Over the past few years I’ve invested in a number of lean startups and a few heavy startups. As it sounds, a heavy startup is nearly the opposite of a lean startup: a high burn rate from the beginning and an assumption that the original idea will be successful. While the heavy startups are making progress, the lean startup model has been superior.
Here are a few lessons learned from investing in heavy startups:
- No matter how great the idea sounds, it always hard to build a product that customers love and where customers can be repeatedly acquired
- Every successful business requires multiple product iterations, and sometimes full pivots, before arriving at the product that takes off (thus, it’s important to plan accordingly with financial resources)
- Regardless of how much cash is in the bank, it will be burned within 12 months, so the more cash in the bank, the higher the monthly burn rate — entrepreneurs love to spend money to get things done (myself included)
- Many aspects of the customer discovery and product/market fit process take time no matter how many people are on staff (similar to the idea that adding software engineers towards the end of a project actually makes the project take longer — see The Mythical Man Month)
- Laying people off is much more painful to morale compared to running on limited staff and waiting to hire until the requisite revenue growth
Heavy startups, while more limited now, are still a part of the startup ecosystem. My recommendation is to go the lean startup route and delay raising a large amount of money and hiring a big team until product/market fit is in place and a repeatable customer acquisition process has been proven.
What else? What are some other lessons learned with heavy startups?
David Cummings on Startups 
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