I think marketing is more critical choke point in current saturated markets.
And if company needs lots of fund to promote product, it doesn't really matter if product is lean or not.
The automotive market before Tesla, the smartphone market before the iPhone, bookstores before Amazon, social media before TikTok, etc. And those are just high profile examples, there are thousands of new businesses launched every year into existing, "saturated" markets and not all of them fail. Sure, marketing is a component of success but innovation can and does succeed, every day. And of course the lean startup approach doesn't apply only to innovative businesses, it's just a philosophy for proving out your market and solution by experiment rather than by theory.
tesla and iphone are not for lean startups which we are discussing.
All of them did come to less saturated markets than what we have now.
The point is that 10-20 years ago market were much less saturated, so some lean startup could build quality product and strive in half empty niche. Since then there is so much money and people were injected into software/tech, that it is very hard to find not saturated niche for lean startup(meaning little funding).
I understand the point, I just disagree with your hypothesis. The automotive market was overwhelmingly dominated by a few massive players. Tesla pushed into that market with innovation, not mass marketing. Do they even have advertising now? Yet they have the top-selling model in the world in the Model Y.
Now, I would agree that Tesla wasn't lean. But the point of your comment as I understood it was that lean or not, in a world of saturated markets, you must have massive marketing. I think that's demonstrably not true, and gave examples where I think it's clear that innovation was more important than marketing.
> Tesla pushed into that market with innovation, not mass marketing
it was innovation outside of tesla. If battery capacity/cost wouldn't improve, tesla would still be producing short range roadster for rich people.
There are pivot points in different markets, when some breakthrough happens, and first mover is having huge advantage, but it is rare and unreliable event, since you can invest in area, but break through won't happen.
> I think that's demonstrably not true, and gave examples where I think it's clear that innovation was more important than marketing.
And your examples are not correct, Amazon was not on saturated market, tiktok and iphone were launched by corp with likely significant marketing budgets.
There are likely examples of success and Cinderella stories, but the question is in success rate. On unsaturated markets such rate will be 10%, while it will be 0.01% on saturated markets.
Say, I am lean dev in area of AI, and I am building something innovative, how can I find customers and squeeze through the crowd of hype and tens thousands startups and tools?
If you read The Lean Startup, you'll have the answer to your question. AI startups don't generally provide AI, they solve some problem using AI. Now, if the only advantage your AI startup has is that your solution costs less at scale, then you're right, lean isn't going to work well for you. But if your solution is significantly better even at small scale than those available in the "saturated" market, then the lean approach is to get your solution out there in some kind of minimal form, to some small group of customers. You just need to prove that there are people who will pay a price for your product/service that you can imagine making money eventually, even if you have to do some things manually to start that you will automate in software later. The book gives examples of this.
Once you've proven some level of market fit with a lean approach, you're much better positioned to get investment. Lean doesn't mean completely bootstrapped. The problem that lean seeks to avoid is burning through investor cash making mistakes in getting market fit that you should have made before investment. By the time you get investor money, you should be ready to make the next level of mistakes. :-)
> If you read The Lean Startup, you'll have the answer to your question.
> then the lean approach is to get your solution out there in some kind of minimal form, to some small group of customers.
I just checked, and the book is completely missing this point how did they get to these customers in my brief reading. This is Vision->Learn->6 months after launch section in the book.
> The problem that lean seeks to avoid is burning through investor cash making mistakes in getting market fit that you should have made before investment.
I agree, but the point is that marketing part is much more important now than then, and completely missing in literature, there is no "lean marketing" paragraph or book, and I am not sure if it is reliably possible.
Well since we're on HN just take a look through the latest YCombinator batch. Some are attempting to break into saturated markets but others are entirely novel.
