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. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants.

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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.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

An edited version of this article previously appeared in the Boston Consulting Group’s strategy think tank website. This 100+-year-old company has seven major product divisions, each with hundreds of products. I spent last week at a global Fortune 50 company offsite watching them grapple with disruption.

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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. In the article, Andrew describes growth hackers as a cross between marketers and coders. An Epic List of 100 Growth Hacks for Startups by Search Engine Journal. Undeniably.

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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 work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. Focus on launching.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

I really enjoyed this article, my first time reading any of your stuff. Also SJ's obsession with better taste (positively) contributes to the overall product development process. Beyond Apple, we can find examples of the Steve Jobs character at Toyota, in the form of the Chief Engineer. Will start to pay attention.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. The more work youve sunk into a product or vision, the harder it is to let it go. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. Thats why its so essential to have a co-equal problem team. Context matters.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

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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.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

for Harvard Business Review) Im excited to have just published the first of several articles on entrepreneurship for the Harvard Business Review online. Unlike previous cross-posting Ive done for blogs, where a lot of the discussion happens here, Id like to ask you to take a minute and click through to read the full article.

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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. Thanks for writing this article.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Hire a CTO or VP Engineering.

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Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 8, 2008 Continuous integration step-by-step Lets start with the basics: Martin Fowlers original article lays out the mechanics of how to set up a CI server and the essential rules to follow while doing it. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , Test-driven development 3comments: Chris said.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. No engineering team. Many people asked some variation of the question: "sure, learning sounds good. Expo, never fear.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Good article, this is exactly the reason Im still primarily a PHP developer rather than Ruby or Python. Nice article. very good article!

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PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day. We always assigned them a "code mentor" from the ranks of the more established engineers. We had them imagine the most risky thing they could possibly do - pushing code to production too soon - and then do it.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

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. Mike Arrington is a capitalist.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

Ive quoted from the article extensively below, but I hope youll take a moment and read the whole thing. Ive quoted from the article extensively below, but I hope youll take a moment and read the whole thing. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

What led you to become a subscriber, versus just reading an article and leaving like everybody else? (or, Labels: listening to customers 19comments: Ben said. In order to convince me, Id to see another link to an article here somewhere that I enjoyed. Read some articles, liked what I saw. How did you hear about it?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

The core of the article is my first attempt to articulate the key metrics (in graph form) that I believe demonstrate customer value. When startups ask me what to measure, I always come back to these three as a starting point: Revenue per customer. You can read the article to find out why. Thanks for the article.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. Since we hadnt shown him much in the way of progress recently, we actually brought in the article to show off. Great article. excellent article although it breaks the whole concept of Launch now worry later. what happens when newspapers call you for an article?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

One hundred frustrated engineers were reporting to one overwhelmed senior executive. Each of Salesforce''s software teams was expected to complete a new software demo every 30 days, but every engineer was free to move to a new team without getting permission, which encouraged leaders to treat people well. What’s customer development?)

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Who better to answer than the company's engineering lead. The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. This post is an accusation. call to arms. What went wrong?

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. link] Hazem Awad An excellent and very practical article. Thanks for the time and energy to write the article. Sorry, folks. Thanks a lot Seth.

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

In a forthcoming article Ive written advocating for the Startup Visa , I wrote this: Like other industries – from publishing to automobiles – entrepreneurship is in the process of being disrupted by globalization. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. An excellent article and responses. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 20, 2010

Although the article is a bit me-centric, I think they did a good job capturing the fact that this is more than just the bloggers and writers, but represents a shift in thinking among entrepreneurs all over the world. The article includes comments from Kevin Dewalt and Drew Houston. Even Marc Andreessen weighs in.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. That’s causing the Product Owner and team to spend more time with each other reviewing the results of experiments, which is allowing them to learn and iterate much faster. They’ve learned to see this waste.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Their recent article suggests that startups led by women are actually more successful, on average, than those led by men. Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. In fact, recent research suggests just the opposite.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

If you don’t know how to define your target market, read Tim Berry’s article on how to do it, or read this article that explains what target marketing is and how to use it to your advantage. Another great way to test your idea is to create a minimum viable product, or MVP. Keep core development in-house.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. Jesse - I dont think youre responding to what I am saying, or to the original article or slides.

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