Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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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

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.

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

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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

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

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.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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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!)

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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

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

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.

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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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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. Others, like IMVU or Second Life, rely almost exclusively on third-party developers to create goods.

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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.

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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?" Nor does picking apart 200 web products and analyzing what works and doesn't.

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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. Synthetic notifications. Who is using it?

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SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

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

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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. But the jobs will be created over there.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They have a product that has a moderate number of customers. Its well done, looks professional, and the customers that use it like it a lot. 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.

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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.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. turn customer feedback into action. turn customer feedback into sales and relationships. customer feedback, vote, comment, manage. live customer chat. Great for visualizing work of product development. agile product management. SW Courses.

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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. There are many articles by many experts ( myself included ) extolling the virtues of listening to customers.

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