Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Brilliant college kids sitting in a dorm are inventing the future. Heedless of
boundaries, possessed of new technology and youthful enthusiasm, they build a
new company from scratch. Their early success allows them to raise money and
bring an amazing new product to market. They hire their friends, assemble a
superstar team, and dare the world to stop them.
Ten years and several startups ago, that
was me, building my first company. I particularly remember a moment from back
then: the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My cofounder and I
were at our wits’ end. The dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our
money. We tried desperately to raise more capital, and we could not. It was
like a breakup scene from a Hollywood movie: it was raining, and we were
arguing in the street. We couldn’t even agree on where to walk next, and so we
parted in anger, heading in opposite directions. As a metaphor for
our company’s failure, this image of the
two of us, lost in the rain and drifting apart, is perfect.
It remains a painful memory. The company
limped along for months afterward, but our situation was hopeless. At the time,
it had seemed we were doing everything right: we had a great product, a
brilliant team, amazing technology, and the right idea at the right time. And
we really were on to something. We were building a way for college kids to
create online proles
for the purpose of sharing … with employers. Oops. But despite a promising idea,
we were nonetheless doomed from day one, because we did not know the process we
would need to use to turn because we did not know the process we would need to
use to turn our product insights into a great company.
If you’ve never experienced a failure like
this, it is hard to describe the feeling. It’s as if the world were falling out
from under you. You realize you’ve been duped. The stories in the magazines are
lies: hard work and perseverance don’t lead to success. Even worse, the many,
many, many promises you’ve made to employees, friends, and family are not going
to come true. Everyone who thought you were foolish for stepping out on your
own will be proven right.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out that way.
In magazines and newspapers, in blockbuster movies, and on countless blogs, we
hear the mantra of the successful entrepreneurs: through determination,
brilliance, great timing, and—above all—a great product, you too can achieve
fame and fortune.
There is a mythmaking industry hard at
work to sell us that story, but I have come to believe that the story is false,
the product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalization. In fact,
having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I have seen rsthand
how often a promising start leads to failure. The grim reality is that most
startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not
live up to their potential.
Yet the story of perseverance, creative
genius, and hard work persists. Why is it so popular? I think there is
something deeply appealing about this modern-day rags-to-riches story. It makes
success seem inevitable if you just have the right stu.
It means that the mundane details, the boring stu,
the small individual choices don’t matter. If we build it, they will come. When
we fail, as so many of us do, we have a ready-made excuse: we didn’t have the
right stu.
We weren’t visionary enough or weren’t in the right place at the right time.
After more than ten years as an
entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both
my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stu
that matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or
being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered
by following the right process, which means it can be engineered by following
the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
Entrepreneurship is a kind of
management. No, you didn’t read that wrong. We have wildly divergent
associations with these two words, entrepreneurship and management. Lately, it
seems that one is cool, innovative, and exciting and the other is dull,
serious, and bland. It is time to look past these preconceptions.
Let me tell you a second startup story.
It’s 2018, and a group of founders have just started a new company. Their
previous company had failed very publicly. Their credibility is at an all-time
low. They have a huge vision: to change the way people communicate by using a
new technology called avatars (remember, this was before
James Cameron’s blockbuster movie). They
are following a visionary named Will Harvey, who paints a compelling picture:
people connecting with their friends, hanging out online, using avatars to give
them a combination of intimate connection and safe anonymity. Even better,
instead of having to build all the clothing, furniture, and accessories these
avatars would need to accessorize their digital lives, the customers would be
enlisted to build those things and sell them to one another.
The engineering challenge before them is
immense: creating virtual worlds, user-generated content, an online commerce
engine, micropayments, and—last but not least—the three-dimensional avatar
technology that can run on anyone’s PC.
I’m in this second story, too. I’m a
cofounder and chief technology officer of this
company, which is called IMVU. At this point in our careers, my cofounders and
I are determined to make new mistakes. We do everything wrong: instead of
spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an
early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really
stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. And we
charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product
constantly—much too fast by traditional standards—shipping new versions of our
product dozens of times every single day.
We really did have customers in those
early days—true visionary early adopters—and we often talked to them and asked
for their early adopters—and we often talked to them and asked for their
feedback. But we emphatically did not do what they said. We viewed their input
as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In
fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were
to cater to their whims.
Traditional business thinking says that
this approach shouldn’t work, but it does, and you don’t have to take my word
for it. As you’ll see throughout this book, the approach we pioneered at IMVU
has become the basis for a new movement of entrepreneurs around the world. It
builds on many previous management and
product development ideas, including
lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile
development. It represents a new approach to creating continuous innovation.
It’s called the Lean Startup. Despite the volumes written on business strategy,
the key attributes of business leaders, and ways to identify the next big
thing, innovators still struggle to bring their ideas to life. This was the
frustration that led us to try a radical new approach at IMVU, one
characterized by an extremely fast cycle time, a focus on what customers want
(without asking them), and a scientific approach
to making decisions.
