How to Disrupt Industries with a Lean Method?

Every once in a while a new company enters the scene, and suddenly all the other players look very old and dumb. They tried hard to innovate and stay ahead of everyone else, but still, the new upcoming star eats their business. How can these small startups without serious industry experience and with much less resources win? They usually use a different, lean product development method. It can help them to solve real people's real problems faster, and gain traction in scale. Let me tell you how it works.

Find a real problem of an old industry

The best way to disrupt an industry, is to find a problem the old players can't see, or don't take seriously. They are focusing on incremental enhancements, and they usually have some blind spots. You can't always see those spots, and you probably have no clue what the other players are thinking about. But you can talk to their customers. Customers can always tell you what's wrong. As a startup you can't build as sophisticated products as the others. But you can build a simple product, attack an existing problem you found, and cut a sclice from the pie.

The Dropbox example

There was many solutions for file sharing before Dropbox. And file sharing is a really difficult industry. You have to handle security, storage, backups, multiple platforms, access rights, concurrent file versions, slow or lost connections, etc. It's a mess.

The normal way of building a better file sharing app:

• Give bigger storage
• Have better security
• Find a more sophisticated method of managing who can read, edit and download files
• Write a better algorithm to handle concurency and connectivity problems

But Dropbox didn't do that. At least not at the beginning. They found out, that file sharing is not just hard to implement, but also difficult to use. People hate all the problems they have with file sharing. They will leave you alone if you start talking about the technical details.

Dropbox hasn't built a better file sharing, with all the advanced features listed above. As a startup they didn't have the resources to do that. They built a file sharing app that is easy to use. Just one shared folder, where you can drop files. That's all, no complexity at all. And they won.

So instead of doing small enhancements on many fronts, you should do user research, find one significant problem real people have, and build an app, with a single feature to solve that.

The Tinder example

Online dating is an old industry, with many players. The normal way of building a better dating site:

• Have more sophisticated profiles
• Build better searching and filtering functions
• Write a better reccomendation algorithm to find matches

A new company can't do all those. But a new player can talk to existing users and observe their behaviour. People choose partners based on first impressions. They go on dates if they like their partner after chatting with each other. Users hate to write to so many people, while just a few answers. So you can leave out the complex profiles, give people a fast way to mark possible partners based on their photos and let the them talk.

This app has just three easy-to-implement features (a simple profile, the swipe game and the chat). No recommendation engine, or sophisticated search and filter functions. But it still works better, because it serves the need of real people.

These apps had just a few features at the beginning. Those features were built on real user insights. A one-feature app is faster and cheaper to build. Those single features can become trademarks. People can remember them and talk about them.

The short conclusion again: find real people's problem with an existing industry, and build a one-feature app to solve it.