Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Enable Google Analytics tracking.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

The disadvantage is that its methodology was based on the old waterfall model of product development and not the agile and lean methods that startups use today. It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. The Business Plan is Dead.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

ConversionXL

JANUARY 31, 2014

What are you using our product for? note: If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use customer development questions for your page to resonate with future traffic). These questions help you uncover trends within your market and tell you things analytics alone can not. Step 1 – Set Up Actionable Analytics.

Analytics 134

Analytics Video Matching Conversion 134

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Use analytics tools to gather information and monitor the landscape you’re about to enter. This will not only enhance productivity but also help retain top talent. It’s not just about a logo or a tagline; it’s the experience you promise your customers. Don’t underestimate the power of data.

Intellectual Property 132

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 132

Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

This thought was in my mind as I was reading Lean Analytics a new book by my friend Alistair Croll and his collaborator Benjamin Yoskovitz. In this post, we’ll look at each of the four steps in the Lean Analytics Cycle in more detail. That’s because they require you to have a deep understanding of your customers. But they are.

Metrics 156

Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 156

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 19, 2017

Go ahead to include how-to-videos on the website that demonstrate proper use of products. Any issues with products should be responded to in less than a week. Also, provide a physical location where the products can be found. Most people would prefer to view a product physically prior to an online purchase.

Software Review 114

Software Review Technical Review Retention Channel 114

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2009

It’s a useful read to explore and challenge analytical arguments and mind-sets. BTW, I don’t know to be hopeful or concerned that that this is the state of the art of analytical thinking at this agency.

Analytics 121

Analytics Silicon Valley Customer RSS 121

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

However, about 5% of the VCs in our database, mostly younger ones, are trying to build a competitive advantage by crawling large amounts of publicly available data and building analytical functions to flag companies with accelerating traction to them. ” Historically, investing was a manual, artisan process. Two Sigma Ventures.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 30, 2014

Understand Your Existing Referral Analytics Before Starting A Referral Program. If I asked you what percentage of your customers came because an existing customer referred them, would you know the answer? Why Are They Referring New Customers Completely Unprompted? Once you know who, you need to find out why.

Programming 107

Programming Marketing Analytics Portfolio 107

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. His teenage daughter has Type 1 diabetes.

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Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

VC Cafe

AUGUST 16, 2013

This post covers how to smart start your startup and maximize the chances of achieving product-market fit. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

SEM 150

SEM Startup Lean Customer Development 150

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

For example, one of the critical business model hypotheses they could test locally is Product/Market fit – the connection between their Value Proposition (what product or service they were building) and the Customer Segment (who they were building it for.). while building their products in China. Trip 2 to the U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Dakin Sloss , co-founder of Tachyus , which offers predictive analytics and quantitative optimization for the petroleum industry. Ajeet Singh , co-founder of ThoughtSpot , provider of search-driven analytics. Ajeet learned the ropes of enterprise startups at Aster Data Systems , where he was Senior Director of Product Management.

Cofounder 274

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 274

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Dakin Sloss , co-founder of Tachyus , which offers predictive analytics and quantitative optimization for the petroleum industry. Ajeet Singh , co-founder of ThoughtSpot , provider of search-driven analytics. Ajeet learned the ropes of enterprise startups at Aster Data Systems , where he was Senior Director of Product Management.

Cofounder 274

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 274

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 11, 2011

To give a little context, I asked two of the other judges - Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits (co-authors of the excellent Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development ) - to add a bit of commentary. Brant : Two things elevated Snappschool: 1) MVP was a functioning product -- as long as you searched for the correct subject!

New York City 161

New York City New York Lean SMS 161

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. Customer Development.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Was the company attempting to introduce faster and better products to an existing market? No, not really.

Silicon Valley 141

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 2, 2020

Some bits and pieces could be found in Google Analytics, while other data was stored in BigQuery and ProfitWell. The stage in which your customers become aware of your product or service. The stage in which potential customers are further exposed to your marketing and branding. Image source ). Pay for it.

