Lean Startup Machine CEO Trevor Owens wants to help with that. Today, he's launching a free product development tool called the Validation Board that help startups crystallize things like their "Riskiest Assumption," which ideas have been "Invalidated," and what constitutes a "Minimum Success Criterion."

It's already being used by Salesforce, NewsCorp, and Singularity University. Within the next couple weeks, it will also be employed by the White House Innovation Fellows, where Mr. Owens offers coaching services to budding entrepreneurs.

The Validation Board is essentially a souped-up whiteboard with sections for important stages in the testing process--all mapped out according to the Lean Startup methodology codified by Eric Ries, who developed the plan of action after carefully studying 500 startups.

Mr. Owens, a familiar face in New York startup circles, has expanded Lean Startup Machine--his workshops on launching a company--globally to 30 cities, including Shanghai and Sao Paulo. "We were testing it for about six months at our workshops," he told Betabeat by email. "We knew after our first test that it worked well in the context of a workshop but it needed to be improved so that anyone could download it and learn it on their own."

After feedback from Mr. Ries, along with experts like Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics, Tom Eisenmann from Harvard Business School, Lane Halley from Cooper Design, and John Kembel from Stanford d.school, Mr. Owens released the board, which can be printed out as a poster for $4 or used virtually via Google Docs.

The hope, Mr. Owens said, is that "by making it easier and faster for new entrepreneurs to follow through this process that took serial entrepreneurs years to figure out, we will see the accelerated rise of more innovative products and companies."

Aside from the nominal $4 fee, "We're not asking for any money," he said, adding, "but if you hockey-stick because of our Validation Board, we would love a case study," marking the first time we've heard "hockey-stick" as a verb.

There are similar tools on the market already, he noted, pointing to Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas. (Mr. Osterwalder also offered feedback on the tool's design.) "Business Model Canvas is a tool better suited for strategy than process, and isn't focused on product development like ours," Mr. Owens explained. "The barrier to adopting process-based tools is always education, which is why we have over 200 workshops planned in 2013 around the world to teach this process."

With all the data from his workshops, Mr. Owens said the Validation Board was fairly easy to develop. But be warned, this could mean you'll be hearing more of the dreaded p-word, albeit with a pedagogical bent. "The main idea was around how important it is to pivot," he said. "Pivot is the most overused word and the most underused concept. People are afraid to admit when they pivot and would rather reframe their story."

Rather, Mr. Owens emphasizes getting feedback as soon as possible. "One of our goals was to be able to get a team outside of the building and talking to customers as fast as possible. I can usually coach a team through the process in ten minutes to get all of the assumptions out and leave the building."

If it sounds too easy to be true, perhaps Mr. Owens students can attest to its practicality. We noticed Union Square Ventures analyst Brian Watson pop up in the Validation Board's promotional video. "He was at the same workshop as Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal when they had the idea for Branch," Mr. Owens noted proudly.

If you want to try out the product but don't yet have a billion dollar idea to vet, you could test it out in our personal life. "This is random, but we've even seen people use the VBoard for stock trading and their dating life," offered Mr. Owens. "If you think about it, almost anything can be put in the frame of a 'product.'"

Let's not make product the next p-word, shall we?

Mr. Grebski.

This is a guest post by Jacek Grebski, COO of Badger, and a board member at the Bowery Arts & Sciences. You can find more of his musings at http://jacekgrebski.com.

The Lean Startup model seems to be present everywhere you turn these days--any methodology that seeks to improve the success rate of young companies is welcome, and this is especially true when new enterprise is needed more than ever to add kindling to the economic fire. However, there is an undeniable problem with this proposed methodology: Eric Ries is largely selling 336 pages of obvious, while simultaneously making assumptions that would be effective in only a handful of startups, and surely not in an across-the-board situation as advertised.

As with any management ideology, there is of course both the good and the bad, so how’s about we take a quick looksee.

The good. Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker, maybe not, but I couldn’t agree more that defining a revenue model early on should be the priority of any startup. Some believe that the mantra of acquiring millions of users and then devising a model is preferred but I would dispute that, you don’t need to, nor should you burn cash for years. Instead young companies should focus on seeing revenue appear on the P&L form starting day one.

