Basel: Going to your next question, it's a really cool question. In one of your presentations, you talk about lean startup myth busters. Can you pick, let's say, your favorite two?
Brant: I'm not even sure any of them are my favorites I bust them because I don't like any of them. There are a lot of people out there that like to talk about how lean startups forces entrepreneurs to think small. I think that this one is just amusing, because to me it demonstrates really a certain amount of lack of insight into what's going on in our global economy. We're seeing a renaissance in entrepreneurship. It's happening all over the world. I'm lucky enough that I get to go, and I get to speak at different conferences and different seminars, all over the world.
The ideas that I hear in Malaysia and in Chile rival the ideas that I hear in Silicon Valley and New York City and San Diego. This is a phenomenon that is so completely independent of one particular movement like lean startups. The entrepreneurship is global, it's happening everywhere. People are graduating from college, even from high school, assuming that they're going to start a business. It just stands to reason that if you have hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, then what you're going to see is people that are trying to solve their own problems.
And guess what? A majority of those problems that people are trying to solve are not going to be the huge, disruptive problems that huge, disruptive companies end up solving. They're going to tend to be a little bit small. They're going to be about their own lifestyle. They're going, "Hey, I've got this iPhone, and wouldn't it be cool if the iPhone could do X?" You're also going to see a bunch of people that are tackling the same problem. If you have hundreds of thousands of startups, people are going to try to tackle the same problems. But they've got a small difference in the way they want to tackle it. Or, they're going after a different market segment.
Think about the startup as a product. What we're seeing is just a ton of competition for creating the right business. To me, that can only be a good thing. It's completely independent of lean startups. Now, it just so happens that lean startups help all of those entrepreneurs figure out what is the right product and what is the right segment for them to be going after.
I guess I think a lot of these observers are just conflating those two things. They see these two things rising at the same time, and it's sort of this fallacy of cause and effect. I think that lean startups actually helps these entrepreneurs discover if there's something that's truly disruptive in their idea. So, that would be sort of the number one myth that I love to shoot down. You want me to try to tackle another one?
Basel: Fire away.
Brant: I guess the other one is that I ask leaders in the startup world, what do they think about lean startups. And sometimes they'll say, "I don't believe... I think lean startups are great, but I don't think that I would ever apply such a rigid framework, or a rigid methodology into startups." Lean startups is nothing about a rigid framework. There really is no... if anybody is trying to sell you lean startups, "Here are the three steps you need to take to be a successful startup," ... That's just wrong. That's not valid.
There is no paint by numbers approach. There is no formula. Lean startups is actually a loose framework that allows you to be creative. It allows the art of entrepreneurship to flourish within a set of principles that if you adopt should help you nail your product market fit quicker than if you didn't adopt those. So, that would be the second myth I like to bust the most.
About the Guest:
Brant Cooper helps startups get started
As the author of the popular Lean Startup book "The Entrepreneur`s Guide to Customer Development.", he is a sought-after writer, speaker and consultant. The "CustDev book" is required course text at several universities, including the University of Chicago MBA program, Stanford University, De Paul, Boston University, UC Santa Barbara and
University of Oslo. Brant has been published in Venture Beat and Business Insider and frequently travels the world speaking to entrepreneurs at conferences, hackathons and workshops.
He has spoken at Qualcomm, the Kuala Lumpur Venture Capital Symposium, and Lean Startup conferences in Vancouver and Michigan. Other speaking events include the Forward Technology Conference in Wisconsin, the Lean Startup Challenge in Boston, and Lean Startup
Machines in London, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.
Brant consults for and advises startups on Lean Startups and Customer Development, serving clients in Silicon Valley, New York, San Diego, France, Australia and Singapore. Clients include Qualcomm, MOGL, HubKick, MotherKnows, i.TV, and Lean Startup Machine.
Brant Cooper is passionate about growing the San Diego tech community. He runs the San Diego Tech Founders monthly meetup that consistently draws 200 attendees. Brant is also the curator for the San Diego edition of the Startup Digest. Brant mentored at CONNECT for four years and holds open office hours at a weekly informal coffee meetup.
Brant has over 20 years experience in IT and a long track record of bringing innovative products to market. As a leader in Professional Services, Product Management and Marketing, he has directed strategy, design, marketing and implementation of numerous products for a variety of startups including Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, Incode and InfoBright.
Brant Cooper blogs at Market By Numbers and tweets @brantcooper.
Comment on the Interview:
Lean Startups
Brant Cooper speaks about lean startups in the Entrepreneurial space, and how it helps startups figure out the right product and right segment for them.
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