad to hear that! It's a great book :) You might also enjoy the newsletter I write, which is focused on actionable advice for founders and product teams: The Full-Stack Researcher.
Yeah! New subscriber! 🙌🏻
That's what I like to see :) Thanks Alejandro!
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Sorry but this is an argumentum ad hominem. Let's not do that here. One does not have to have the experience to critique something. Perceived success, or lack thereof, does not bring protection against review, examination or critique.
I hope one day to have the confidence of a coach/mentor.
I'm a startup founder, not a coach. My startup OpinionX is a research tool and through OpinionX I work with loads founders and PMs to help them validate their ideas (while also having to tackle the same problems as a founder). I wrote the essay linked because I've seen for years how The Lean Startup falls short and leads founders down the wrong path.
No disrespect intended, but your startup (at this stage) doesn't really add anything to your credibility. It's a pre-product market fit startup which hasn't yet reached relative (relative to proponents of methods you're deriding) success from either your methods, or the lean startup ones.
Your success has been in coaching – coaching 1,000+ startups is incredibly impressive – which is why I said I wish I had the confidence of a coach.
No offence taken, I appreciate the blunt question :)
I've coached ~1,000 founders and product managers over the past 7 years across every continent. I now run my own research startup OpinionX, which is used to help 2,500+ product teams from top companies and even some governments around the world. I used to train people up in Lean Startup methodology during my workshops but have long since abandoned it for some of the reasons outlined in my linked essay.
I also write about my experience as a startup founder and mentor on my newsletter and blog, which has been shared by some of the top startup publications out there, so feel free to check those out.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Founders are time-poor people -- don't read a book if there's better advice out there. Read The Mom Test, read Obviously Awesome, even read Running Lean if you're driven by ideology over practical advice (which would be a silly pov, but some people are).
Also, I'm not necessarily saying you should create non-product MVPs like videos and photos. I'm saying that customer discovery is the right first step, so that you understand the problem you're solving, whether it's a high-priority pain for your target customer, what value they get from solving that problem, the unique product attributes you'd have to build to solve it, and the product category customers are expecting to find the solution in.