However, we all speak from our own experiences, and so does Mr. Ries. A lot of his assumptions are based on his experience with IMVU, a product that at time of launch entered (as far as tech is concerned) a mature market: online chat.

But what if your startup is debuting in a relatively young market, like Foursquare, or attempting to create an entirely new market, like Skillshare or Airbnb? Conceptually new ideas need time to test markets and mature. New product acceptance is not something that happens overnight, it’s often a lengthy process that involves careful strategic oversight, which the lean startup model lacks. Small sample sizes, constant iterations and new features are detractors. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the lean startup approach will do more in terms of hindrance than good to the company’s overall vision.

Using a feedback loop to provide an optimal solution for a saturated market can be a good strategy. However, when the startup is doing something absolutely novel and new, this approach is equivalent to asking everyone in Union Square to name their favorite band. Imagine if the gents behind Twitter were to have listened to their community in 2006? I think we can all attest to the fact that by and large people assumed that 140 characters were not enough, that the service did not make sense, and it was for lack of a better term, just plain dumb. (Who wants to read about what people are having for lunch? etc.) But, by staying the course, Jack Dorsey & co. proved the naysayers wrong.

People can only tell you what they want based on the products they’re already using. But if you as an entrepreneur can make something completely novel, something you yourself want to use, now you’re innovating. That doesn't happen by putting up a suggestions box.

(Another thing: can we please stop with the pivots already? Turntable.fm did not pivot from Stickybits, Turntable.fm was a completely new product developed by the same people from Stickybits. Bar code scanning, and music-enhanced chat rooms are not similar products. Sheesh.)

And what about the obvious? Yes, agile development is absolutely pivotal (get it) when it comes to product, and it’s something that every young company should be employing. It’s an absolute necessity, and looking at the nature of today’s market where test products can be delivered in a matter of days it just makes sense. Anyone who isn’t working in an agile methodology is simply stuck in the 90s. But the call to continuously improve in lean startups borders on the absurd, seriously. All products need to be improved upon and updated, without them we’d still be driving Model-T Fords and watching black and white TVs.

At times, it seems like Mr. Ries read Friedman’s “The World is Flat” and thought to himself, I can do this too, which is fine--by all means we should embrace efforts to foster entrepreneurship and growth. It’s just that we should look objectively at these methods that claim to be the holy grail solution to an industry that is far more complex than Lean Startup gives credit to, and one that is sadly often marred by the cult of personalities that Mr. Ries has become.

At the end of the day, nothing beats foresight, a skilled and complementary team, and market knowledge. But if you really want to take away some of this book’s teachings you’d in all honestly be better off sitting in on a few operations classes at any half way decent MBA and saving yourself the $15.63 plus shipping and handling.

This is a guest post from "Hurricane Melanie" Moore, co-founder of Elizabeth & Clarke, a stealth fashion/tech startup in New York. This is a post-mortem on Ms. Moore's first startup, the

As you all know by now, the grim reaper has paid ToVieFor a visit. Sad face. I want to talk a little about the root cause of the closure, in the hopes that others who might be starting a new business do not make the same mistake. Also, some broader industry thoughts below--as I'm sure no one wants to hear me keep yapping about my failed startup for weeks on end.

Wither ToVieFor

The reason ToVieFor failed is the same reason almost all businesses fail: we did not build something that people wanted. I know it sounds like a *facepalm* moment, but following the steps of the Lean Startup method in order to discover what people want is so easily said, but so hard to actually do.

While we all worship at the altar that is Steve Blank and the Lean Startup Movement, I have noticed that it is somewhat rare to find entrepreneurs truly applying the principles of Customer Development. I know we didn't do this at ToVieFor, not even close. In fact, in the beginning, I had never even heard of Steve Blank or Eric Ries. What? Blasphemy you say? Yes, I know it is a little shocking to those in startup land, but for many aspiring entrepreneurs, recent MBA graduates, or those leaving industry to start their own thing, there may not be anyone around to enlighten one of the wisdom of The Four Steps to the Epiphany and the beautifully simple formula to starting a business.

