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.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

SoCal CTO

MARCH 20, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

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Venture Capital Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles 150

SoCal CTO

MARCH 9, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

SoCal CTO

MARCH 20, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Search Engineer 150

SoCal CTO

MARCH 13, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles Internet 150

SoCal CTO

MARCH 1, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Networking Southern California Los Angeles 150

SoCal CTO

MARCH 12, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. This post is applicable to any kind of business. The company has just missed its quarterly revenue forecast.

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Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

SoCal CTO

MARCH 20, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

April 27, 2009 8:59 AM Anonymoussaid. Paring down products, target customers, business models etc takes courage, but it must be done to have any chance of success. Paring down products, target customers, business models etc takes courage, but it must be done to have any chance of success.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

SoCal CTO

MARCH 16, 2007

Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, June 5, 2009 It’s a startup, not a spreadsheet Some people, when they start to realize the power of using data to inform their decisions, become obsessed with optimization. And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

And the final lesson was that we were keeping score on our packaging with the wrong metrics – it wasn’t about awards, it was about sales in the retail channel. Reply Bill Allred , on May 1, 2009 at 10:46 am Said: This is a really common pitfall. We hadn’t taken the time to learn the basics of packaging ourselves.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

To win in business you need to follow this process: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act. We are far too enamored with data collection and reporting the standard metrics we love because others love them because someone else said they were nice so many years ago. That metric is tied to a KPI.

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Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 156

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

on May 26, 2009 at 6:18 am Said: [.] Reply Dmitriy , on May 26, 2009 at 6:54 pm Said: I would like to humbly suggest banning the term “vertical&# altogether. Reply steveblank11 , on May 26, 2009 at 7:57 pm Said: Dmitry, I think your comment makes my point. The next few posts will make this clear.

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SoCal CTO

MARCH 22, 2007

Open Source Business Models, speakers for Web 2.0 Mobile Internet Apple Facebook ► 2009 (32) ► December (3) Startup Software Developers Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Be. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec. event I did last fall.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Business Model I would like to propose that in addition to team, product, and market, there is actually a fourth, equally important, core element of startups, which is the need for a viable business model. However there is a lot of value in looking at these same metrics for all other businesses.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, January 28, 2009 Refactoring yourself out of business Let me start out by saying I am a big fan of refactoring , the ongoing process of changing code so that it performs the same behaviors but has more elegant structure. January 29, 2009 12:08 AM Mahesh said.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

ConversionXL

MAY 16, 2018

Know the difference between leading and lagging metrics. Revenue, downloads, and sign-ups are all examples of lagging indicators. While it’s always necessary to keep track of lagging indicators to evaluate ongoing performance, as marketers we want to understand what causes those metrics to move either up or down. Why do we test?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# The amount of traditional business modeling will vary.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Austin Startup

JULY 2, 2021

Chargify’s new BI tool has taken our speed-to-calculate and accuracy of MRR and financial metrics and reduced it down to a mere dashboard refresh with 100% accuracy,” said Jenny Leman, President of CareerPlug. Chargify Business Intelligence took this four to six hour weekly project and turned it into a 10-second refresh. and Canada.

San Antonio 67

San Antonio B2B Texas Ireland 67

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

“Dribbble is what I like to call a “boot up,” or “organic startup” – a company that lives and breathes on revenue. […] For us, getting cash flowing in sooner than later was critical to give us resources to respond to the site’s rapid growth. Figure out what your milestones are – customers, pageviews, revenue, etc. – Scale rapidly.

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ConversionXL

MARCH 19, 2020

The best drivers apply the brakes just ahead of the curve (they take out excess costs), turn hard toward the apex of the curve (identify the short list of projects that will form the next business model), and accelerate hard out of the curve (spend and hire before markets have rebounded). recession in 2009.”. Progressive.

Marketing 121

Marketing Campaign Non-Compete Lean 121

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.). In contrast, startups search for a business model. (Or to optimize this search. to optimize this search.

