What other methods like Paypal are there?

What comes after Lean Startup and Customer Development? What could be the new methods we read about in 2020?

• What comes after Lean Startup and Customer Development? What could be the new methods we read about in 2020? Eric Ries’ Lean Startup and Steve Blank's Customer Development models have become very popular for many startups nowadays. These and other similar models share the same principle of learning about the customers early with minimal effort and failing fast, pivoting, etc. They were the key to success for many startups in 2000-2010 and most likely still today. Now I wonder what happens if/when everybody starts using these methods? Will the bottleneck of startup success just be pushed further down the funnel somewhere after product-market fit is found, or will it just result in enormous economic growth? Either way, there are going to be winners in the future as well. Some of them bigger winners than others. What could the key to success be? Any good guesses?  Will the winners in 2010-2020 be the ones who do LS and CD methods better (more lean)? Or will the new winners that we read about in 2020 be doing something completely different today already? I find it hard to believe that these methods would really become obsolete, but when everyone is using them, they will not give you any competitive advantage anymore. Any good guesses what the advantage could be today and in the near future? Could it be that Lean Startup and similar methods leave behind lots of opportunities that cannot really be pursued with these approaches? When there are less people pursuing these opportunities, it could be easier to find success there. Any ideas? I was planning to write a blog post about this, but realized how little I know, so this became a question instead :)

• Answer:

  I think for a short term we will be seeing a lot of businesses being improved in their early stages, especially when you're looking at online to offline (o2o) businesses (uber, groupon, airbnb, vayable, etc.). However, I don't think that you can assume CD or LS is the bottleneck. For many startups, yes, they end up building stuff that people don't want. But I think there are enough startups that validate their ideas, and just do all the LS and CD right, but still end up failing. Remember Dialpad? They came before Skype. They didn't fail because their solution sucked. It was because of other difficulties. Timing, bandwidth, etc. In fact, Paul Graham talks about growth a lot, because that's really what's most important. It's like...okay, you've built an awesome product, so how do you tweak it so it's easy to use, and relevant. There's so much noise in the market now. I think in the future the challenge will be about BD and marketing (growth hacking, content marketing, social/referrals, etc.). The market is so saturated...won't be easy getting through all that clutter. We operate a platform to guide people through building a lean startup, and then follow through with a growth hacking/content marketing/SEO curriculum. Those interested, check it out at http://startitup.co. Finally, to answer your question. I think it'll just become a long tail. Look at the SEO industry. It's so saturated. All the short tail keywords have been optimized to death. So what's left is long tail, and I think users will adjust to used to diversifying their attention than using just a couple of platforms. It's already happening...niches everywhere.