Frustrating objection to lean startup strategies

(Just an aside - "respect" and facebook don't go together in the same sentence.)

Assuming I would take your position I would ask him how he would address the risk of spending time and money building something no one wants. Ask him if he thinks it is a valid concern.

You should also figure out how to address his concern over the risk that no one will take you seriously with a subset featured product. Let him know that you are thinking about that issue.

Both are valid concerns. For some domains one is more of an issue than the other.

Buy him "The Four Steps To The Epiphany" by Steven Blank.

Maybe it's an advantage if the competition thinks you're crappy, when in reality you're building exactly what their customers want.

But that's not enough to win this argument -- I assume you've already talked to him about "4 steps" and that it hasn't worked. More arguing is probably not the answer.

Sometimes you do know the market cold, in which case you do know what to build. An example is an entrepreneur who just finished a 5-year stint at a similar company and saw all the opportunity and all the mistakes. Another example is someone who has detailed mock-ups which were shopped around and "proven."

I also agree with others above that perception does matter in certain industries. Imagine a design and marketing firm with a crappy website!

However if both of you are stumbling around in new territory, I think the main thing to challenge is the notion that either of you knows what "full featured" means. If it means "Copying a lot of the features of competitors," then why are you in business? If it means "A unique approach," that's better, but then you have to prove the concept along the way.

After all, surely there are 10 ways you could do it, all rational, and most won't turn into a business. That's not good dice to roll!

This is a common problem between an engineering type and a business type. In my experience, "full-featured" is just code for "I have no idea what the market wants." If he understood the market need, then he would know what he wants.

It's important to weight that against just shipping something to ship something. Too often this whole Minimum Viable Product idea is an engineering excuse to push marketing in a corner. Sometimes the market need will be complex and some of those nice to have features may make or break your product.

Getting back to your biz partners concerns, he should not worry about how they think as long as your customers think to buy your product. The only people that matter are the customers.

As a developer, I've spend countless hours developing software for companies that NEVER been used.

Why?

Because when you build a product following a 100 pages functional specification document and spend one year of development without feedback from the users, the final result is not what your users need.

User feedback should guide the development of a new and untested product.

Release Early, Release Often.....

Have your partner read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often

As a customer I've always been much more impressed by a company that's trying to solve my problem than a company that's impressed by their own feature set.

Ask him to put himself in the shoes of your customer--do they care what your contemporaries think?

You might want to have a read of this blog post http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/04/28/how-to-predict-whether-a-startup-will-succeed-or-fail-testing-the-disruptive-innovation-model/ which discusses how to determine start-up success or failure, based on things like position in a market and whether or not your company/product is likely to succeed.

It is not always clear what will or will not work but there is definitely some food for thought here.

Also, when you do get your business together make sure that you have a good strategy implementation process in place.

The key point I'd push is that whether others think lowly of you or not has nothing to do with why you're in business. I'm assuming you're building this product to sell to others? If so, then that objective should drive you.

First impressions - first impressions these days are more about getting in the door. That you have a product that may partially meet the customer's needs and they're willing to provide feedback to help you get it the rest of the way.

Development time - someone said that if you're not embarrassed with the first version of your product then you've taken too long to get it out the door. That might be a bit of an exaggeration but not by a lot. Iteration is how you make a great product. When I was at Borland we had a W.A.R. philosophy - Win All Reviews. What that meant is it took way too long to get our products out the door and eventually we lost the real war.

Take an hour to update your FB page and remove that as an argument for him.

I suppose the key question is who makes the final decision on your strategy. That's the real big picture here.