Fighting Failures In Lean Start-ups

Lean start-up as we all know was developed to prevent failures and hence those reading this title here would be wondering what it really means! The logic is simple, not all five fingers are the same, and the best tools in the wrong hands can go awry. It is possible to pivot badly or run out of pivot ideas. It is pertinent to remember that a great mix of timing, execution and luck is what will make a successful start-up.

No Man’s Land

It is possible so as to say to end up in no man’s land in a lean start-up. Ideas and iterations from budding entrepreneurs may be good but if they are not good enough, that is exactly the place where people end-up more often than not. Some ideas may pass through the validation process but may never give the kind of results that are being taken in the hypothesis. The truth of the matter is that reality is messy, it gives you false positives and false negatives much unlike the board room version.

How can one fail when validation is done and the results are positive? This can be the mind boggling question in the minds of readers. The crux here is the hypothesis – if the hypothesis isn’t falsified then there is nothing to worry, but if you try to validate the hypothesis, then all that you do is to end up deluding yourself into a perceptive world that it is right. The truth is however far from that as we all know. This invariably forces the entrepreneur to face something that he is vary of facing – fear of failure. But that is what the real world is going to offer to you if you start validating the basis of your validation process.

The end result will be that you will be killing a great idea that was formulated on a wrong hypothesis. This focuses on one thing, the entire lean start-up fundamentals is to ensure that you do not make a mistake, you do not take something just by the face value, you scrutinise, validate and offer an honest hypothesis where you need to call a spade, a spade! Get the fundamentals right, the rest will take care of itself.

Read also Going About The Minimal Viable Product (MVP) Process