When *Not* To Be A Lean Startup
Eric Ries’s 2011 book The Lean Startup encourages you to build the simplest MVP you can as quickly as possible and launch it.* This profoundly useful idea now has traction among startup founders. But I’ve talked to many people who think they’re a special exception to the rule. Are they really?
This post is about when you should think it’s okay not to be a lean startup.
Desirable vs. Feasible
Most startups work on something that’s sufficiently feasible, but not sufficiently desirable.
Y Combinator’s motto focuses on the desirability side of things because that’s the less-commonly-overcome obstacle: It’s “Make Something People Want”, not “Make Something You Can Make”.
Let’s look at some typical examples.
A Grilled Cheese Restaurant
Of course it’s feasible to start your own grilled cheese restaurant. The main question that will determine your success is how much untapped market demand there is.
A Software Startup
The biggest killer of software startups waits on the other side of executing a Minimum Viable Product: The difficulty of getting even a single customer. (Don’t get confused by the separate independent fact that most teams who try to ship working software can’t actually do it.)
A ~BlOcKcHaIn~ Startup
It’s tempting to jump straight into a discussion of the technical feasibility of what they’re building, but once again I’d bet desirability is more likely to be the issue that makes or breaks it.
The above examples represent the typical startups we hear about today. They all better urgently ask themselves whether what they’re building is desirable.
When Feasibility Is Your Bottleneck
Ok, now we can talk about when not to be a lean startup: it’s when desirability is a given but feasibility is not. In other words, it’s when feasibility is your bottleneck to a massively successful business.
Let’s take some examples:
Boom
Supersonic airplanes are desirable because we’d all prefer to fly from New York to London in 3 hours.
TerraPower
Safe nuclear power plants are desirable because we all want cheap sustainable energy. Solving climate change is also an extra bonus.
Impossible Foods
Plant-based artificial meat is desirable because there are countless vegetarians who enjoy the taste of meat.
When You’re Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the king of pursuing highly desirable value propositions by pushing the envelope of technological feasibility. He therefore gets a lifetime exemption from all lean-startup requirements.
Tesla
People want to drive an electric car if it’s better to drive and cheaper to maintain than a regular car.
By the way, here in 2019 I can’t even look under the hood of a non-electric car without gawking at how steampunk that sh*t is, or maybe internalcombustionpunk? Either way it’s lame.
SpaceX
People want vastly cheaper prices launching stuff into orbit and deep space, ya know?
Hyperloop
California’s voters validated the desirability of High Speed Rail by straight-up voting on it. Afterwards, the CA government’s published plans proved that it wasn’t feasible for them to make it happen within a sane budget and timeframe. A classic feasibility bottleneck.
The Boring Company
Tunnels have lots of existing applications, ergo building them 10–100x faster is desirable. Plus it opens up new applications for shuttling cars under the highway or something.
Neuralink
Brain-computer interfaces have lots of applications, certainly for paralyzed people, but also because we’re all gonna live in Virtual Reality pretty soon and it’ll be useful to plug our brain’s whole output channel into that.
Milestones for Non-Lean Startups
If you’re a lean startup, the first milestone you should be aiming for is validating demand by transacting actual value with an actual customer. If you’re not a lean startup, then the first milestone is… delivering a technological miracle?
No, delivering your technological miracle will take years. In the meantime, these are the kinds of milestones you should deliver:
Technological Proof Points
Videos demonstrating cool technical abilities that you’ve developed. Licensing the tech to others before it’s productized. White papers, patent filings, etc.
Pre-Product Customers
For consumer products, these can be Kickstarter campaigns or pre-orders. For B2B products, they can be letters of intent from businesses, or better yet, actual preorders that put $thousands or $millions in your company’s bank account.
Getting People On Board
Recruiting impressive employees to join you. Getting well-respected investors to fund you. Research grants. Affiliations with any thought leaders in industry and academia.
So now you can see what characterizes a lean startup vs a legitimately non-lean startup. Which kind are you?
That’s right, you’re probably the kind that should be lean. And I’ll write more soon about how “Minimum Viable Products” (MVPs) for the purpose of initial demand validation can be more Minimal than most people realize.
*More precisely, Eric Ries writes in The Lean Startup that he doesn’t necessarily recommend launching a quick & dirty MVP and iterating from there, he recommends aiming for quick cycles of validated learning. Instead of “When Not To Be A Lean Startup”, this post could be more precisely titled “When launching and iterating an MVP shouldn’t be your execution plan”.
