Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

9The Invention of Everything Else

Discover the Innovation Vortex, which emerged by combining the Design Thinking approach with the Lean Startup method.

 

Imagine that you’re building a new fitness center with fancy, high-tech equipment. You even have an AI-powered crypto-cardio drone. The people in your town are enthusiastic because there’s nothing like that in the area. A number of them already sign up! Then, when the gym is finished, the doors open, payments come in, and … nobody shows up. Yes, people pay for their subscriptions, maybe because they feel they should go to a gym, or maybe because being part of something new makes them feel hip and trendy, but your rooms are mostly empty. The equipment just stands there doing nothing, and the drone is playing a battle royale game with the cross trainer. However, people from neighboring towns have seen you building your fancy fitness club and they ask you, “When will you open such a nice gym in our town?” What do you tell them? Do you build more gyms, because people ask? Or do you figure out why nobody uses the first one?

This is the metaphor I always use when people ask us, “When will we get the iOS version?” They’ve asked us many times because, in the Validation stage, we experiment on the Android platform only. But why would we copy something that doesn’t work to another platform? And so, we had many discussions about our Lean ...