Global trends are showing that new investments and innovations are crucial for the employment growth. Following the global trends, Croatia is opening a lot of incubators for development and support of startup companies. Nonetheless, the fact is that a lot of this companies still collapse has raised the question whether there's a way to successfully react to all challenges and thrive at the same time. The Lean startup method represents a way that changes traditional thinking and rather puts a point on the importance of achieving connection between the problem and the solution, and top of all that, communicating with clients. This method makes no place for uncertain assumptions or intuition, instead, every step is reviewed and tested. The goal of this qualitative research is to determine the issue of lean startup method in practice and its advantages and disadvantages, and finally to answer whether the lean startup method is the key to creating a successful startup. Furthermore, this research will present experiences from different startup founders in their early stage development of ideas. The first phase of research uses secondary data, and the second phase approached startup companies with an attempt of carrying out structured interviews on a convenience sample. The results of research show that the practical use of lean method is more demanding than the traditional methods, but proper implementation of the method brings a lot of advantages for the company: development of customer network, employee development, quality built into the product, reducing unnecessary activities, reducing costs, etc.