"The Lean Startup" was recommended to me about 10 years ago in the short phase when I was trying to build a startup (cool prototypes, no business model or product market fit, and starting the project with half the seed money I thought I needed to get it off the ground made it a short project).
It was a big influence on me and something I recommend and quote often.
I'm curious if your perspectives on the topics of "The Lean Startup" have changed I the era of AI tools. Particularly curious what you think about the role of MVPs to test a market.
This has been on my mind the past few weeks because of a recent experience during a company hackathon:
A few years ago I gave a talk about prototyping and MVPs at the Audio Developers Conference and in this talk to explain the concept of an MVP I proposed a silly idea for an audio plug-in (that replaces a singers voice with the sound of flamingos) as a demonstration of how we might test that there is a market for this plug-in before building it. I gave some examples of how we could test this like a landing page MVP, concierge MVP, etc.
Recently during the two days of this company hackathon I was too busy to do a project of my own because I was helping on-board colleagues with Claude and getting sucked into some leadership meetings. During the demos meeting I decided to try to build my voice replaced with flamingos plug-in and built a working plug-in in under two hours and this got me thinking:
If I can build a real functioning plug-in that a user can try in their host application in less than two hours why would I use non-software MVPs to test a market when I can build working software just as fast or faster than I could setup a non-software MVP a few years ago.
Of course there is more to learn from "lean" than just MVP (I'm also a big fan of the andon cord and the 5 why's)
(to anyone commenting on vibe coding I looked at the code and while not all of it was ideal I wouldn't consider this "vibe coded" and for serving the purpose of an MVP a couple things in the code that were a little funny are not a problem)
It was a big influence on me and something I recommend and quote often.
I'm curious if your perspectives on the topics of "The Lean Startup" have changed I the era of AI tools. Particularly curious what you think about the role of MVPs to test a market.
This has been on my mind the past few weeks because of a recent experience during a company hackathon:
A few years ago I gave a talk about prototyping and MVPs at the Audio Developers Conference and in this talk to explain the concept of an MVP I proposed a silly idea for an audio plug-in (that replaces a singers voice with the sound of flamingos) as a demonstration of how we might test that there is a market for this plug-in before building it. I gave some examples of how we could test this like a landing page MVP, concierge MVP, etc.
Recently during the two days of this company hackathon I was too busy to do a project of my own because I was helping on-board colleagues with Claude and getting sucked into some leadership meetings. During the demos meeting I decided to try to build my voice replaced with flamingos plug-in and built a working plug-in in under two hours and this got me thinking:
If I can build a real functioning plug-in that a user can try in their host application in less than two hours why would I use non-software MVPs to test a market when I can build working software just as fast or faster than I could setup a non-software MVP a few years ago.
Of course there is more to learn from "lean" than just MVP (I'm also a big fan of the andon cord and the 5 why's)
(to anyone commenting on vibe coding I looked at the code and while not all of it was ideal I wouldn't consider this "vibe coded" and for serving the purpose of an MVP a couple things in the code that were a little funny are not a problem)