One of the great TV ads of all time featured a crotchety old Chicago woman (Clara Peller) whose plaintive 3-word inquiry (“Where’s the Beef?”) became a national catch phrase and a huge advertising home run in terms of brand awareness and sales for Wendy’s restaurant chain. Every comedian, late-night television host, news commentator and politician seized on the expression and couldn’t use it enough.
For at least an entire year after the commercial first aired, it became a very succinct way to challenge the substance of almost anything or anyone – even politicians like Gary Hart. It was a socially-acceptable form of 80’s shorthand and a speedy substitute for those who formerly referenced the ancient (1837) and time-honored Hans Christian Andersen tale of the child who noted that The Emperor’s New Clothes were notably absent.
And – amazingly enough – this lightning-fast phrase craze swept the country in 1984 – long before social media made it possible for the most trivial comment by a second-rate celebrity to become a worldwide “triumph” or “travesty” overnight. But today, among too many young startups, the latest and greatest craze – with roughly the same caloric count and value - is “lean” everything.
I find myself thinking fondly of Clara’s pronouncement whenever I have to sit through another bogus business review session where someone with the bare bones of an idea is trying to convince a group of otherwise intelligent investors that there’s a real business opportunity buried beneath all the bullshit and that (a) all of the shortcomings of the story being spun and (b) all the gaps in the gospel aren’t actually problems at all. They’re not bugs, oversights or misses; they’re the intentional result of trying to be “lean” and trying to launch “something” (not to say “anything”) to get the ball rolling.
I’m not sure when it got to be OK to try to do the least work possible in developing anything that you were seriously trying to do well, but maybe I missed a memo or two. And, as a result, when I hear these pitches and have people telling me that it’s the minimum viable product, not the meat of the matter, that actually counts; I remember that Clara knew better and that this entire lean startup movement not only misleads and misdirects people into building mediocre products and potential services, it’s also much more of a curse that ails us than any kind of a new cure.
We’re encouraging an entire new generation of young entrepreneurs to rush things out to prospective customers; to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall; and to see what sticks. In the old days, people thought this might be a good way to test to see if the spaghetti was al dente, but it actually wasn’t. Pasta that sticks to the wall is most likely overcooked and too gummy to taste good.
Like so many other things in life, there’s no simple shortcut or quick way to do these things right. It takes time and craft and patience to build things that will matter and last. “Quick and dirty and out the door” sucks as a strategy for successful startups. Maybe you can never be too thin or too rich, but a startup can clearly be too “lean”. The ultimate goal isn’t to build skinny startups – it’s to build smart ones.
I understand that it would be naïve to delay your launch until you thought you had every single detail exactly right and that, by waiting, you’d ended up building the completely perfect product or service. We know that, over and over again, even the experts can completely overlook glaring interface flaws or other obvious omissions that the simplest novice user will see right off the bat. And it’s equally arrogant to assume that you can’t learn a single thing from the marketplace or your users. But that’s just a different problem.
As I see it, there’s a basic flaw in the common understanding of the “lean startup” concept and then there are 3 main problems with the way most young entrepreneurs are trying to adopt and implement the methodology.
The Basic Flaw
Even the best MVP (“Minimum Viable Product”) won’t succeed without an MVA. An MVA is a Minimum Viable Audience (that’s my simple shorthand for a bunch of potential buyers). Long before you start creating your product, crafting your code, and designing your UI; you need to find out if anyone gives a damn about your idea and your proposed solution. This isn’t easy work. You have to actually get off your butt and get out into the field and find and talk to actual people – not your co-founders or your folks – about what you’re hoping to do.
You have to find actual problems that are generating real pain for a large number of people. You have to determine whether those people recognize the problem, appreciate the pain, are willing to admit that they have the problem, and are willing to pay for a solution. Then you might have a fighting chance to define and build a viable solution.
And you have to also recognize that: (a) there’s an infinite demand for the unavailable (anyone can say they’ll buy something that you don’t have for sale); and (b) the easiest way for a buyer to get you to leave them alone is to say “Yes” and “Come see me when your product is ready” and then show you the door.
The 3 Key Problems
They Won’t Care
If you haven’t done your homework first and identified the right pain points and the right target customers, you might as well take a hike because no one wants the cure for no known disease; no one is going to invest in solutions in search of problems; and you’ll end up building and wasting a lot of time on the greatest software never sold. The way you start the process determines where you end up and these businesses are hard enough even for the people who do all the proper research, preparation and planning. A goal without a plan is just a daydream on someone else’s dime.
They Won’t Suffer
The idea that you can dump some partially-baked solution on your first prospects and that they will help you figure things out is another pipe dream. Trying to make your first users into your last beta testers is a stupid waste of everyone’s time today because smart users want simple solutions that work right out of the box, not more problems. And it doesn’t really matter what the problems are – implementation, training, support, stability, or security – they’re all just more noise and aggravation that busy people don’t need. We are very quick to try and even adopt things that work for us, but we’re even quicker (by a multiple) to dump the stuff that doesn’t. And while there is an obvious trade-off between the degree of the customer’s pain and the customer’s otherwise heightened expectations, in the end, no solution that simply swaps one set of problems for another is going to get out of the gate.
They Won’t Wait
As the Heads & Shoulders people always say, you don’t get a second chance today to make a first impression. Customers won’t (and don’t) wait for you to figure things out and – for sure – if your first attempt falls flat, you can bet that they won’t let you come back. We hear too often about products that aren’t released, but simply escape and others that aren’t ready, but run out of time and race into the market. It’s ridiculously easy to burn your bridges and impossibly hard to rebuild them when there are fast followers and copycats galore standing in your wake and watching your mistakes. Customers don’t want stories or excuses; they want workable solutions.
The Right Way
There is a right way to do this and it’s pretty simple. Do your homework and find an important unmet market need. Recruit the right early users who are invested (by virtue of their own desires) in your success. Build your MVP to their specifications and with their input and buy-in. And then prepare to enter the perpetual iteration loop.
Launch, Measure, Modify, Re-Launch and Repeat the Process ad nauseam.
Successful solutions today are all the same – moments of mad creativity followed by months of maddening maintenance. Continually raising the bar and improving your offerings is the only way to stay in the game.
PS: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
