2008, Customer Development, Programming and Revenue

Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

Customer Development

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer

Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Their idea is that consumers will want a subscription service for short form entertainment (10-minute programs) for mobile rather than full length movies. Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits.

Lean

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO

Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Less is more.

Lean

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 The three drivers of growth for your business model. Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. Choose one. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick

Lessons Learned: SEM on five dollars a day

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money. SEM is a simple idea.

SEM

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

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.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Lessons Learned on Mashable today

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean

Lessons Learned: The lean startup comes to Stanford

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 28, 2008 The lean startup comes to Stanford Im going to be talking about lean startups (and the IMVU case in particular) three times in the next two weeks at Stanford. September 28, 2008 6:13 PM Eric said. September 28, 2008 7:26 PM Jeff Hammerbacher said. Can I go to one of them?

Lean

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business.

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets. Amazon PostRank

Hockey Stick

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean

Lessons Learned: Continuous deployment and continuous learning

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. Continuous learning -> Continuous feedback!

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean

It's a startup, not a spreadsheet

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup

Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review

Why vanity metrics are dangerous

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. It turned out that, during the course of the decline, one customer segment was losing customers while another was gaining customers. The company struggled mightily with how to explain this bad news to their board.

Metrics

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: Q&A with an actual reader

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 29, 2008 Q&A with an actual reader One of my favorite things about having a blog is the feedback I get in comments and by email. Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Lessons Learned: Cash is not king

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late. Amazon PostRank

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean

The Steve Jobs method

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Not even if its generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. Not everything has to follow lean startup and customer development principles, and I write that as a devoted practitioner of both. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review

Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first? For more on how to figure out which question applies in which context, see Business ecology and the four customer currencies.) And therein lies the most common source of confusion about whether startups should listen to customers.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design

Why Continuous Deployment?

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean

Lessons Learned: Refactoring yourself out of business

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

John Doerr's 10 lean startup tips

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, October 30, 2008 John Doerrs 10 lean startup tips I just saw video of John Doerrs talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn&# roundtable event. Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Voluntary salary reduction program.

Lean

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC

Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. What is the right revenue model? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution

Lessons Learned: Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to.

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. Pick a target number of customers to take the survey every day. Nice post.

.Net

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean

Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

There are huge classes of bugs that "work as designed" but cause catastrophic changes in customer behavior. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. Most QA teams are organized around finding reproduction paths for bugs that affect customers. Better handling of intermittent bugs.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics

Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. That is customer development. “But it never happened.&# [Alas, customers dont know what they want!

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment

Lessons Learned: Three freemium strategies

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

The cardinal sin of community management

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much. We couldn’t have been more wrong. No gain without pain.

Community

Community Management Lean Software Review

Lean Startup webcast post-game

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

One of my personal heroes, Kent Beck , the creator of Extreme Programming and a truly wonderful writer was logged in and twittering, too. I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" "unknown problem" was an eye opener for me.

Lean

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment

10 years of entrepreneurship

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Maybe, but the thought never even entered our minds. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.

San Francisco

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC

Marketing Metrics 101 for B2B Startups

www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

A good set of metrics will allow me to predict that if I spend $1 on a certain marketing tactic, I’m likely to get $X of revenue in Y days. Closed revenue – the actual value of the deal after it has closed. I do this by program/campaign so I can compare email campaigns to pure advertising (for example).

B2B

B2B Metrics Marketing Startup

StartUpRoar

Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Trending Sources

Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Lessons Learned: SEM on five dollars a day

Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Lessons Learned on Mashable today

Lessons Learned: The lean startup comes to Stanford

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business.

Lessons Learned: Continuous deployment and continuous learning

It's a startup, not a spreadsheet

Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Why vanity metrics are dangerous

Lessons Learned: Q&A with an actual reader

Lessons Learned: Cash is not king

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

The Steve Jobs method

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Why Continuous Deployment?

Lessons Learned: Refactoring yourself out of business

John Doerr's 10 lean startup tips

Marching through quicksand

Lessons Learned: Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to.

Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications

Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium

Lessons Learned: Three freemium strategies

The cardinal sin of community management

Lean Startup webcast post-game

10 years of entrepreneurship

Marketing Metrics 101 for B2B Startups

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