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by Lauren Miller The lean start-up approach has the advantage of using genuine customer feedback as a means of improving the entrepreneur’s product specifically for those perceived as the niche consumer, but numerous stories from entrepreneurs and case protagonists about acting on false positives and negatives has caused me to wonder: can smoke and other lean start-up tests just end up being smoke in the entrepreneur’s face? ” I question whether an entrepreneur should take the results of his or her tests as “gospel” since pitfalls in the experiment design and interpretation of results can be numerous. I will focus on a few of these potential pitfalls. Focus groups Steven Carpenter shared in the Cake Financial case that he has “learned that focus groups… can be unreliable because people can’t always say what they want until they can actually see it and play around with it.” This highlights the fact that customers often can’t or won’t tell you what they want or need and are often li...

by Sarah Elliot The primary objective for most entrepreneurs is to create a product that customers want and are willing to pay for. The process by which this objective is reached often requires frequent product iterations and customer interactions. It is through this process that the entrepreneur identifies which aspects of the product vision are incommensurate with the wants and needs of the customer. Closing the communication gap with the customer is critical to the success of a venture. However, there are real and substantial consequences to exposing a customer to a product that isn’t “right”. Therefore, there seems to be an inherent tension between getting the product “right” and getting the product out the door and into the hands of customer. So the question remains, When does it make sense to launch early with a buggy product, and when is it important to perfect the product? The answer to this question varies and is contingent upon several contextual factors such as the nature...

by Tiffany Niver   We don’t know what we want. Decades of psychology, economics, and sociology research has shown that people are quite poor at predicting what they want, how it will make them feel, and the long-term implications of gratification. This makes ground-breaking product innovations all the more complicated as understanding users becomes an exercise of mind-reading…and then some. Knowing the limitations of consumer insights and going into the process with a healthy sense of skepticism can empower creativity in coming up with the most impactful tests and analyses. The key to getting great consumer information is focusing on obtaining as much behavioral insight as possible, while following the lean start-up principle of “maximizing learning for unit of time and effort expended.” Many entrepreneurs and researchers follow a fairly standard path of gaining customer insights. Baselining Through Consumer Self-Reporting : Before any development or investment begins, they r...

by Stirling Cox The idea of a product that would enable commuters in a given city to access information on the location of their buses, has been occupying my thoughts since the summer of last year. With a background in Banking and Consulting, what had been bashed into my head through various training programs and countless deals and projects is that you need to be 100% sure of your facts before opening your mouth. As such I was convinced that it was only through significant primary research and presentation that I would ever be able to prove the viability of my idea and start a business. I spent much time during the end of the summer and fall term of EC year researching number of commuters, their habits, Smartphone proliferation, looking at different markets that product could be applied to, producing possible revenue models in Excel, preparing financial statements and fancy PowerPoint slides explaining the business. Years of “bad” entrepreneurial practice had me convinced that I neede...

by Lorin Pace & Iris Guerra In the new era of all things lean, fat gets a bad rap. Even the terminology is loaded; in the U.S. we are facing an obesity health crisis like nothing we have faced in our nation’s history. Of course no-one would want to be ‘fat’ when the term has such a negative connotation. But when did ‘fat’ become the only alternative to lean? What about medium or athletic builds? Painting a picture of two polarized options and demonizing the other is a storied psychological tactic for building momentum around your own philosophy. For better or for worse, Eric Ries has done a great job of depicting epic failure as the product of the ‘other’ approach. And he has a point. It IS senseless to build a product no one wants, and no one is a better example of that than Ries himself (he did it!) and he knows how painful it is to pour your heart and soul into something that ends up being discarded. Ries would have you believe that not only can you apply the lean start...

by Charlotte Jepps Forgive me for being biased by the fact I'm currently wrestling with distilling what I think is a great idea down into a 'minimal viable' form, but I can't help but find this concept inherently frustrating... Is it realistic that many online business concepts can truly be attractive to users when presented in a simplified form? Whilst I think this is indeed true for some platforms and businesses, which need to 'train' their users before adding complexity (eg a social game), I think there is a risk for other sites that the 'lean startup' methodology drives them toward stunting themselves - to an extent that great ideas might be deemed unattractive and thus abandoned too early. I understand that definitionally every site has a 'minimal viable' version (which lies on a sliding scale between something incredibly simple, and the full ‘vision’ for the site), but is the term still useful if 'minimally viable' and ‘full site’ a...