I’m use the term “false positive” in a business sense, to describe when someone or something is attributed to being successful, usually wildly successful, at making a business profitable when in actuality it had little or nothing to do with it. It’s even worse then ignoring the failures when the going is good, this is actually attributing success to something that had nothing to do with it. Eric Ries captures it more eloquently in his post The lean startup comes to Stanford.
In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. Those stories would be retold and repeated, and eventually achieved mythological status as “facts” that guided future action. But making decisions on the basis of myths is dangerous territory.
Now that I’m at a start-up, one competing with Eric’s IMVU interestingly enough, I am more weary of false positives than ever. Start-ups are at the cutting edge of trying to define user needs and wants, swinging this way and that to try and discover the one thing that will click with users. For us in the virtual worlds industry, we’re all searching for the killer app. Which in a way pits Eric and I against each other to see who can sift through the false positives quicker. Because start-ups aren’t so much about building but about understanding users – people. You build to learn.
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
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