LESSONS BEYOND IMVU

 

I have had many opportunities to teach the IMVU story as a business case ever since Stanford’s Graduate School of Business wrote an official study about IMVU’s early years.5 The case is now part of the entrepreneurship curriculum at several business schools, including Harvard Business School, where I serve as an entrepreneur in residence. I’ve also told these stories at countless workshops, lectures, and conferences.

Every time I teach the IMVU story, students have an overwhelming temptation to focus on the tactics it illustrates: launching a low-quality early prototype, charging customers from day one, and using low-volume revenue targets as a way to drive accountability. These are useful techniques, but they are not the moral of the story. There are too many exceptions. Not every kind of customer will accept a low-quality prototype, for example. If the students are more skeptical, they may argue that the techniques do not apply to their industry or situation, but work only because IMVU is a software company, a consumer Internet business, or a non-mission-critical application.

None of these takeaways is especially useful. The Lean Startup is not a collection of individual tactics. It is a principled approach to new product development. The only way to make sense of its recommendations is to understand the underlying principles that make them work. As we’ll see in later chapters, the Lean Startup model has been applied to a wide variety of businesses and industries: manufacturing, clean tech, restaurants, and even laundry. The tactics from the IMVU story may or may not make sense in your particular business.

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Instead, the way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment. The question is not “Can this product be built?” In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically.

In other words, we need the scientific method. In the Lean Startup model, every product, every feature, every marketing campaign—everything a startup does—is understood to be an experiment designed to achieve validated learning. This experimental approach works across industries and sectors, as we’ll see in Chapter 4.