Anybody who describes hiring a CX/UX freelancer or staff member as “money to waste” is unlikely to agree with me on a lot of things. It’s not money to waste. The real wasted money are all of these MVPs and guesses, these shitty ideas that get built (time and money) that then fail to be valuable or desirable to customers.

Let’s stop praising startup founders for wasting time and money on MVPs and guesses. That shouldn’t be seen as cool or Lean. It’s fake Lean. Lean is about reducing defects, improving efficiency, cutting waste, and delivering more value to customers. Guessing at who people are or what they might want is the opposite of Lean. Learn, build, then test and iterate. Too many startups and larger companies try to build before learning, and that’s wasteful and risky.

As for innovation or long-term innovation, very few startups or companies are innovative. We throw that word around without thinking about what it really means. It means creating something that hasn’t been seen or done before. That’s VERY few startups. Even the companies trying to improve a known (not innovated) thing/space aren’t doing a great job of improving things.

You can say “to each his own,” but when a method is widely failing people, we should think critically about it. Most startups are trying to follow Lean Startup, right? And depending upon whose numbers you believe, 90–95% of startups are failing. At best, this approach has a very low success rate. We need to consider that it was almost OK for its time (2010-ish), and now we have enough years of trying it to say that it doesn’t work well enough, often enough, or consistently.