Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, November 4, 2008 Principles of Lean Startups, presentation for Maples Investments Image via Wikipedia Steve Blank and I had the opportunity to create a presentation about lean startups for Maples Investments. Customer development. How dare you! =) November 4, 2008 10:58 PM IMVU said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. October 6, 2008 12:16 AM Vincent van Wylick said. October 6, 2008 12:17 AM r& said. Nice write-up. Interesting read.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Venture Capitalists on your board developed the expertise to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits. So what’s left?

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 230

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 29, 2008 The ABCDEFs of conducting a technical interview I am incredibly proud of the people I have hired over the course of my career. Some questions have a natural escalation path (like working through the standard operations on a linked-list) and others require some more creativity.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. We try to take advantage of that phenomenon twice if possible.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 6, 2008 Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile I thought Id share an interesting post from someone with a decidedly anti-agile point of view. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. October 20, 2008 9:34 PM Nivi said. October 20, 2008 10:36 PM Nathan said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 8, 2008 Continuous integration step-by-step Lets start with the basics: Martin Fowlers original article lays out the mechanics of how to set up a CI server and the essential rules to follow while doing it. December 10, 2008 6:37 AM Anonymoussaid. March 26, 2010 8:42 AM ankur aggarwal said.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. November 26, 2008 9:23 AM Andrew Meyer said. Nice post.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part two In part one , I talked about four different kinds of work that every company has to do: innovation/R&D, strategy, growth, and maintenance/scalability. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. percent utilization in the precourse surveys. What will this do?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

That’s because many of our reports feed us vanity metrics: numbers that make us look good but don’t really help make decisions. Yet even among those who have access to good actionable metrics, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that prevents taking maximum advantage of data. Too much of this data is non- actionable.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, December 6, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three Those startups that manage to build a product people want have to deal with the consequences of that success. Having early customers means balancing the needs of your existing customers with the desire to find new ones.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Small batches reduce overhead.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

In management jobs related to operations – that is, the people tasked with actually making and distributing physical products – this kind of thinking is now considered ludicrous, thanks to a century of progress. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, November 5, 2008 Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campaign trail I had the privilege of volunteering for the Obama campaign in swing states for a few weekends during the final push towards victory. November 6, 2008 7:46 AM spanky said. November 6, 2008 9:55 AM Jim said.

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Campaign San Francisco Lean Agile 84

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

This is another sub-optimization caused by incentivizing the wrong metric. For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? This is a variant of the time-quality-money fallacy , and it is not necessarily true.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuous deployment. Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

You can train your operations or customer service staff on how it works - all live in the production environment. Monitoring of real-world metrics. In order to make continuous deployment work, teams have to get good at automated monitoring and reacting to business and customer-centric metrics, not just technical metrics.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. We still struggle to create Firm software that is defect-free, and it still requires customer insight (and maybe some customer development) to discover what will Delight.

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

The idea was that these two people would operate as a unit, with the mentors job performance during this period evaluated by the performance of the new person. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 13, 2010 The Superbowl ad test I am a firm believer in the danger of vanity metrics , numbers that give the illusion of progress but often mask the true relationship between cause and effect. Vanity metrics are generally bigger. Vanity metrics. The solution? Is that really news?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

A given customer would have an entity URL that looked like this: customer://1234 Somewhere in your API, you have a way to access data about a given customer. Im not talking about high-level abstractions (like an object-oriented view of a customers data). Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Lean vs. debt In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it. The results were that the Israeli system became operational 10 years ago, while the THAAD project is starting to finally be deployed this year after 10 years of delay. pay 'interest'). Eric, great post.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. ► May (3) Thank you Philosophy Helps Start-Ups Move Faster (WSJ on the.

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Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, October 21, 2008 Lean startups vs lean companies Venture Hacks has a great article today on lean startups. By the standard of "customer value," most innovation-seeking experiments are waste. Lean startups operate by a different standard. October 21, 2008 11:27 PM David said.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&# I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Heres a representative view from an actual Amazon customer review : We all know how to operate our own entertainment center, but what happens when you have to explain it to your babysitter, mother-in-law, or your wife? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, November 5, 2008 Getting educated about advertising, agencies, and media buyers I see lots of startups whose business plans revolve around selling high-value ad space to brand advertisers. You also need to know what each one cares about, which metrics they look at (or studiously ignore).

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, November 19, 2008 Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you? When I first wrote about the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers , I only had 5 subscribers. November 19, 2008 1:48 PM Will Pate said. November 19, 2008 5:57 PM McElroy Flavelle said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 23, 2009

Customers say,&# Give me feature X,&# “Give me feature Y,&# and sometimes you do what they want, maybe sometimes you’re going to do what you want, and then they get mad at you. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

But I think debates about which language, which operating system, even which editor (emacs, vim, Visual Studio) can go on forever. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? However, it made me remember that Im tired of technology arguments.

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