Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

for Harvard Business Review) Over at Harvard Business Review, Ive been building up a series designed to introduce the Lean Startup methodology to a business-focused audience. This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Labels: product development Speed up or slow down?

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. As we were out looking for our Series B round, our company had gotten the attention of “name of big VC firm here” who wanted a play in enterprise software.

Silicon Valley 253

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

It became harder and harder to separate how the software is built from how the software is structured. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? If not, whos going to insist we switch to free and open source software? I dont think so.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Graduation day with classmate Joseph Helton (right), killed in action in Iraq in 2009. We were modernizing datacenters, buying vulnerability-scanning software, and adding intrusion detection appliances – all things typical of anyone running an enterprise-scale network. Air Force Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Teaching'

Lean 268

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 15, 2009 Why Continuous Deployment? Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

San Francisco 161

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. 2009 – Back to The Future The bad news is that since the bubble most VC firms haven’t made a profit. So what’s left?

Silicon Valley 235

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Embrace technical debt Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. But there is more to technical debt than just the interest payments that come due. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. Remember Hamlet?

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. And we made sure that instead of some artificial numbers, the benchmarks truly measured performance on these four key applications our customers told us were important.

Silicon Valley 127

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Each specialist takes up his part of the spec (UI, middleware, backend) and cranks out code. So the product manager winds up actually having to use the software, by hand, updating the spec and helping create a new test plan. In exchange, the team agrees to show each piece of working code to the product manager for his approval.

San Francisco 158

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. Three concepts I found particularly helpful: Process = discipline.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And the odds in your favor are even higher, as most of your peers wouldn’t even get into the game due to some unspoken belief that in a meritocracy, good things will come to those who wait. Reply | SocialStartups.com , on July 27, 2009 at 9:55 am Said: [.] You’ve reinforced my own personal beliefs.

Silicon Valley 120

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, February 22, 2009 Please teach kids programming, Mr. President Of course, what I really mean is: let them teach themselves. See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding?

Programming 143

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. When I first encountered customer development , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs. Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. We all owe him our thanks for persevering.

San Francisco 133

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 12, 2012

Since 2009 when they started using the Chatter platform, attendance at Dreamforce has grown about 50 percent per year — except this year, when it nearly doubled from the previous year. A new firm, Zuberance, makes it easy and enjoyable for a company’s loyal customers to advocate for it on their social media platform of choice.

Social Media 164

Social Media Media Marketing Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, May 14, 2009 The Lean Startup Workshop - now an OReilly Master Class My rate of posting has been much lower lately, and this is mostly due to preparations for the upcoming Lean Startup Workshop on May 29. May 14, 2009 4:53 AM James Spittal said. May 14, 2009 5:23 AM David said.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. And like feedback on a simple microphone sound system, this would occasionally boil over into screeching.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, August 26, 2009 Building a new startup hub Last week, I had a unique opportunity to spend some time in Boulder at the behest of TechStars. And do your customer development. These quotes are, as is my custom, straight from twitter. August 28, 2009 1:15 PM Derek Scruggs said.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 24, 2009 Marching through quicksand I have been spending a lot of time lately talking to people in various media companies: editors and agents, executives, journalists, producers and directors. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This required convincing software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. – was his job.

Silicon Valley 331

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. They share a common language, culture, and coding style.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? Most startups fail.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, March 4, 2009 Lo, my 2295 subscribers, who are you? Ive previously written about the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers , and how to get started with customer segmentation. it seemed time to return to the subject of investigating who my customers are.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? And since the card was useless without any application software, what other software products did they use on it? What reviews did they trust? Were our products a small part of their life or large? What magazines did they read? Did they attend trade shows?

Silicon Valley 210

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. It happens whenever youre writing code on your own machine, or you have a team working on a branch. It also happens whenever you have code that is checked-in, but not yet deployed anywhere.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. Another great article is from Joel on Software called Duct Tape Programmer.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuous deployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. Our code pushes take another six minutes. That’s 6 deploys an hour.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. Now he wanted to go off start his own company.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? What is your advice to someone who has financial strain due to a startup? Reply Mark MacLeod , on June 15, 2009 at 9:21 am Said: Thanks for sharing this Steve.

Entrepreneur 291

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 2, 2009 How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis In the lean startup workshops , we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written?

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. scott Reply Daily Links #54 | CloudKnow , on April 20, 2009 at 11:42 pm Said: [.] Reply Jamie Varon - techVenture , on April 23, 2009 at 3:05 pm Said: Great post! Very informative.

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