Heavy Startup: The Lean Startup’s Alter Ego

The lean startup methodology is great and deserves the most attention. As contrasting to the lean startup, there’s the traditional heavy startup with extensive engineering along with customer discovery, large burn rates right out of the gate, and more. While the heavy startup shouldn’t happen too often, there’s still a place for it.

Here are a few ideas when a heavy startup makes sense:

• When an entrepreneur has extensive domain expertise in a market, running heavy can result in a fully assembled and cohesive team in a shorter period of time
• When a market opportunity is winner take all, and it’s go big or go home
• When a market requires more fully baked software before trying out a minimum viable product, like in healthcare or other complex areas

Heavy startups aren’t very common, but they still have a place in the startup world.

What else? What are some other ideas as to when heavy startups make sense?