Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 A new version of the Joel Test (draft) (This article is a draft - your comments are especially welcome as I think through these issues. Everyone will be able to see how much of the product is done vs undone, and see the finish line either coming closer or receding into the distance.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

All of the incentives described in the article focus on making it easy and highly desirable to launch your product: [He] claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Googles internal ecosystem tends towards, and its because they pump so much energy into pointing people in that direction. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. 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. You can read the article to find out why. Thank you for this excellent article.

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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. 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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

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. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

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. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. This is a fantastic article.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

You can find out what it would take for them to adopt your product, and then follow up a week later and see if they did. Same with finding out what it would take to get them to recommend your product to a friend. What led you to become a subscriber, versus just reading an article and leaving like everybody else? (or,

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 19, 2009 Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a response) Inc Magazine has a great new piece up about the increasing use of the Minimum Viable Product by businesses (and not just startups). Like many companies, TPGTEX rolls out new products several times a year. Read the rest.

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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.

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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 5, 2009

Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Customers will get to consume the content they want, and support the producers of that content directly, rather than having to rely exclusively on intermediaries. The key tools of this new marketing are: targeting, filtering, and customer insight. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

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? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 11, 2010

for Harvard Business Review) In the latest article for my series in HBR, I discuss the problem of how to figure out how much process startups should have. Companies that insist on building a world-class infrastructure before shipping a product are doomed to achieve failure, because theyre starved of feedback for too long.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, October 21, 2008 Lean startups vs lean companies Venture Hacks has a great article today on lean startups. They quote extensively from two of our most important thinkers: Taiichi Ohno , creator of the Toyota Production System, and Kent Beck , creator of extreme programming. Go read it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 8, 2010 Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review) The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Establish baseline metrics by building the minimum viable product — the minimum required to measure the response of early adopters.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, September 3, 2009 Dont be the Ice Cream Glove I have a new post up today on OReilly Radar , called " Is your product an Ice Cream Glove or a Snuggie? " Ali G meets with business leaders and investors on Wall Street to learn how to create a new company around a new product idea.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. Andrew Chen recently did a great article on the economic model underlying freemium (it includes a detailed spreadsheet, too!). Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product? Pretty good deal, right?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? And once you can see waste, you can start to get it out of the way of your execution, and become a truly lean company. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

The customer is known, the product is known, and all we have to do is act. The customer is unknown, the product is unknown, and startups must be built to learn. Ive embedded the audio and slides below, but I recommend you c lick through to the Venture Hacks article if youre interested.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. As Steve writes in the Four Steps to the Epiphany , we always seek to find a market for the product as currently specified , not conduct a focus group to tell us what the spec should be.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Product launch) In todays world, there is no reason you have to do these two things at the same time. Do some Customer Development instead.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy&# or “our team moves too slow.&# The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com. Read the rest of the article here. Related articles by Zemanta The Promise of the Lean Startup (gigaom.com) Labels: lean startup 11comments: Ravi said. How about a fictive short story about few guys starting up a web product company on lean startup way?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

They were deploying to production with every commit before they had an automated build server or extensive automated test coverage in place. Initially, IMVU sought to quickly build a product that would prove out the soundness of their ideas and test the validity of their business model.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, heres my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesnt go out and ask customers what they want. He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right. We stopped production for five months.

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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. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Heres the working definition Ive started using: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. A: have them deploy code to production on their first day as an employee. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

You can even see the humiliating evidence of my smug incompetence in this absurd article from 1999.) All my products and ideas focus on early cash and a business model that works from the first day. Building a product that makes everybody's life better or something bad undone will drive you and will make work meaningful.

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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. Its the ultimate high-engagement product. You can learn more about the event here.

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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. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization.

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techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Tech Gadgets Mobile Enterprise GreenTech CrunchBase TechCrunch TV Disrupt SF More TechCrunch TV Beta Invites Crunchies Elevator Pitches Gillmor Gang Podcasts TechCrunch Europe TechCrunch Trends TechCrunch France TechCrunch Japan Whats Hot: Android Apple Facebook Google Microsoft Twitter Yahoo Zynga Subscribe: From Nothing To Something.

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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. The work product is a more realistic test, although it requires much more work on the part of the candidate. For more on this subject, take a look at The product managers lament.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Or take a recent TechCrunch article about a startup I wont name: “X billion messages sent since June 2009.&# These articles treat this as a huge number, and it is. It’s possible, but the article doesn’t say. Most of the article is about the features – new and old – of the product.

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