Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

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Agile VC

MAY 16, 2019

I have friends who are execs or shareholders of the company, but I have no stake in Slack nor intent to invest in the IPO. A somewhat unique thing about the Slack IPO is that they’re pursuing a direct listing on the NYSE. But it does mean that traditional 180 day lock-up periods won’t generally apply to existing Slack shareholders.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This slinging of whatever against the wall to see what sticks does not a market make, is to me a sign of too much capital in the wrong hands, and it's already the most over invested area in recent years- in both human and financial capital- particularly relative to revenue. Otherwise it's a great idea.

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Cracking the Code

JULY 12, 2019

-This article was co-authored with my colleague Maxim Filippov and published initially on Tech.eu. Nominations are now open for the 2019 Accel Euroscape, the annual list of the top 100 cloud companies originating from Europe & Israel. The growth of the cloud ecosystem in Europe over the past few years has been explosive.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

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pandodaily.com

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

Meanwhile, the rash of early liquidity and recent IPOs — unsatisfying as they were — gave liquidity to thousands of employees at large companies, and a subset of those made very real money. This time around, there has been an explosion at the early stages, and the very late pre-IPO growth stages. Now it’s glutted.

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ConversionXL

JUNE 2, 2022

Fullfunnel co-founder Andrei Zinkevich says, “ABM is not that complicated, and it’s also oversimplified.”. How do you sustain growth that precedes the highest IPO in history for a software company? For cloud-based data warehouse Snowflake , that was ABM. Results from Snowflake’s ABM efforts post-IPO.

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Austin Startup

OCTOBER 6, 2018

My talk was about the 7 lessons I’ve learned on the journey from founder to CEO. I started off my talk emphasizing that the journey matters most in your transformation from founder to CEO. To prepare for our IPO at Bazaarvoice, I leveraged three additional coaches?—?one The event was held at the Jewish Contemporary Museum.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. Most people cant sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified.

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Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 4, 2008

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. 2007 was a turning point for the SaaS industry with the successful IPOs of NetSuite, SuccessFactors, DemandTec, Salary.com, Aprimo and Constant Contact. Cracking The Code. Monday, February 04, 2008.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 9, 2011

Extremely important for companies to plan their IPOs during a “strategic window” that will increase their odds of success. Going public is not easy : companies should be preparing for IPO in terms of media communication and internal management over a year ahead of IPO. October 2011 was the worst month for IPOs since 2008.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. The first version of the 3D IMVU client took about six months to build, and as the founders iterated towards a compelling user experience, the user base grew monthly thereafter. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. Some companies and founders refuse to serve existing customers, and are always lurching from one great idea to the next.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. Naturally, they had just raised money, and their new investors were understandably pissed.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). The key is to be able to refute as many major hypotheses as you can.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. Small batches also help deliver value earlier in the project. February 25, 2009 8:12 PM Anonymoussaid. Small is beautiful.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Now, Andrew’s excellent piece that I quoted from above correctly diagnoses two situations where consumer internet companies often get in trouble: They focus too much on short-term revenue, getting caught in a local maximum via constant optimization. Founders struggle with this question. Successful startups don’t.

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Cracking the Code

SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

Accel Euroscape: The 100 most promising Software-as-a- Service companies in Europe and Israel -This article was co-authored with my colleague Pia d'Iribarne and published initially on Tech.eu. To date, there have been only four major European SaaS exits (all IPOs), including QlikTech in 2010, Wix in 2013, Zendesk in 2014 and Mimecast in 2015.

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readwrite.com

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

And nobody is loving this more than Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old co-founder and CEO of Box, which sells cloud-based data storage and collaboration software to enterprises. Levie won’t disclose revenue figures, but allows that Box has 650 employees, roughly double the level from a year ago. A Smart Bet On The Enterprise.

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www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

And since a startup thatsucceeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies gettingrich is doable too. A lot ofwould-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is theinitial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute.Venture capitalists know better. Ideally you want between two and four founders.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. Im in this exact position with my startup, industrialinterface.com.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Not even if its generating revenue. But that would be a disaster for Apple, so whatever testing they do has to happen in secret and behind closed doors. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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VC Cafe

JULY 6, 2010

To learn more about the product and the founder’s ambitious vision, I interviewed Erez Pilosof, founder and CEO of Libox who also founded and ran Walla! Israel’s largest online portal) from inception to IPO as well as Oren Nauman, formerly CEO of Mobival , who serves as deputy CEO at Libox.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. When something works, its too easy to invent a story about how that was your intention all along. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. " Actually this process works really well in a financial company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Revenue is always my preferred measure, but you can use anything that is important to your business: retention, activation, viral invites, or even customer satisfaction in the form of something like net promoter score. Or it could be that they are endlessly pecking through menus, totally confused about what to do next.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

When you read stories of successful startups in the popular and business press, you usually hear about how the founders anticipated several of these challenges in their initial vision. Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first? Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first?

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infochachkie.com

DECEMBER 5, 2011

In all cases, these names were derived by the Founders, without the involvement of consultants, MBAs, focus groups, statistically valid surveys or other detriments to a startup’s ability to make quick, sound decisions. Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo’s Founders, chose the name, as they considered themselves to be “Yahoos.”.When

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

We just add up the revenue we've made in the past few months from Win98 users, and compare to the pain that Win98 has caused as identified in 5Ys. It's so old and so buggy that it's a real pain to ship 3D software on it. So far, it's been a net win to keep supporting it. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

What is the right revenue model? Aside from the dramatically shorter development cycle that browser games enjoy, the split testing of features (which is intuitive to web application makers) is something that propelled Zynga's games and revenues to the top of the social games vertical. August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

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Up and Running

APRIL 17, 2013

Google was a private company and their CEO and co-founder was visiting his and my alma mater in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan, where I had just graduated a few months prior and was bumming around getting my own startup off the ground. Imagine Tiger Woods, playing The Masters with them this past weekend.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. There are huge classes of bugs that "work as designed" but cause catastrophic changes in customer behavior. Better handling of intermittent bugs.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

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