Lean Startup is all the rage these days. Everyone is lean, thinking lean, or trying to be lean. We are not. In fact, we aspire to be a chunky bacon startup. Thick and juicy and dripping with mouth-watering Delight.

Lean Startups talk all the time about their Minimum Viable Products. Many times they are just parroting buzzwords and don’t really know what they are talking about at all. The ones who do know what they are talking about refer to their MVPs as vehicles for ‘validated learning’. Really, MVPs are little business probes used to collect data and evidence for or against various business hypotheses and assumptions.

Well, ok, but Yuck.

Ultimately, Lean Startup(™) treats every business opportunity as its own little pseudo psychology experiment. I can certainly understand the appeal to an analytical/scientific mindset. It is the latest attempt to scientize business.

So, of course the Lean approach to business is deeply appealing to engineer-founders. In fact much of it (properly understood and applied) is good and does work. It works particularly well for certain narrowly construed sets of problems and opportunity domains. If your business idea involves targeting a SaaS model to middle-management stakeholders in enterprise, then you should absolutely be incorporating heavy doses of Lean tactics in your approach. But that is not all there is to business. The Lean methodology is usually necessary but almost never sufficient.

Here at playswell, we don’t do Minimum Viable Products (as the old adage goes, life is too short to do minimum anything). Instead, we talk about Maximum Viable Experiences. These are the best possible experiences that we can deliver given limited time and resources. Our aim is always first and foremost to Delight you. To make you smile. To make your day better than it was before. To solve your problems, sure, but to do so in the most entertaining and fun and good way possible.

Metrics, analytics, data, statistics, algorithms, sure, sure. We got all that. We have these things called computers. That stuff is easy. But to create an experience that’s effective AND Delightful… that’s hard and it’s what we live for.

This post was first published at http://www.playswell.com/playswell-is-not-a-lean-startup-tm