If you’re not familiar with the Lean Startup movement, Eric Ries’ Lean Startup website and Wikipedia are excellent places to get started learning about them. If you like concrete examples as a learning tool, have we got a post for you. Vinicius Vacanti has a revealing story about his experience launching a startup.
The Lean Startup methodology says (among other things) fail quickly, and fail often, and learn from those failures. Mr. Vacanti begins by relating what appears to be a failure:
Two users. That’s it.
It had been a week since we had announced to friends and family our latest idea, LinkFalcon, and only two of them had bothered to try it.
I thought LinkFalcon had some real potential. It solved a real problem for me and one that I hoped others had.
Complete disaster. Failure. Six months down the drain. Back to our real jobs.
That’s what should have happened; but, thanks to the Lean Startup movement, that wasn’t the case at all. Here’s why.
Read the rest of his post to understand why it wasn’t a complete failure. You’ll also learn that a subsequent experiment lead to a VC backed company: Yipit.