Lean Work Will Save Your Bacon as a Founder

And your budget.

And your hires.

And actually get you traction.

I was recently challenged by a founder about how to put together a system for predicting events in a specific market. With many so many possible submarkets, signal types, and signal sources, my main recommendation was to move incrementally: choose your best customer. Focus on their market. Then choose one signal type from that market.

Create your 'signal detection' fast and scrappy - don't automate it yet.

Deliver the signal to the customer. Get their feedback. If they like it, go ahead and automate it, and move onto the next market, or the next signal.

The founder's approach was to build one giant signal-generation platform first. There is no way an engineering team could ever know how fast that would take, and it would likely involve tremendous amount of sunk cost. And founder frustration. And engineer frustration. And...users left scratching their heads.

The same philosophy that Eric Ries, Ash Maurya and Steve Blank talk about constantly applies - get your idea out to the customer. Get your developer's work out to the customer. Test it, and then move onto the bigger build.