Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If you dont have customers, a product, investors, or a board of directors, you can pretty much stay focused on just one thing at a time. Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

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. He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

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.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And once you have a relationship with an author, musician, or journalist, it will be quite easy for them to offer new products and services – and for you to give them feedback that helps them shape ever more interesting (and ever more profitable) offerings. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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.

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Every product ultimately is satisfying a need in the customers who buy it or use it. Products that dont solve satisfy any need for any customers tend to die out quickly. The more painful curse for startups is the product that satisfies a need or solves a problem - but that problem is not very important. Thats an early adopter.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

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. If your company is using minimum viable product , you’ve probably said the same thing yourself. But I have decided to make an exception today, for two reasons.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

Customers dont care if you have good metrics, only if you have a good product. 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!) Well, lack of usage, really.

San Francisco 98

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. But that team may also include product marketers or other in-house customers who can give insight into the impact that solution trade-offs might have on customers. Traditional department labels just make it harder.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

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. In the right situation, its a very useful tactic, too.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

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.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

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.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

It got me thinking about what decisions are essential when building a virtual goods product. These decisions cause problems that will challenge you for years, if you are lucky enough to be successful with your product. Sales depend on being right (whereas in UGC we can pretty much try anything, and promote the winners).

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. And what causes them to choose one product over another?

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, October 23, 2009 Case Study: Using an LOI to get customer feedback on a minimum viable product How much work should you do on a new product before involving customers? But other times, the right way to learn is actually to show a product prototype to customers one-on-one. Yes and no.

San Francisco 144

San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Some really great stuff in 2010 that aims to help startups around product, technology, business models, etc.

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.] These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. We will not lose on their products -- after all, most of them are global. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They have a product that has a moderate number of customers. Still, theyre not really hitting it out of the park, because their product isnt growing new users as fast as theyd like, and they arent making any money from the current users. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

To wit: achieving product/market fit , getting customer validation , making something people want , things that matter , and of course the many excellent books on the topic, of which Ill mention just two of the best, Crossing the Chasm and The Innovators Dilemma. Is a market a set of paying customers? Tough sell.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. It took me a long time to understand that benefit of our product. This probably sounds illogical.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158