I find it extremely difficult to reconcile between Eric Ries’ school of thought (lean methodology) and that of Peter Thiel’s (blue ocean strategy).
The former suggests finding an existing problem and talking to the consumer to solve a problem, while the latter is about building a new market. The latter disregards asking consumers because they will only want “more for less” of existing features provided by the existing players in the market.
Another limitation of lean startup methodology is how it stifles innovation by brining in complacency. If you have an MVP which is good enough then you only make incremental changes and not something remarkable as Seth Godin puts it. I recently read in an excellent article on The Atlantic. Ten years before Apply Pay came, M-pesa was already having mobile-to-mobile transactions.
But if you wait too long to do build something truly innovative without testing the MVP in the market, you may invest a lot of money in something useless.
So which strategy is better?
You can reply to this in theory or in context of a project I am working on.
My project is Amicus – “Anti-virus for E-commerce agreements”.
The market here has existing players focusing on providing solutions after disputes (such as Gripe, Yelp etc) and not preventive solutions. Should I go by consumer demand and also give solutions after a dispute(complaint resolution etc.) or go on a limb and build a purely preventive solution (like an anti-virus)?
The former requires me to do something consumers want (one stop solution) but it compromises integrity. The latter is something new and consumers don’t know how effective it will being preventing disputes, but they wont want to pay for it.
Also, the latter will mean the revenue comes from consumers like anti-virus softwares (higher user acquisition cost) and the former will mean revenue comes from businesses – Google, Facebook etc. (compromise neutrality and privacy issues).
Twitter: @amicusco @aayush1990sri