🪴 Why lean startups always win

Startups have always been a hit-or-miss proposition. There’s two ways around it. Either you write a business plan, pitch to investors, assemble a team, brainstorm the product, build the product and try selling it to an unknown market,

or — you just wing it. Scratch the planning, just build your product in the shortest time possible. Chances are you fail, but you fail fast. What takes other teams 2 years to find out, you find out in couple of weeks. You move on, and repeat until something sticks. Then you scale.

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Let’s start with a quick math. You know the story where slow and steady tortoise beats the reckless hare (or as I call it, turtle vs rabbit).

In startups that’s a complete bullshit. In the real world, the rabbit doesn’t just run one race. It sprints, learns, and runs again. Meanwhile, the turtle spends years crawling toward the finish line, only to realise the judges are long gone.

Speed wins. Always.

Speed vs. slowness

Let’s break it down:

• Startup A spends 2 years planning, fundraising, and perfecting their product before launching.

• Startup B builds fast, launches in 2 months, and gets real customer feedback.

Even if Startup B fails six times, they still get six shots at success before Startup A makes its first sale. Failing fast isn’t a failure — it’s a learning experiment.

What if you could do it even faster?

• Startup C launches their product every 2 weeks.

• Startup D ships a feature every 3 days.

The faster, the better (treat this argument carefully).

How do I work lean?

This being said, speed ≠ recklessness. You still need to be wise about the direction you take.

There’s a couple of valuable markers you can follow:

• Talking to users: this is what you want your hobbies to become. The more you talk to the people experiencing the problems you try to solve, the more you understand the direction you want to follow.
  
  Will Shu (CEO @ Deliveroo) was personally delivering some of the orders even when the company was valued at millions.
  

• Launching ugly products: If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. This is a tough one, I’d compare it to pulling your pants down in the middle of the Times Square and just hanging around.
  

• Minimum viable product: Don’t forget the most important of the 3 words. Cut scope, not the quality.
  

• Kill bad ideas fast: If something is not picking up traction, or not working altogether, move on. There’s way too many problems in the world for you to focus on something that’s not of them.
  

• Treat constraints as a privilege: When you get limited, you start to think creatively. Be scrappy, leverage tools and for the love of god.. automate manual work.

Most startups don’t fail because they ran too fast. They fail because they moved too slow, burned too much money, and realized too late that nobody wanted what they built.

Are you sprinting or are you crawling?

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