The Lean Startup's Build-Measure-Learn loop is useful, but it can be misleading.
The Lean Startup's Build-Measure-Learn loop is useful, but it can be misleading. The most valuable part of the loop is Learn. Assuming you're not out of your league with product development, Build is the easy (but time-consuming) part, and Measure only exists to help with Learn.
Where The Lean Startup can go wrong is when you begin to believe that the only way to learn is to build and measure, and that you should therefore focus on cycling through entire the loop as quickly as possible. In reality, there are many other ways to learn, and you should probably spend most of your time on that step. Lots of successful founders spent weeks/months/years learning about a problem and then built something that's mostly correct on the first try.
@csallen What are some examples of founders/companies who built something basically correct on the 1st try? ( And wasn't mostly luck/consumer e.g. twitter)
If you take luck out of it, I'm not sure. I'd have to do research and I'm feeling lazy. At the risk of sounding vain, I built IH with a very deliberate strategy that largely worked out according to my initial research (although I long ago passed the point where I had to begin figuring things out as I went).
If you allow for a bit of luck, I'd wager most successful online businesses didn't require any massive pivots.
Disclaimer: I think the above is mostly true for the ideation and pre-launch phase of your business. When you're still trying to figure out what to build, you should be doing more learning and less building. That way the first thing you build will be closer to the mark.
After you put something out there and you start acquiring customers, I think cycling through the Build-Measure-Learn loop becomes more valuable. (Unless what you released was a complete dud and you need to go back to square one.)
Maybe a good analogy is golf: You want to get as close to the hole as you possibly can before you switch to your putter and start iterating on your progress.