In addition, as much as those in the startup world pay lip service to these ideas, and as much as we *thought* we were implementing them at ToVieFor--we were not--in fact, by the time I had even heard of a Lean Startup it was already too late. We had passed that golden time period that every startup has: the time when nobody knows your name, when you have almost no users, no press, no investor will give you the time of day, it's the perfect time when you can massively fuck up over and over and over again, and no one will be the wiser. It won't affect your branding, your user acquisition targets, or your next board meeting because you do not have any of those yet. We squandered this time away winning a business plan competition, when we should have been trying to find out what our users actually wanted.

Every time I thought: "Oh, we need to raise money" or "We need to get more press" or "We need whatever-the-fuck-we-do-not-actually-need"--I should have been focused on the product. Lesson learned for company no. 2. We thought we were doing Customer Development. We were looking at our own "vanity metrics" as per the industry vernacular. But the reality is that we were afraid to ask our customers the tough questions and get the hard answers: we don't like your product (or worse, who are you? what do you do again?). That fear of your own customer is more common than one might think. Many times, when I speak with other first-time entrepreneurs--clearly more in tune with startup land and its golden principles than I was--there is a lot of lip service paid to Customer Development, but not a lot of action. But in the hopes your startup does not receive the next visit from the grim reaper, please please please, get over it.

We did do one thing right though, one thing that I see so many other fashion Internet startups get wrong, which was to build a balanced team of technology talent and apparel industry experience. That included my co-founder Eric Jennings, an enormously talented engineer who spent the previous four years hacking on the e-commerce company MyShape and Lily Kwong, who has worked at every fashion house from Dior to Altuzarra, is a model, a Vogue contributor, and just a general Conde fav.

Fashionably late

Over the past two years, after probably a couple hundred meetings with people involved in either tech or fashion in some way, I have noticed a distinct and divisive cultural attitude of one towards the other. I have found it enormously common to sit with a first-time fashion entrepreneur who constantly complains about her outsourced tech team, "I asked them to do this a million times, why don't they get it?" "I don't know what's wrong with them, I told them they need to add Facebook Connect, why is this taking so long?" "It's just an e-commerce website, I don't know why they can't build it faster" ad infinitum. There is a clear lack of respect for the technology and the (typically outsourced) developers who are building it.

Luxury brands are among the worst offenders. I challenge you to find a luxury website without (1) a black or dark "sexy" background color, (2) a crazy-long, unnecessary Flash-intro, (3) infinitesimally small font everywhere, (4) and impossible-to-click, three-level drop-down menus. It's no wonder brands like Calvin Klein, which generate about $6 billion in revenue annually, only produce about $60 million through e-commerce.

However, technologists do not escape scrutiny either. I can't tell you how many times I have talked to a previously successful entrepreneur in gaming, video, social media--or maybe a recent alumni of Google or Twitter--that is now starting something that is going to "revolutionize shopping on the web." The distinct attitude is "I worked at Facebook and sold my last company to Google, how hard can this fashion thing be? This will be cake." Ha. Talk to anyone who has spent a day of their life in apparel, and I'm pretty sure the last word used to describe the industry would be "easy."

In fact, to quote a wonderfully eloquent commenter on my last post:

Instead of listening to this writer's advice, any company going into fashion should look at how backward thinking most people in the industry are, how little they understand technology, and how they are unwilling to admit the core purpose of fashion. The easiest entry is discoverability and influence and that's also the most powerful element of the fashion ecosystem. If you become the discovery engine and the decision engine then it's game over for everyone else. If you become the decision engine (something Google and Bing are trying to do with there [sic] Flight Search and other initiatives in various verticals), then you can easily take over the entire business. If people are coming to you and you help them decide what to buy - then you can start selling them that stuff. You start off as the starting point and then you start taking over more and more until you start producing the products you were originaly [sic] only linking to.

