Over the last couple of years, I’ve blogged about my lean startup experiments (a popular post that made page one of HN). I’ve spoken at conferences about applying lean to building mobile apps. And, I was a mentor at Lean Startup Machine. Along the way, I’ve applied lean at my last startup across ideas incubated using an internal Y-Combinator incubation format. I’ve collaborated with other entrepreneurs as a part of a DHC lean peer group (who reviewed this post). And right now, I’m running lean experiments at Intuit, a large software company. I’ve come to the conclusion that while lean startup has been a terrific step forward in how we think about what to build next, there’s still many significant challenges involved in practice. This session is based on a popular blog post I'd made and is an attempt to surface some of the issues so that we can talk about them as a community, and we can learn from each other.

Rovio tried 51 games before hitting upon Angry Birds. We tend to hear a lot more about the chart busting numbers of Angry Birds than the struggles of the previous 51 games. In my opinion, their success was the journey of the 52 experiments, and not just the final one.

We at Levitum recently had learnings from an MVP that we put out, and experiments that we ran. In the spirit of openly sharing how I’ve tried to apply Lean Startup principles to a new venture, I’m going to outline how we went about things, and what I’ve learnt.

More details on the experiments are available in my blog post http://arg0s.in/what-we-learnt-from-a-failed-mvp.html. My blog post made page one of HackerNews, has had over 20,000 visitors, and has been cited by various practitioners as an example of how to apply lean startup in practice.