Speed Kills...
We seem to be living in a world where the goal for many is to get rich as quickly as possible, while putting in the least amount of effort possible.
On the surface, it’s not a terrible goal, but it can come with a terrible price: failure.
The failure rate for startups has hovered at around 75% to 90% over the last decade, and nothing has been able to make a significant dent in improving this startup failure rate.
Many thought that the “Lean Methodology” and its companion “Lean Canvas” would help, and I believe that it did help the few founders who were accepted into Startup Accelerators, where it was frequently preached as the preferred approach.
But the vast majority of the people who came up with new product or business ideas, and/or creative programmers who cranked out code they thought worthy of purchase, were either not aware of the Lean Methodology or chose not to follow it.
Now, because of the tremendous advancements in AI, speed is becoming a new startup success factor.
Whether it’s software coding or ideation, AI is taking over because the speed at which it can execute is beyond what could have been imagined just a few short years ago. But when I recently read an article claiming that, because of the speed of AI, the Lean Methodology was dead, I was taken aback.
This notion will lead to just more of the same, or even more dismal results, when it comes to startup failure.
The Lean Methodology and its Lean Canvas remain the single best approach to startup success currently available, with just one minor tweak:
Now, instead of waiting to develop your minimum viable product until after you’ve validated the problem you're solving and the solution you're providing, you can choose to rapidly develop your MVP first, with the help AI, and then begin the validation process immediately after. There’s no real change to the Lean Startup Methodology other than switching up the order of a couple of the startup success path elements.
What keeps me up at night is the fear that new, inexperienced founders will be tempted to, in the quest for speed, skip many of the following critical steps that are still needed to ensure startup success:
Documenting and validating key business and product assumptions,
Identifying and analyzing the market they’re entering and the companies they’ll be competing against,
Selecting the right target market niche for their solution, and
Gathering meaningful customer feedback and knowing what to do with it.
Even with the fast pace of AI, the fundamentals of finding product-market fit still require thoughtful design, clear understanding, and strategic execution.