Churn Rate 78

Churn Rate Analytics Retention SQL 78

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 19, 2013

Testing on sites with little traffic will also take a long time to collect statistically, valid sample sizes of data in your Google Analytics (and other tools, like mouse tracking stuff). You can configure event tracking for Google Analytics, but it won’t provide the level of insight that user session replay videos do.

Conversion 124

Conversion Framework Technical Review Analytics 124

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? They also diagnostic products, test kits, ultrasound products, x-ray machines and medical lasers. Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Science and Industrial Policy Teaching'

Startup 294

Startup Lean Venture Capital IPO 294

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

——— Yuri, one of my ex students started a big-data analytics company last year. He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. We’re building the wrong product!”

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. Even PhD analytics eggheads. Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. Highly trained salespeople.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

SneakerLabs’ first product was a Java-based chat server and client. Since I had good connections with the University, we got a lot of feedback on how the product could be improved to meet their needs. We listened to their feedback and started adding features to the product accordingly. The product worked. Not so fast.

Revenue 72

Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

He had an idea for a new class of enterprise software insight-as-a-service based on big data web analytics as a Cloud/SaaS (Software As a Service) application. Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. It was a “gotta use it, don’t take it away, we’ll have to buy it” product.

Customer Development 330

Customer Development Cofounder Later Stage Software 330

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

It’s common, perhaps the norm, for startups to pivot like that—to discover that a product is catching on in unintended ways worth pursuing. With 21 employees today, kaChing is devoted to recruiting professional managers and finding product/market fit , first for money managers, then for consumers.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Others emphasize how to build a product. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. Therefore we developed a class to teach students how to think about all the parts of building a business, not just the product.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2012

Few of the Principal Investigators or Entrepreneurial Leads had startup experience, and few of the mentors were familiar with Business Model design or Customer Development. 2) Get the teams out of the building to test their hypotheses with prospective customers. 98% felt that they had found “product/market fit”.

Lean 248

Lean Incubator Business Model Georgia 248

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. It’s 2010 and that idea has not graduated to mainstream yet. By doing the job. Where is it?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. We had just iterated the product and refined the minimum feature set. Your customers teach you which features actually matter by whether they will buy.

San Francisco 228

San Francisco Database Advisory Board Silicon Valley 228

The Startup Toolkit

DECEMBER 12, 2012

The typical startup spends little money, focuses on product, and tries to build traction. Once we think of a product, we need to back up and look at the questions behind it. And once we have the questions in mind, we can usually find cheaper and easier ways to answer them than building the entire product. That is not too bad!

Lean 54

Lean Startup Metrics Retention 54

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 8, 2009 Datablindness Most of us are swimming in a sea of data about our products, companies, and teams. For example, a recent event I held started with a customer validation exercise (actually, this example is fictionalized for clarity). Too much of this data is non- actionable.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

At Facebook we never did testing or looked at analytics. Usability testing is great for coming up with ideas about what to change in your product, but dont forget to split-test those ideas to make sure they work, too. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

First, SlideShare is a fantastic product (that I use on a regular basis) and an impressive company example of Lean Startup practices in action. 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.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

There is a wealth of resources that are unique to this town and a vibrant community of hackers, product designers, business people, and investors at various stages in their career. Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Great for recent grads or career switchers.

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Ruby 71

Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

Minimal viable products are being demo’d to sponsors and sponsors are reacting to what the teams are learning. In companies this would be product line extensions, more efficient supply chain, new distribution channels. Their Minimum Viable Product can be seen on slides 12-16 using this illegal fishing data.

San Diego 142

San Diego Metrics Silicon Valley Indonesia 142

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2016

While finding product-market fit is important, getting the rest of the business model right is the difference between and a great demo and a great business. Additionally, he is the co-founder of ConnectYard , a social analytics platform for e-learning platforms. That helped us develop a product. .

Cofounder 120

Cofounder DC Entrepreneur Silicon Valley 120