The lean startup's methodology has allowed thousands of founders to kill the project on time, and that's a good thing.

In my experience, now about half of the novice startups are still sawing the product, and only then they sell it. The remaining 50% follow the "correct" scheme: they make a loan, drive traffic, cut MVP — and make a decision based on this.

Only in 2025, this approach is slow and useless.

If you look at how startups have been launching in the United States for the last 3 years, you can see that founders often don't make referrals at all, don't nag MVPs, and don't even always make landing pages. Their approach is to write a couple of "viral" tweets about some problem or take down a few tictocs where the same pain is raised.

Then they look at what problem got knocked up, and shoot a sequel — an idea of how this problem can be solved. They make a simple website with a form, collect pre—registrations - and already for this ... no, they don't make an MVP, but go to the media to write: "such and such a startup flew in for so many views in a day, collected so many registrations."

And after being mentioned in the media and with confirmed interest, they are not looking for investments, but receive applications from foundations, studios and angels. Unfortunately, almost no one uses this approach in the CIS countries. I do not know of any studio or foundation that would work according to this scheme.

This is the future of the present, which has already arrived, but we ignore it. That's why we're losing.

What to do if you are a startup:

• 1. Take down 100 tictocs about your product, idea, or problem
• 2. Help "virality" through seeding
• 3. File a loan, gather people in a whait list
• 4. Write to the media (add more traffic to articles and news)
• 5. Receive incoming messages from investors, rather than sending pitches to nowhere.

That's how we'll win.