Lean Startup Is Wrong… or You Are

This is an article I have been sitting with for years. Incessantly pointing out to founders that they’re getting the MVP wrong or that Lean Startup misled them, I want to throw out provocative notion to challenge us all to ask why, with the clarity of what to do in Lean Startup, and so many practitioners and adherents, do overwhelmingly most startups still fail while everyone says “MVP”

The conventional wisdom we all preach is that 90% of startups fail. Now, my first startup was in 2002, when it was also said that 90% of startups fail. One of two things must be true: either Lean Startup is wrong, or founders are doing it wrong.

Eric Ries gave the world a gospel: build a minimum viable product (MVP), validate it with customers, and iterate toward product-market fit. The idea promised to democratize innovation and de-risk entrepreneurship. Yet nearly two and a half decades later, the success rates haven’t changed (presumably), and venture outcomes haven’t improved. The startup graveyard still fills faster than seats in the accelerator downtown. So, is the method broken? Or are the practitioners?

Lean Startup isn’t the problem

Lean has become dogma. Founders are quoting scripture without understanding the language. Most programs are preaching a process, with Lean Startup the Bible, when the only that works in entrepreneurship is systems.

The Myth of Product-Market Fit

Let’s start with the sacred phrase: Product-Market Fit.

It sounds so elegant that we wouldn’t even question the order of the words and yet the order of the words, alone, has completely upended entrepreneurship: Product first, market second. And that’s the trap. The language itself is misguiding entrepreneurs. When you put “product” before “market,” you condition founders to build before they understand who or what they’re building for.

The truth is, it’s Market-Product Fit. (at least, philosophically)

The market comes first: its behavior, its unmet needs, its price sensitivity, its patterns of adoption. You build only after the market reveals what it will pay for. And yes, I did just say, in flowery language, “what the market will pay for” (not customers) – we’ll get to that.

Steve Blank, the intellectual godfather of Lean Startup, never said “build a product, then validate it.” He said, “get out of the building.” In The Four Steps to the Epiphany (2005), he warned against starting with a prototype. Instead, he taught that founders should start with customer discovery; not interviews, but immersion. Ries codified that work later, but by the time Lean Startup hit the MBA circuit, it had been neutered into process, stripped of philosophy. In nearly every cohort I experience in Startup Development Organizations, founders still are working on their MVP (their solution) having only spoken to, maybe, 10 potential customers. You aren’t listening to us! You didn’t actually read the book. Or worse, you’re surrounded by awful mentors and investors giving harmful advice whom you need to help us remove from the ecosystem (honestly, this wouldn’t surprise me)

The problem is that most founders never truly “get out of the building.” They Google some stats, talk to five friends, and call it customer discovery. Then they burn three months building something no one wanted.

MVP: The Most Misunderstood Acronym in Entrepreneurship

The next misstep is the MVP.

Lean Startup defines the minimum viable product as the smallest thing you can build to start the learning process. That definition was meant to protect founders from over-building, not to give them permission to build badly.

In practice, “MVP” has become an excuse. Founders treat it like a hall pass to push out half-finished apps and call it learning.

If you’re building an MVP to “see if people will use it,” you’ve already missed the point. Your MVP isn’t supposed to prove functionality. It’s supposed to prove demand.

Dropbox didn’t build before testing. Drew Houston made a simple explainer video demonstrating what Dropbox would do, and the waiting list jumped from 5,000 to 75,000. That’s an MVP. It proved people wanted it before they could have it.

Contrast that with the graveyard of “MVPs” that founders build in isolation; small versions of their big dreams, validated by no one, tested with no market.

Academic work has backed this up. A 2018 study concluded that startups using MVPs incorrectly focus on the product rather than the business model, which limits learning and prolongs time-to-market. Translation: you’re building too much, too soon.

Your MVP should be the minimum viable proof not the minimum viable product. Proof of what? That you can acquire paying customers. Certainly not that you can build something (especially these days, a chimpanzee with ChatGPT can build MVPs). Prove you can create demand and a competitive advantage, not deliver a solution.

