Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

And while its true that metrics sometimes can lead to a better product, in my experience just as often they had led to no insight whatsoever, like fancy reports that nobody reads or after-the-fact rationalizations (with graphs!) We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. Labels: product development 4comments: Doug said.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

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. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

A video conference system like Polycom is crucial not only for project meetings but also for sales and product development meetings. That feeling is akin to being in the same room with the people you are talking to instead of being miles apart.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Of course, the sales folks had new features as their #1 priority.

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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. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge. So without further ado, let me share the slides with audio. Here are some of my top takeaways.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. If I get sales I will expand on the site. This is a common mistake.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

OCTOBER 5, 2011

Creating a Title for your product that is Too Cute or Clever. You think the most important part of your product is the product. Now I use the term “product” and that can mean ebook, video course, audio course, etc. If you have no marketing, then you have no sales.

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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. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. 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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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This gets me into trouble, because it conjures up for some the idea that product development is simply a rote mechanical exercise of linear optimization. You just constantly test little micro-changes and follow a hill-climbing algorithm to build your product.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

OCTOBER 5, 2011

Creating a Title for your product that is Too Cute or Clever. You think the most important part of your product is the product. Now I use the term “product” and that can mean ebook, video course, audio course, etc. If you have no marketing, then you have no sales.

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Sales Product PPC Naming 65

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. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation.

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San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

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. As the company grows, this kind of work generalizes into "executing the companys current strategy." .

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

To acquire new money managers, the company makes traditional sales calls, which means they’ve interviewed many, many professionals and gotten a strong sense of their needs. .&# says Rachleff. At the same time, whenever a customer closes an account, kaChing contacts the person to find out why; most agree to a short phone interview. .&#

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Sales intelligence platform Cognism cut their lead generation efforts by 90% in 2021. In this article, you’ll learn how to build a demand generation funnel that fuels the pipeline, shortens the sale cycle, and generates revenue. an ebook); Then you blast them with sales messaging (e.g., email, ads, retargeting, etc.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. Most importantly, I encouraged the leaders of the company to bring awareness of the business challenges to the product development team. Great post, Eric.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. Does this sound familiar?

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Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

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. I wont recount what happened next (although your can hear us recount it in audio ). In the right situation, its a very useful tactic, too.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

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. You clearly can produce a product and so on. Is it more the marketing/sales side? Edwin: I know.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I'll add two ideas: The modern structure of university patent licensing and technology transfer works really well in the life sciences and other fields with expensive product development processes. Similarly, government purchasing is a frustrating series of hoops, even compared to enterprise sales.

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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. My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that a lot? I have given more than two-dozen paid speeches this year – is that a lot? Is that good?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Duct Tape Marketing

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services? John Jantsch: Well, Duct Tape Marketing is officially for sale, guys.

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Cost Marketing Audience Media 37

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. Read the rest. Read the rest.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

But if that piece-parts solution is great, then its unlikely they are going to need to buy any additional products. 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.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

Sales depend on being right (whereas in UGC we can pretty much try anything, and promote the winners). Your platform may require you to staff up a large production department to crank out enough content to satisfy your customers.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. For example, on the "leading indicators" front, I think companies should use a funnel analysis to drive decisions and get rapid feedback on how they are progressing.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 27, 2022

Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell, and frankly who doesn't check out the salesman podcast, where host will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business ineffective and ethical ways. And if you wanna start someplace, I recommend the four step process to influencing buying decisions.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Meanwhile, individuals and smaller companies emailed by the hundreds to say that they wanted the features of custom channels, but the sales model—arranged like a media buy—didn’t make sense to them. -Eric] Big companies said they liked the idea, but SlideShare found it hard to close deals.

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San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

turn customer feedback into sales and relationships. Great for visualizing work of product development. SaaS Sales Team Compensation â?? Startups For Sale. CrowdSpring. Guerra-Creativa. LogoTournament. ShopForDesigns. Image manipulation. FotoFlexer. Photoshop Express. Pixelmator. BlogTalkRadio. ClipGenerator.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

We got instantaneous feedback on the validity of the idea and started our sales process concurrently. LOIs, while clearly not as good as signed sales contract, do have meaning and are valuable. I encourage B2B startups to keep them in their customer development arsenal.

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San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

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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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

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.

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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. Since LL took over xstreet, they have seen a 34% DROP in users and sales, why? YOU and ONLY YOU.

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 3, 2018

Copper’s Relationship Era does the same for the sales industry, and Dialpad’s Anywhere Worker paints a picture of simple, streamlined communication for SMBs. By writing about the pros and cons of vinyl, they can introduce their flooring as an alternative and encourage visitors to view their product line.

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