Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Market Risk vs. Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention.

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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? Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. SEM is a simple idea.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

The last quarter of the 19 th century, what Perez calls the Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering, saw the growth of America’s first national corporations in railroads, steel, telegraph, meatpacking, and industrial equipment. Each institutional adjustment also changed how companies innovated and built new products.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Venture Capital United States Technical Review 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Most executives, especially in startups, dont have the courage to hold their teams to a high standard for new products or features. 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. Good taste and common sense goes a long way.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars - Steve Blank , November 24, 2010 When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars. but: Something is Still Missing.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Continuous deployment is another such technique, one with a unique power to change development team dynamics for the better. One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production. In traditional batch-and-queue development, these two concepts are linked. Why does it work?

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, April 7, 2010 Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem) Lean startups don’t optimize. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. Get me a new one&# was closer.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

A year goes by, you miss your revenue plan, and you’ve burned through your first VP of Sales. Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. What happened?

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Still, theyre not really hitting it out of the park, because their product isnt growing new users as fast as theyd like, and they arent making any money from the current users. I was told they werent sure, because all of their engineers were currently busy refactoring. In other words, it is dreaded legacy code. Great post, Eric.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. Here’s what the product development diagram looks like from a sales perspective.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors. Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 184

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. This development philosophy created a culture around rapid prototyping of features, followed by testing them against large numbers of actual customers. It would be hard to argue against this product development strategy, in general.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 7, 2022

Since I began in 2010, there have been ups and downs, but I wouldn't have it any other way. By establishing a company dedicated to inventive and speedy product development, I am able to use cutting-edge technologies and consistently innovate faster than competitors. Historically, lighting equipment advanced at a glacial pace.

Entrepreneur 112

Entrepreneur Technical Review Software Review Non-Compete 112

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. January 6, 2010 12:49 AM Anonymoussaid. This is a common mistake.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. 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.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, January 15, 2010 Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business Review) The next part in the series I am writing for Harvard Business Review is online. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Read the rest here.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. Thats good for QA and for engineers. Faster (and better) feedback.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

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. I am chugging along.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

You can argue that the DNA created by Microsoft's over emphasis on distribution (Steve) and development (Bill), has ultimately cost it $50bn or more in lost revenue, market share and market capitalization. Developers have worn the crown for the last 30 or more years in the technology industry - rightly.

Technical Review 51

Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

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.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

He , Srikanth Narayan , Ben Werdmuller von Elgg , Jo Vi Ko , Justin Lee , Giovanni Tardini , David de Weerdt , Vineet Thanedar , Ryan Brideau , Jonathan Meiri , Rob Weedn , Krzysztof Kowalczyk , Greg Pilling , Kevin Leland , Parham Michael Ossareh , Dan Loewenherz , Mary Specht , Engin Erdo?an Yishan Wong • Nov 8, 2010 lol.if

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

The entrepreneurship progarms of the business, engineering, and undergraduate schools are all tackling the subject this semester, and Im honored to be part of it. hitchens - theyre not open to the public as far as I know, but if you have an affiliation with Stanford engineering, undergrad, or GSB, its possible you could come audit.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Now, Andrew’s excellent piece that I quoted from above correctly diagnoses two situations where consumer internet companies often get in trouble: They focus too much on short-term revenue, getting caught in a local maximum via constant optimization. And others require an early product prototype.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

2010 – Sean Ellis, who currently runs Qualaroo , coins the term “growth hacking” in his article, Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup. September 2013 – Ryan Holiday publishes Growth Hacker Marketing and urges people to build growth into the product itself so that it’s a self-sustaining, scalable growth machine.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

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. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? In other words, what is the minimum viable product ? Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that good?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Execution by Vertical Market As the class progressed, students asked how the activities/functions of a startup; (Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product Development, etc.) How does product development differ in communications hardware versus enterprise software, etc. would look in each of the verticals.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc. But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company. All the strategic thinking in the world won’t make up for a missed revenue plan. Sales was the Sharp End of the Stick, and Marketing was the Stick ?

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 126

mashable.com

MAY 24, 2011

May 23, 2011 by Christina Warren 20 Share on Tumblr email share Share on Tumblr email share The Mobile App Trends Series is supported by Sourcebits , a leading product developer for mobile platforms. Sourcebits offers design and development services for iOS, Android, Mobile and Web platforms. My 2 cents.

Mobile 90

Mobile Web Social Media Software Review 90

Growthink Blog

JANUARY 24, 2018

And with Warby’s 2017 “direct to consumer” eyeglass sales revenues of $250 million+, I am not alone. Whether your business sells a product or service, ask yourself how can your company look and perform better online? #8. driving 600% revenue growth and helping the company raise more than $24 million in growth capital.

Artificial Inteligence 48

Artificial Inteligence San Francisco Valuation Reputation 48

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Everyone from the receptionist to engineers is selling. Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121