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 Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

New Century, New Channels For many of you reading this, boxes sitting on a retail shelf may seem hopelessly outdated, but the same marketing lessons hold for “award winning&# web sites or social media. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. Now with customers and early revenue, it was out raising its first round of venture money. The question was: what did the founders want to do? They hired a world-class team with co-founders and early employees who shared their vision.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 27, 2014

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. Now you can do it for free, or a few hundred dollars, with one of the many web building tools available, like Shopify or Weebly Store.

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Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media LLC 260

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. 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. What is customer development?

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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. It turned out that, during the course of the decline, one customer segment was losing customers while another was gaining customers. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

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

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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. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Hearpreneur

JULY 30, 2016

The short answer was no and whilst many of the businesses present had a large technology component to their company, with custom developed software etc they could not present themselves as a tech company. But only around 2% will actually achieve revenues over $1 million dollars. Photo Credit: Aquila Leon-Soon.

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

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

What is the right revenue model? As you and I have chatted about, a Zynga developed game versus an EA developed game is quite different. Though technology tools and Web 2.0 The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? ideas (e.g. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Knowing your customers is the single biggest driver of startup success, and there’s no substitute for getting out of the building to learn about their problems and needs. Jason Young , co-founder of MindBlown Labs , which makes mobile social games to teach young adults about personal finance. Get out of the building.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

There are huge classes of bugs that "work as designed" but cause catastrophic changes in customer behavior. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. Most QA teams are organized around finding reproduction paths for bugs that affect customers. Better handling of intermittent bugs.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. We have been lucky enough to have formed strong relationships with family friends and past co-workers, to have a very informal Board of Advisors on hand. As such, advisory board members will often become customers or help you find customers.

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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. That is customer development. “But it never happened.&# [Alas, customers dont know what they want!

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? What went wrong?

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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. Over-communicate with employees, investors, customers. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. Offer equity instead of cash.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2011

As time went on, I was a co-founder or member of the starting team for six high-tech startups…. In 1999… with the company’s revenue north of $100 million…I handed the keys to a new CEO and left. Now…a decade later… that course called Customer Development … is the basis of an entirely new way to start companies.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. I first did it for the founder.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast. How cofounders can collaborate without going crazy.

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Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. How cofounders can collaborate without going crazy. We would rather chase revenue. Of course you should chase revenue. Jason: Oh, good.

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Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. In fact, I remember sending him and his obscure-to-me co-founder (aka Reid Hoffman ) a bug report early-on, instead of taking them up on their offer of an in-person meeting. Oh well ;).

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www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Non-Technical Co-Founders Co-Founders Technical Co-founders Finding Co-Founders Startups & "How Important Are Ideas?" " Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea.

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Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

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). And, of course, theres the Lean Startup session at the upcoming Web 2.0

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Much of the content is shared with the Web 2.0 I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" How does this map to the web? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

If they were an unknown web 2.0 startup, they could release the app and see how customers respond. 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. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money. And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

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? Unfortunately, startup success requires getting them all right.

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