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.

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

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. But code written that doesnt help the company succeed is a sunk cost.

San Francisco 98

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

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.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

That is just currently a full personal money sucking process, as you're taxed on income and have no business breaks yet, besides supplies, the majority of costs to start up a business have no tax advantages to creating a start up. 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

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. Slow progress, but has cost less than 150k aud so far. Help you raise money.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Sure, it seems efficient. Not necessarily.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

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?

San Francisco 144

San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

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. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever. "Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?" When I say viable, I mean something that can generate sales. 1 vote by Rohan Jayasekera Wow.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. Read the rest of The New Startup Arms Race at Huffington Post.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Stick to some kind of absolute-cost rule, like "no one is allowed to spend more time on the refactoring for a given feature than the feature itself, but also no one is allowed to spend zero time refactoring." This is usually exacerbated by zealous sales persons who oversell the features, or even more typical, promise completely new features.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

In the world of startups, this is like trying to sell a product to a very demanding customer who needs to see a lot of features before buying. Resegmented market (low cost variety). Heres a situation where you offer to do the job for 1/10th the cost. They must be thinking "if its costing people their jobs, it must really work.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. tells you how much adwords cost. turn customer feedback into action. turn customer feedback into sales and relationships. customer feedback, vote, comment, manage. live customer chat. hire low-cost international engineering talent. Codeacademy.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. In the end, we managed to repair the damage, but only after losing a lot of time and at significant opportunity cost. Because, and I quote, the top 10 developers never posted there.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158