Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Without the revenue to match its expenses, the company is in now danger of running out of money.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 228

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?) Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

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

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. Interesting post. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2018

by Donald Chan, founder of IMPACT! Something powerful is shaking up the Manufacturing industry and it will change the way we work and produce products forever. According to Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, we are heading towards the fourth industrial revolution known as Industry 4.0.

Agile 100

Agile Analytics Cloud Bankruptcy 100

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And when we do make bets, they’re small bets on incremental products or acquisitions that simply add to the bottom line.”. Bob looked wistful, “Our founders built a company known for taking risks and moving fast. More agile competitors are starting to eat into our business. and how to price the product.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2017

With agile development cycles and uncertain monetization models, they live and die by data and experimentation. At the core is still the same balance of analysis and creativity – but you’ll get an advantage with experience in product development, marketing, and commercial strategy. “. Image Source.

Conversion 48

Conversion Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Analytics 48

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2011

In a startup founders and the board need to do exact the opposite of a large company – failures need to be shared, discussed and dissected to extract “lessons learned” so a new direction can be set. The VP of an operating division had run into trouble in product development; the product was late and getting later.

Forecast 265

Forecast Agile Revenue Founder 265

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

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. Expo SF (May.

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. Its likely that the new release will contain new bugs.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. We bought Steve’s book , started product development and began reaching out to customers ins search of our first earlyvangelists. This meant we had a hard time focusing our development. The founders do.

Customer Development 230

Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

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. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

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 ? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Is that a lot? Is that good?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

It means relying on your own savings and revenue to operate and expand.”. Eric Ries, the founder of theleanstartup.com , states that the lean startup philosophy“provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get the desired product to customers’ hands faster.”. Implement the “lean startup” philosophy.

Bootstrapping 85

Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

The agile software movement has made numerous contributions: continuous integration, which helps accelerate feedback about defects; story cards and kanban that reduce batch size; a daily stand-up that increases tempo. It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately. Expo SF (May.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 7, 2021

However, on a more granular graph, the introduction phase would be preceded by a product development stage. This stage is used to determine the viability of your product and confirm when it should go to market. You want to tell people that your forthcoming product is solving real problems.

Product 142

Product Marketing Software Review Social Media 142

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. Waterfall, Agile, Lean?

Vertical 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. They will realize that you have built a startup that’s agile, resilient and customer-centric.

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

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. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

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. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. And I can even imagine cases where it might burn more cash than a traditional startup. Lets see why. Something else?

Lean 250

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. For founders, I think it also has another big attraction: the ability to avoid a lot of " free vs paid " arguments. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Rashmi Sinha, co-founder and CEO of SlideShare , describes an early version of the analytics package that’s part of the Pro accounts the company announced today. If your company is using minimum viable product , you’ve probably said the same thing yourself. Eric] “The first user experience was actually terrible.&#

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. This was an effective approach to discovering a business by using a sequence of product prototypes to get early customer feedback. If a feature worked, wed keep it. But it worked.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? You got it.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. Not only was I not an expert on code review prior to building a code review tool, I wasn't even an expert on software development processes generally! The Dream Team.

Software Review 325

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). Combining agile development with customer developm.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

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. In fact, I remember sending him and his obscure-to-me co-founder (aka Reid Hoffman ) a bug report early-on, instead of taking them up on their offer of an in-person meeting. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

LIKED: Y startups fail, cont deployment vs waterfall vs agile, small batches & learn fr biz metrics #leanstartup As concise a summary as Ive ever seen. 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?" A: yes, absolutely.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) 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. Will start to pay attention.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations. I mean, here we are, paying them to be there, and they won’t use the product!

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. We just add up the revenue we've made in the past few months from Win98 users, and compare to the pain that Win98 has caused as identified in 5Ys. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

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. Minimum viable product is a tactic for mitigating risk.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156