The Internet is destroying entire industres [sic] - yet she thinks fashion internet startups should instead compete in the real world. That makes no sense. We should all play to our strenghts [sic]. While she's trying to do backend stuff and help existing Fashion [sic - again] companies, some 'only 3 to 8%' earning Internet startup is going to disrupt the entire industry. A hacker, in my opinion, is not meant to figure out how to solve the problems the existing industry power players created or want solved. A hacker, again in my opinion, should solve the most elegent [sic] things and solve things for actual people.

While it is difficult to defend an argument that is not rational, in this case, I do not need to. The words speak for themselves.

There are very few companies that have been able to conquer the cultural divide of apparel and technology and, instead, bring together top fashion industry execs and talented technology entrepreneurs. Ironically, the company that has been so far ahead of this curve, is also over a decade old: Net-a-Porter, the Platonic Ideal of the fashion internet company--and also the one that has paved the way for every flash sale website in existence. Typically, new apparel startups fall distinctly on one side of the other: Moda Operandi has very deep connections and industry experience, but no engineering talent. Inporia has incredibly successful technology entrepreneurs behind it, but couldn't pronounce "Rodarte" if their life depended on it. The problem is that both think the other's job is easy or unimportant: 'the technology is not core to the product and can be outsourced' or 'fashion is so simple anyone who is a consumer can understand it.'

If we (we being the collective ecosystem of fashion entrepreneurs and investors) have any hope of solving the difficult supply chain and remnant inventory problems in apparel, disrupting a 100+ year old industry and building amazing companies, we have to realize that each function--both engineering talent and apparel expertise--is equally important and necessary. The ability of your company to build a brand and an emotional connection with your consumer is just as important as your engineers who churn out lines of node.js each night so your site can handle concurrency issues and RACE conditions after Style.com runs a fabulous piece on your new brand.

With all this said, there are a few startups I am super excited about, and believe can cross this divide: Edition 01 (deep fashion expertise + some excellent East Coast technology investors), The Lookk (one of Carmen Busquets's first investments since the sale of Net-a-Porter), and The Runthrough (a way for stylists to request samples for shoots without having to send interns running all over town to physically hunt them down) are a few. In addition to the more established fashion startups like Warby Parker and Bonobos, I am incredibly excited to see how they change the industry, and hope that many others will follow suit.

Mr. Lean, Mr. Lean, Oh, Mr. Lean!

With all the co-living spaces, one-day insta-education conferences, and blogs-to-replace-boardrooms out there espousing the mantra of growing lean, one could be forgiven for thinking that entrepreneurs jumped on the concept as soon as someone thought of it. As it turns out, not so much. In a long profile on Xconomy, Eric Ries, the face of the movement, who helped crystallize the concept along with Steve Blank, goes back to a time before lean and the genesis of what now seems like conventional wisdom.

First, of course, came the failure. Well, actually, in Mr. Ries case, it seems like two failures before an eventual success were the charm. All three also all happened to be social networks, of a kind.

It started with There, a company founded in 1998 to build 3D social virtual worlds.

Every company has to cross the chasm. We didn’t believe in the chasm. We thought we could just start with mainstream customers. There were actually no products in history that had the kind of response we were looking for. We used to say stuff like, “We want to be the next Microsoft, the next AOL.” And we were building the kinds of products a mature company might build. But if you go back and look at version 1 of AOL, every product goes through its adoption phases. There is no skipping a grade. It’s not like we debated this internally, we just had these beliefs—I call them “shadow beliefs” now—that we never spoke out loud.

Then there was the failure of Catalyst Recruiting, an employment site he founded where college students  shared profiles with employers:

At the time, it was hard, it was really depressing. I was very upset. I felt very embarrassed. I had put all of my social and political capital into this thing. I had promised all kinds of people that this was going to be a big success. My roommates were employed there. We always joke—we had the first two-thirds of The Social Network experience. It was just like the movie. But the part where anything good happens, we never had that. But this was actually a good experience, because so much of what I work on with entrepreneurs now [is similar]. When you are on the brink of failure, it often looks just like the movies. You always expect that that customer will walk in magically, just in the nick of time, just like in the movies. But hey, you know what? They don’t.

