The Lean Startup is a terrible book for startup founders
If you’re an early-stage startup founder, do not read The Lean Startup.
According to The Lean Startup, the best way to figure out if your product idea is any good is to jump straight into building a prototype. This is terrible advice.
Ask any startup accelerator (including Y Combinator), talk to any successful founder, or read literally any other book, and you’ll hear that this is a bad idea. But for some reason, even though everyone agrees on this, The Lean Startup remains one of the most popular books about building new products — as of 2018, it had sold over 1 million copies and been translated into 30+ languages.
This essay explains why The Lean Startup is such bad advice and what you should do instead of reading it.
‘The Lean Startup’ is not actually for startups
Telling founders to validate whether people want their product by building a minimum viable product (MVP) and using iterative “build, measure, learn” loops is sound advice for startups that have already achieved Product-Market Fit (PMF). Early-stage founders that haven’t yet reached PMF — or haven’t even launched their product yet — should definitely not follow this advice. Here’s why:
Your first idea is likely flawed in so many ways. Most founders don’t have the time, money or tenacity to spend 2+ years building failed iterations to figure out all the reasons why their idea was wrong. And 2 years of failed products feels a lot longer in reality than you’d think.
The Lean Startup says that “customers do not tell us what they want; they reveal the truth through their action or inaction”. This is the flawed assumption that the entire book was built on. No founder should ask customers what they want. But customers are very willing to talk about their unmet needs, pains and desires — and the best founders/product teams know exactly how to get this information.
There are way more software products today than there were in 2011 when The Lean Startup was published. Unless you’re offering a solution that customers can see clearly solves a high priority problem that they have, then you’re going to struggle to get anyone’s attention — nevermind having enough product data to learn what’s wrong with what you’ve built.
The “build, measure, learn” loop assumes that you can answer ‘why’ questions with quantitative data like product analytics. You can’t answer ‘why’ questions from product data alone. You’re eventually going to have to use qualitative research to understand your customer’s needs, pains and desires, so you’re better off starting with discovery interviews instead of building something only to realize afterwards that you’ve solved a problem that nobody cares about.
Wait, so if The Lean Startup isn’t actually for early-stage startups, what is?
There are some great books that tackle specific challenges along the journey from creating a startup to finding Product-Market Fit. Piecing those books together offers a better guide to building products that people actually want.
The best alternatives to The Lean Startup for founders and product teams
Most people agree that the best startups are built by founders that deeply understand the customer need, pain or desire their product solves. The best resources help startup founders understand this need, pain or desire. The two books I think do this best are The Mom Test and Obviously Awesome.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is quickly becoming the new bible for founders (and rightly so). Fitzpatrick’s core message is that it’s the founder’s job to understand the problem they solve for customers, and the best way to do that is through ‘customer discovery interviews’. But people are almost universally quite bad at running interviews, so The Mom Test offers some easy-to-implement principles for asking better questions.
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford offers a simple set of steps to help you understand how your product is viewed in the eyes of their target customer. Using those insights, the book tells you how to find the right context for your product positioning so that customers intuitively understand exactly why it’s valuable to them. April’s book is awesome because provides an easy-to-follow set of steps to help founders put their “startup ingredients” together.
What Eric Ries did get right in The Lean Startup is that the path to success is built on your ability to iterate many, many times. You’re not going to get everything right upfront, so you’re going to have to learn quickly and try again. The shorter your iteration cycles, the sooner you’ll reach product-market fit.
The Full-Stack Researcher has actionable essays that cover topics like how Stripe validates new product ideas, step-by-step guides for founders on research methods like data-driven customer discovery, and analyses of successful product strategies like this deconstruction of WeatherBill’s $930M startup pivot. The Full-Stack Researcher isn’t a book (it’s our blog), but its essays have been shared by some of the top startup publications in the world like First Round Review and UX Collective.
Conclusion: Don’t Read The Lean Startup.
The Lean Startup no longer deserves to hold the top spot as the most popular book for startup founders. Alternatives like The Mom Test and Obviously Awesome offer more relevant approaches to building successful products today. But this space is constantly changing, with new frameworks and more effective methods emerging every year.
I feel like there’s a great opportunity for someone to replace The Lean Startup entirely, combining the research-driven approach of The Mom Test with the recipe-like nature of Obviously Awesome to create a repeatable playbook for building successful products.
When I’m not complaining about books written over a decade ago, I’m focused on building my startup OpinionX — a free research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities. We help hundreds of product teams from scaling startups like Unbounce and Gnosis Safe to make better informed prioritization decisions by giving them real data on their customer’s biggest needs. Create your own stack ranking survey for free in under 5-minutes 🚀