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136 6 SECRETS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

Ries’s second video is an infomercial for the Snuggie, the “blanket
with sleeves” that served as the butt of many jokes in late 2008 and
2009. The Snuggie-clad characters in the ad are hard to watch without
guffawing, which is why so many first-time viewers of the ad thought
it was a fictional spoof. But the Snuggie was no joke from a revenue
and marketing standpoint. It sold more than 4 million units in its first
few months and caught fire as a pop culture phenomenon, leading
USA Today to proclaim in January of 2009, “The Cult of Snuggie
threatens to take over America!”5

Ries says that when he first saw the Snuggie ad, he found the idea
so laughable that he was sure it was a hoax or a joke, just like the Ice
Cream Glove. His point in sharing these videos is that you cannot
know in advance how the market will react to your new product or
service. “Most entrepreneurs, when they are pitching their products
to investors, to potential partners, and even to future employees,” he
writes, “sound just like Ali G pitching the Ice Cream Glove: in love
with their own thinking, the amazing product features they are going
to build—and utterly out of touch with reality.”6 Your best plans, pre-
dictions, and upfront analyses are meaningless unless, and until, they
are validated by customer behavior.

Wernher von Braun, the famous NASA rocket scientist, said “one
test result is worth one thousand expert opinions,” a principle that ap-
plies perfectly to the startup journey. “You cannot figure out what prod-
ucts create value for customers at the whiteboard,” Eric Ries writes,
“where all you have to draw on are opinions.” To avoid sinking all of
your resources into a nonviable idea, Ries urges new entrepreneurs to
get “out of the building” as early as possible and expose their concept
to actual customers, to the fact-based scrutiny of the marketplace.7

Iteration is an indispensable tool for putting your startup on a
discovery-driven track. As shown in Figure 6-2, the basic cycle of iter-
ation is not hard to grasp. An idea leads to action, which leads to a result
that can be evaluated. You try something; you observe or measure the
outcome; and you develop a new and improved idea to carry into the
next iteration. This cycle will look familiar to those with experience
in the continuous improvement or lean production movements (echo-
ing the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle and similar frameworks).

American Management Association • www.amanet.org