The Importance of Building with Lean Startup Principles

Often, when we have produced a business idea, we have the urge to build the full product with every single feature so that we can "wow" our customers right from day 1. In this blog post, we'll explore why this is a dangerous and utlimately inefficient way to take your business or product to market. Much of the sentiment here is drawn from champions of the startup movement such as Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, who developed the Build-Measure-Learn cycle for product development.

Wasted Resource

By the nature of the process, going straight to a full product build will always incur the greatest costs and, therefore, the greatest risk of waste. For example, if an aspiring founder wanted to build a marketplace where real estate agents and property surveyors could be connected, they may have a list of functionalities that they perceive to be required. One of those functionalities might be a chat functionality for the two parties to connect directly on the marketplace. Upon building the chat functionality, however, the founder could find out that it remains completely ignored by users because real estate agents prefer to use email to track their interactions better. In this case, the founder has likely outlaid considerable expense to develop the chat functionality, before finding out it is redundant. The Build Measure Learn cycle helps to mitigate this risk through an iterative build process where the founder starts with core functionalities and builds out based on customer feedback.

Lack of Flexibility

The beauty of the Build Measure Learn cycle is that it allows your product or service multiple avenues of progression, without being restricted merely to the functionalities which were ideated before customer input. The problem with building a full product straight away is that it can narrow the future options for direction change through an over-development of infrastructure. Often this will mean that a founder, having collected customer feedback, will have to breakdown pre-existing product architecture in order to meet the needs and functionality being demanded by their customers. If using the Build Measure Learn cycle, however, features only get built once there are key indicators or customer demand - so the pathway is not pre-set. This isn't to say that the Build Measure Learn cycle will be seamless every time, but it does give the best chance for success.

Distorted Customer Feedback

Finally, a large risk with releasing an over-built product at Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Version 1 stage is that the excess features will distract from the core value proposition at hand. In this situation, the functionality which had been intended to create the optimal customer experience actually start to diminish the value of the product as the customers struggle to perform the job at hand. In this situation, the founder can also find it difficult to collect clear and succinct feedback from their users. Using the same example as above, for instance, the founder might be inundated with feedback from users regarding elements of the chat functionality - such as bugs or deliverability issues. This distracts from the main value of the marketplace and, therefore, instead of understanding whether real estate agents and surveyors are gaining value from being able to find each other in real time, the founder merely learns that the chat functionality is sub-optimal in functionality. The Build Measure Learn cycle ensures that the core value functionalities are in full focus for user feedback as, at MVP stage, they are the sole functionalities.

Conclusion

The risks of building a business, whether it revolves around a product or service, are high. Using the Build Measure Learn loop helps to mitigate the risks of over-extending in product development as you will be responding to customer sentiment rather than simply guessing what your customers will want. By allowing customers to guide product development, from MVP stage, through to Version 1 and beyond, founders give themselves the greatest chance of success.

How can Verticode help?

Verticode are champions of the Lean Startup methodology set out by Eric Ries. Verticode does this by building Minimum Viable Product (MVP) software products for aspiring founders. Using our proprietary development toolkit, we can build software products 10x faster than development agencies at a 90% cost saving to our clients. This means that a founder can get their product into the market and get customers onboard without wasting valuable time or resource.