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 315

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2010

-Company grew by more than “400% each year” for past few years [assume growth metric = revenues]. Competition: Chegg (has raised $144 in debt and equity)—estimated by Steven Carpenter ( TechCrunch ) to be 10x more unique visitors than BookRenter (during peak book renting seasons) with nearly $140mm in revenues for 2010.

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Cracking the Code

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Getting through the downturn: a few thoughts for SaaS companies planning their 2009 budget. It is time to fix your key SaaS metrics: P&L: MRR = MRE: you control your destiny when your monthly revenue equals your monthly expenses Sales & Marketing: Your cost of capital doubled, so if a CAC ratio > 0.5

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Software Review Technical Review Valuation Portfolio 48

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 10, 2008

Be prepared to cross the desert - SaaS requires R&D and sales expense up front for a multi-year stream of revenue, so it demands enough investment capital to fund 4+ years of runway. Effectively measuring and understanding your CAC and CLTV metrics are key to future success. Great list! I particularly agree on points #2 and #4.

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Software Review North America Europe Metrics 48

Seeing Both Sides

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Conventional wisdom suggests that the most important metrics for a startup - such as unit economics, cost of acquisition, lifetime value, churn rates - typically get better with time. I hear this asserted frequently by entrepreneurs who confidently project their businesses with increasingly improving metrics as they scale into the future.

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Metrics Churn Rate Acquisition SEM 20

Cracking the Code

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

The Deutsche Bank report has a very interesting chart on the topic presenting the Free Cash Flow margins vs. the revenue growth four years post IPO for select software leaders: As you can see, with 20% Free Cash Flow margin and a 50% growth rate, Salesforce is well positioned in the pack! ► 2009. (9). Posted by Philippe Botteri.

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Ben's Blog

MAY 15, 2020

Finally, we’ll zoom out and assess the big picture: how various categories of company may be impacted long-term, how this crisis compares to 2008 (and what that means for early-stage founders), and the industries and business models that are now prime for growth. What are those metrics?

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Ben's Blog

AUGUST 17, 2020

OH in South Park, San Francisco (or on Zoom from Big Sky, Montana): “OMG, crazy – that firm just paid 100x revenue to invest in [insert hot startup here] – what could they be thinking?” A multiple is a company value divided by a metric. cash flows beyond that forecast period).

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Valuation Balance Sheet Cofounder Forecast 36

Ben's Blog

APRIL 28, 2010

First, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business just published an analysis of recent exits for high technology companies such as BlackBoard, BladeLogic, Concur, Danger, Liveperson, LogMeIn, and Netsuite. The transition would have been far easier if these executives running the companies had invented the old models.

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 78

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Designed for large businesses, the channels let a company share several types of documents, brand the channel with their own design elements, and then include display advertising, contest promotions, blog aggregation, social media integration and metrics reporting. That is the essence of proving the business in micro-scale.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 9, 2009 10 years of entrepreneurship I recently passed my ten-year anniversary of becoming an entrepreneur. We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. No business model, either. And Google?

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 16, 2006

It is true that the SaaS model faces some challenges like service reliability, data privacy, lower level of customization, integration with existing applications, vendor viability concerns. whereas traditional software companies of this size have a growth rate of less than 10% and revenue multiples of 2-2.5x. ► 2009. (9).

Software Review 48

Software Review Silicon Valley Technical Review Software 48

betashop.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

But, you can iterate and iterate on features, but you cannot iterate your way to a business model. I’ve seen too many businesses get stuck or fail because of their endless pursuit for the magic new feature that is going to help them gain traction. Jason is also an investor in and Board Member at RJ Metrics.

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Technical Review Technology Software Review Valuation 108

Professor VC

AUGUST 26, 2011

To that last one, there is certainly some truth as the standard time vs. revenue chart in most business plans looks like this: Im not teaching Entrepreneurial Finance this semester for the first time since Fall 2007. What are the key drivers and metrics? Is the model consistent with the business plan?

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Silicon Valley San Jose Hockey Stick Venture Capital 35