Today is Election Day, so I thought it would be fun to explain how political campaigns are just like Web startups. But first, a PSA:

DEMOCRACY TAKES EFFORT. GO VOTE.

Since I started WatchParty earlier this year I've had to learn a lot about how to take an idea and turn it into a business. Like everything else, there are a lot of different theories about the best way to do that. The theory that is most applicable to WatchParty is the theory of the Lean Startup espoused by very smart people like Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and Ash Maurya (among many others). For those of you who don't know, the basic idea behind Lean Startups is this:

A Lean Startup takes ideas and builds a minimally viable product, then measures the success of that product by looking at discreet data, from which it learns more about its customers and business model, producing valuable ideas it uses to build a more advanced product, which it measures, and so on and so forth. While this model doesn't work for every kind of startup business (e.g. biotech), it is extremely successful for Web businesses like WatchParty. The idea is to iterate like mad to find a product/service people love before you run out of money.

Last week I attended a Bootstrap Maryland event where I was fortunate enough to hear Jared Goralnick, Paul Singh, Tawheed Kader, Hooman Radfar, and Aaron Batalion talk about pivoting to a product or service that works. When I left the event I felt a bit down, because knowing when and how to pivot is no easy task, and being new to startups I wondered whether I have what it takes to pull it off.

And then I started thinking about the 20+ years I spent running political campaigns. 

I realized that I have been running Lean Startups for 20 years, because political campaigns are Lean Startups. They start with a candidate (or proposition), and build a message. Usually, in order to get on the ballot, they have to gather a certain number of signatures on a petition. The number of signatures the campaign receives, plus the number of volunteers who were willing to collect signatures, plus the money it costs to gather the signatures, all constitutes data from which the campaign learns. Then they modify the message, raise more money and recruit volunteers, put out product in the form of flyers, signs and ads, measure the results of their efforts and gather data through processes like polls. Then they start the process all over again.

In fact, I'd argue that political campaigns must be Lean or they cannot win. The worst example I ever saw of a campaign failing to be Lean was a statewide race in California in the 1990s. I joined the campaign about five months before the election, and my candidate was about 15 points ahead in the polls. At that point our campaign and the opponent's campaign adopted completely different strategies. They went Lean, and we went Big. Guess who won?

We were up in the polls, had plenty of money, and seemed unbeatable. The folks at the top decided that the best approach was to use that advantage to inundate the market (voters) and create the impression that the opposition simply couldn't compete. So they produced a booklet explaining our candidate's position on all the big issues and delivered it to every registered voter in the state.

Our opponent's campaign, on the other hand, focused on understanding why their supporters were supporters. They picked the positions they thought would scale best, and made those the focus of the campaign. They gained additional supporters, focused on understanding what messages were working with the new supporters, and pivoting to gain even more supporters. We focused on writing, publishing and distributing a comprehensive position paper. Things started to go badly.

While they iterated and pivoted, we thought bigger and bigger. We believed that when every voter in the state saw how awesome our candidate was on all these issues, we would be guaranteed to win. We were wrong. When voters started receiving the issue book, they started turning against us in droves. How could this happen?

The answer is simple. They focused on what voters (customers) wanted the candidate (the company) to do. We focused on what the candidate (the company) wanted to do. Voters like some of what we had in our book, but either didn't like or didn't care about most of what was in there. Given the choice between a candidate who seemed to care about what they thought was important and a candidate who seemed to want to be everything to everybody, voters chose the former. And we lost.

That's the way it goes in business, too. A Lean Startup, like a campaign, has to figure out what the people really want (not what it thinks the people want or should have, or even sometimes what the people think they want, but what the people truly want) and give that to them before time and/or money run out. Today, in almost every race, the leanest campaign will win.

So, while I've never run an entrepreneurial Lean Startup before, I think I have more experience with running lean that a lot of other folks. And I think WatchParty will succeed as a result.

SUPPORT A LEAN STARTUP. GO VOTE.

UPDATE: Really nice article in yesterday's WSJ about others who, like me, have ditched politics for entrepreneurship.