Finally there was IMVU. This social networking service was an avatar-based, the "Build, Measure, Lean" ethos that defines lean start-ups began to take shape.

This was 2004. The agile [software] manifesto was three or four years old. Extreme programming had been around a few years. Unit testing was just starting to enter the mainstream understanding. Continuous integration was considered as advanced as one could reasonably get. Pair programming was still considered nuts. But I wanted to do stuff like continuous deployment, which didn’t even have a name at that time, because it was considered something that only a truly crazy person would do. I wanted us to take agile into the business.

But were the people buying what Mr. Ries was selling? Not initially:

I started writing a blog because I wanted to have something to show people. I would have these meetings where I’d get all dressed up, schlep over to some startup office, give them my shtick, and they’d want to argue with me and say it’ll never work, that’s stupid. I’m like “You called me!” Life’s too short. So I said, I’ll write this stuff down. And Steve [Blank] was encouraging me to blog and write. So I said all right, let’s try this out.

And the rest is start-up history.

Post-funding grin?

If Betabeat just closed a $350,000 round of funding from folks like Dave McClure, Eric Ries and Esther Dyson, we're pretty sure we'd spend the next day hungover trying to form our piles of cash into a Scrooge McDuck-like money pool.

Not so Tout founder Tawheed "TK" Kader, whose app attempts to solve the problem of repetitive email. "Its that magical moment right? Its what you’d been waiting for right? The press starts writing about you, the congratulations come flying in. You’ve made it. Right? Wrong."

On his Tumblr, at 2am, TK sketched a rough outline of what the-day-after actually looks liked, including terribly glamorous tasks like answering 52 customer service emails, posting job listings, making sure your iPhone developer has his priorities straight, crossing your T's on Apple's enrollment process, and fretting over your backlog of work.

What’s the point? The point is that the day after you get funded is like any other day that you are running your business. Getting funded is not some magical event where all your worries go away. It is not some big party to pop the champagne over. Its the time where you buckle down even more so that you can make it rain.

The day after you get funded, you still have to deal with the real fundamentals of your business. You still have to build your actual business, and you have to actually plan and execute so that you can actually deliver all those things you promised your Investors when you took their money.

Somebody bring this man a 16-olive martini. It sounds he'll be at the office for awhile.

Marc Andreessen

The current wave of IPOs that investors hope will extend from LinkedIn through Groupon and onto Facebook is making some venture capitalists very, very wealthy. But the bonkers bubble money isn't exactly getting spread around. Bloomberg reports that the success of firms like Sequoia, Greylock, Accel, and Andreessen Horowitz, all of whom have equity in the most valuable start-ups, is driving a massive wedge between "the venture-capital industry’s haves and have-nots."

LinkedIn's IPO, for example, has already yielded $2 billion in paper profits for backers like Sequoia and Greylock. Groupon hasn't gone public yet, but its top investors like Accel and New Enterprise could end up owning a $5 billion stake. These are accredited private investors we're talking about, so it's not as though the VC-equivalent of the top one percent is making paupers of their competitors. But it is creating vastly disproportionate access to deal flow and capital.

David Schwartz, co-chair of the emerging companies and venture-capital practice at Michelman & Robinson in New York tells Bloomberg:

“The rich are getting richer, and they’re finding the better products and better companies at better valuations. It’s making it very complicated for second-tier funds.”

The drought of IPOs through over the past few years lowered the number of active VC firms. But although the NVCA says fundraising has jumped 76 percent (year-over-year) in the first quarter to $7.1 billion, it might not get funneled toward the recession's "walking dead": firms that are only working with their existing portfolio and lacking cash to make new investments.

Nonetheless, their loss might clear the brush for newer firms like Mike Maple's Floodgate Fund and Boulder's Foundry Group, which was Zynga's first venture investor. These younger firms have the benefit of being on top of newer trends like mobile apps and social networking, entrepreneur Eric Ries tells Bloomberg. Plus, we imagine, they don't have the stench of dashed dreams from the last bubble.