Customer Validation: The Cult of Conversation

Here’s where Lean Startup really got hijacked: Customer Validation.

Blank’s original meaning was that founders should validate hypotheses through experiments. But MBA programs and startup bootcamps watered that down to “talk to customers.”

So now founders spend weeks collecting polite praise from potential users. “That’s a great idea,” people say. “I’d totally use that.”

You know what that is? Noise.

That isn’t validation, it’s social politeness. Humans hate confrontation, so they rarely tell you that your idea is dumb. The result is a false sense of traction.

True validation only happens through transactions.

When someone gives you an email, that’s interest. When they click “buy,” that’s validation. When they pay and return, that’s product-market fit (er, market-product fit).

This isn’t just opinion. A 2020 analysis by CB Insights on startup post-mortems found that 42% of startups fail because there’s “no market need” – not because the product didn’t work. In other words, founders keep building before marketing.

If you think validation means conversation, you’ve confused empathy with evidence.

Lean Startup Didn’t Reduce Failure Because It Was Never Used Properly

Let’s put data to the claim. The global startup failure rate remains roughly nine out of ten within five years, nearly identical to pre-Lean Startup eras. So let me be clear in establishing that while I’m defending Lean Startup given my point of view, the fundamental fact must be that either it’s wrong, or you are.

I don’t think it’s that the framework doesn’t work; it’s that no one follows it correctly. Instead of “build–measure–learn,” founders are doing “build–launch–hope.”

You treat Lean like a checklist, not a scientific method.

A 2019 Harvard Business Review critique, What the Lean Startup Method Gets Right and Wrong, observed that most teams “fail to apply the hypothesis-driven approach rigorously,” relying on shortcuts that invalidate the learning cycle. In plain English: the method doesn’t fail; the execution does.

The consequences of this misunderstanding go beyond startup failure. Economic development agencies and venture funds have built entire infrastructures around “Lean” principles, incubators, accelerators, government innovation hubs. Yet those systems also misapply the framework. They fund product-builders, not market-finders.

That’s why so many startup programs produce pitch decks instead of businesses. It’s all process, no market. It’s step-function, not system.

We’ve created a culture that celebrates the building of startups, not the selling of them.

If you want evidence, just walk through any coworking space. It’s filled with brilliant prototypes and empty wallets. Founders are still confusing invention with entrepreneurship.

Doing It Right: A Market-First Framework

If you want to do Lean right, you have to start before you build anything. The real sequence should look like this:

1. Discover the market. Who has the problem? What have they tried? What do they already pay for?
2. Prove demand. Build the smallest, cheapest test to show people will pay: a landing page, a pre-order, a prototype with a Stripe button.
3. De-risk before you develop. Use those insights to remove your biggest assumptions.
4. Then build the product that fits.

That’s the inversion most founders can’t make: marketing before development, demand before design.

Marc Andreessen put it, “Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” The order of those words was never meant to be sequential; it was descriptive. But if you start with the product, you’ll never get there.

So, Is Lean Startup Wrong?

Let’s return to the question. If Lean Startup was supposed to change everything, why hasn’t it?

Maybe because Lean was never supposed to be a “method,” it’s a mindset. It’s about humility before the market, not hustle before the investor.

But today’s founders aren’t humble. They’re pitching before they’re listening. They’re coding before they’re marketing. They’re mistaking validation for affirmation.

So no, Lean Startup isn’t wrong. It’s just being done wrong, and worse, preached wrong, by nearly everyone.

If Lean Startup really worked, we’d have more success stories to show for it. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t still be the foundation of every accelerator and innovation program on Earth.

That paradox should make you uncomfortable.

Lean Startup is either wrong or you’re doing it wrong. But one of those must be true.

If you’re brave enough to assume it’s you, not the method, then flip it: start with the market, test demand, sell the story, and then build.

If you’re not (brave enough), if you’d rather keep building in a vacuum, waiting for your epiphany, the startup cemetery is still plenty big.