Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Best of all, Nivi from Venture Hacks was recording, so these slides have synchronized audio, too. 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. Expo, never fear.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. They are closing orders.

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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. Check your assumptions, what went wrong? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. As the experiments progressed, day-in-day-out we werent making sales. We started to put in simple data probes at each of these key stages in our customers usage of the product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing says they had the fortitude to make quick decisions and stay the course not just because they’d observed how people were using the marketplace, but also because they’d spoken with hundreds of potential and past customers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. That’s why we have operations alerts trigger a page, but it can also work for other customer events. And here is the howto for your sales bell: [link] Have fun! :-) June 9, 2009 1:42 AM David Skillern said.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Do some Customer Development instead. I wont recount what happened next (although your can hear us recount it in audio ).

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

This makes lean supply chains more robust in the face of the unexpected: if sales suddenly dry up, they are stuck with less unsold inventory and simultaneously have less debt to service. Are the engineers in the customer development team allowed to push quick and dirty "prototypes" to production? Eric, great post.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Videos/presentations. Customer service. Use us to power any video chat applications (talkshow, education apps, collaboration, etc). We have an iOS SDK as well, for web-web, mobile-mobile, web-mobile video chat and video messaging. Codeacademy. Steve Blank.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

They’ll make much more sense if you watch the video or read some of the earlier posts for context. McMicking and Terman introduced Ampex to the National Security Agency, and Ampex sales boomed when their audio and video recorders became the standard for Electronic Intelligence and telemetry signal collection recorders.

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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. Similarly, government purchasing is a frustrating series of hoops, even compared to enterprise sales. Expo SF (May. Try About the author.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. If our goal is just to create a blog or a YouTube video as a hobby, there’s no need for this kind of rigorous process. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Also, our stuff was pretty much useless to our customers if it wasnt full featured AND reliable. Of course, the sales folks had new features as their #1 priority. We ended up rethinking our entire product development process, top to bottom, start to finish. Top managements #1 was usually ROI. What a freaking mess. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? ► April (11) Video update on the Startup Visa Act Lean Enterprise Institute webinar, April 28 Four myths about the Lean Startup Sneak preview, KISSmetrics (and more) Sneak preview, Grockit The Lean Startup Intensive at Web 2.0

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

This is usually exacerbated by zealous sales persons who oversell the features, or even more typical, promise completely new features. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May. Try About the author.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

You do get the beneift of total control of your content, so you can guarantee your customers a quality experience. However, virtual goods is a hits-driven business, which means you must constantly figure out what kind of content your customers want. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Because this language may lead you to believe this concept is for enterprise sales only, I thought Id walk you through an example from the world of consumer electronics. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? One of my favorite gadgets at home is the Harmony Universal Remote.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, October 30, 2008 John Doerrs 10 lean startup tips I just saw video of John Doerrs talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn&# roundtable event. You can see the whole video at the end of this post. Act now, act with speed. Expo SF (May.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

But instead of spending the time and money to develop products on spec, TPGTEX creates mocked-up webpages that list the features of a potential new product -- such as a system for making radio-frequency identification, or RFID, labels -- along with its price. The key ideas are customer development , the pivot , MVP, and root cause analysis.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

This is especially useful in situations, like most B2B businesses, where the total number of customers is likely to be small. This case study illustrates one company’s attempt to do customer development by testing their vision with customers before writing a single line of code. Oh, this is just a Photoshop file?

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San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. Third, SlideShare started holding sales calls with large companies to learn what would prompt them to buy the enterprise version.

San Francisco 167

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

If you are passionate about business, good at writing, decent at scheduling, can learn to edit audio, and want to help Jason share more interviews, then contact me to see if you could be the next producer of Smart Bear Live. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. Edwin: Yes.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Without a basis for comparison, you first have to drive home the need, then you will have an easy time making the sale (after all, youre the person who they trust to bring it to their attention). Toughest part of the sale is to get agreement that you really can deliver benefits that they didnt previously know were possible.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

I wrote about this challenge for iPhone developers, in an essay on retention competition : the battle over what icon the user will click when they go to the home screen. At that point, theres no opportunity for marketing or sales; the battle is already won or lost in the persons mind. Thats exactly what the worlds best video games do.

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Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

It took hundreds of years for newspapers to learn to behave as worthy holders of this public trust and cover the news without fear or favour, and create a firewall between news and views and the ad-sales side of the operation. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much.

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