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. That’s why we have operations alerts trigger a page, but it can also work for other customer events. 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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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

This makes lean supply chains more robust in the face of the unexpected: if sales suddenly dry up, they are stuck with less unsold inventory and simultaneously have less debt to service. Are the engineers in the customer development team allowed to push quick and dirty "prototypes" to production? One last thought.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Excepting for cosmically co-incidental success stories, the fuzzy requirement stuff never congeals as a holistic engineering exercise. Also, our stuff was pretty much useless to our customers if it wasnt full featured AND reliable. Of course, the sales folks had new features as their #1 priority. What a freaking mess.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Thanks to those of you who were willing to fill out the survey, I learned my net promoter score (about 25) as well as some clear other segmentation insights: about 80% of you are founders of or work at a startup, you read many of the same other blogs, and many of you would like to engage with Lessons Learned in formats and venues beyond this blog.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. Third, SlideShare started holding sales calls with large companies to learn what would prompt them to buy the enterprise version.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Then, the company spends no more than a few hundred dollars marketing the product through search engines and to the contacts in its sales database and LinkedIn. It isnt until a customer actually clicks or calls to place an order that TPGTEXs developers will build the software. "We

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

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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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

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. Founders push for it. In some ways, founders are even worse. Help you raise money.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

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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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

You do get the beneift of total control of your content, so you can guarantee your customers a quality experience. However, virtual goods is a hits-driven business, which means you must constantly figure out what kind of content your customers want. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

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. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

November 23, 2010 Entrepreneurs, Using Outsourcing to Obtain Capital Efficiency Needs to be Thought Through to be Effective - Robert Ochtel , June 7, 2010 Teen Entrepreneur, Brian Wong, Youngest Founder to Receive Angel Funding - teenentrepreneurblog.com , October 28, 2010 Build Your Own Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. Similarly, 24% of all the patents filed in the US in 2006 had a foreign resident as inventor or co-inventor.

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San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Fortunately, my co-founders are also engineers and understand the need for some of the stuff I do. This is usually exacerbated by zealous sales persons who oversell the features, or even more typical, promise completely new features. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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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?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

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. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much.

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158