Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Since that time we've seen a massive change from product engineering to financial engineering. Otherwise it's a great idea.

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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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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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www.huffingtonpost.com

MAY 10, 2011

Because we achieved our most aggressive revenue targets and built a strong community, we realized that we had a broader opportunity to change the world of graphic design. However, we needed a head of engineering to recruit and lead a larger team to accomplish our larger goals.

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YoungUpstarts

JULY 29, 2013

by Meng Weng Wong, co-founder and social engineer at JFDI Asia. But they’ll sit up and pay attention when you talk about the customers and revenues of the business. Better to decide now that you would rather pursue a career path in engineering than in entrepreneurship. Some founders stay at hostels.

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The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 14, 2021

The Startup Magazine continues our Founder Interview series with entrepreneur Richard Lavina, Co-Founder and CEO of accounting services platform, Taxfyle. Richard Lavina, CPA, Co-Founder and CEO of Taxfyle. 5000 list , which lists private American companies based on three-year revenue growth between 2016 and 2019.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

Why do these founders get to stay around? Because the balance of power has dramatically shifted from investors to founders. — Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed: IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 26, 2020

As a hardware engineer, you already know the value, importance, and layout of a spec to keep you focused, but you may not be so familiar with the key elements of a business plan, and the way to use it to support and add credibility to your hardware solution. They want to see revenue to share in the return.

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Austin Startup

JANUARY 27, 2019

In the past few weeks, we’ve had our data.world executive team and then leadership team off-site, All-Hands kick-off for the year at the Alamo Drafthouse, Board meeting, and another event I co-host every year outside of data.world. Hurt Founder and CEO Bazaarvoice, Inc. he’s our incredible Chief Revenue Officer. Thanks, Brett A.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System.

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www.mint.com

MARCH 9, 2010

If the answer to the question centers around “We will achieve revenue soon so our net will improve and give us more runway,” it means the company is in trouble because no product ever ships on time nor achieves the company’s “conservative forecast.” These days revenue is the best source of capital. Who is on your board of directors?

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Software Review Startup Post-Money Valuation Technical Review 68

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

My first day at Bazaarvoice was just a few weeks later, on May 2, 2005, and we built a company from inception to IPO on around $12m of capital use (out of the $24m we raised) in 7 years, creating over a thousand jobs and impacting clients all over the world?—?starting Still in business today and run by my co-founder.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. 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.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

And from a financial perspective, any investor would be better off buying stock in Amazon than buying and share of a corner bookshop; if you invested $100 in Amazon’s 1997 initial public offering (IPO), those shares would have been worth about $120,000 in 2018. Blitzscaling is a strategic technique for moving faster, not a reckless gamble.

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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

JUNE 15, 2009

One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production. In such a system, the primary goal of each engineer is to stay busy, using as close to 100% of his or her time for coding as possible. As luck would have it, one of IMVU’s engineers happened to be in the audience at the time.

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Haystack

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

Khosla Ventures has quietly been on a roll over the past few years, most recently with Square (a monster, monster return, assuming they held post-IPO) and Guardant, among others; and they old early shares in Instacart, DoorDash, OpenDoor, and many winners in the most recent unicorn crop.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups,) but he wanted to talk about his third startup – the one he and two co-founders had started. We’re at 70 people, and we’ll do $40 million in revenue this year and should get to cash flow breakeven this quarter. ”

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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 28, 2009

The second shift in mindset required is to separate the concept of a marketing release from the concept of an engineering release. Engineers working in a continuous deployment environment are much more likely to get individually tailored feedback about their work. Thats good for QA and for engineers.

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Spencer Fry

DECEMBER 7, 2011

Doctors, scientists, and engineers are all highly skilled professions involving a lot of pressure, but as to stress level the difference is that for the most part emotions don't enter to what those specialists do because they're trained in a systematic process that keeps surprises to a minimum. You NEED a Co-Founder to Offload Stress.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Everyone from the receptionist to engineers is selling. 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.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

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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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Reid Hoffman

JANUARY 20, 2013

20 years ago, the classic startup model was to have young founders start a breakthrough company, then bring in “grey hair” in the form of experienced executives once it was time to scale the business. In other words, Ben asserts that bringing in a professional CEO should be a last resort for a founder. During the dot com era, Yahoo!’s

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Rashmi Sinha, co-founder and CEO of SlideShare , describes an early version of the analytics package that’s part of the Pro accounts the company announced today. Because the SlideShare team was used to giving away a high-value product, engineers balked at charging for a clearly imperfect product.

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San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Scalable Startup

SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

San Francisco, over 50 universities and trillions of dollars in revenue. Stanford - Not sure this even needs explaining, but Stanford has been a wole new entity in the past 20 years, beyond anyones imagination in wealth creation, funding, computer science, a recruiting engine into SV then on to local companies, pride, confidence, location.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

I discuss category creation with one of the co-authors of Play Bigger , Christopher Lochhead, in episode #232 of Legends and Losers if you would like to really delve into that (it is a very important topic). They will bring you revenue, delight your clients (the right salespeople care about the ultimate value delivered?—?not

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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. For founders, I think it also has another big attraction: the ability to avoid a lot of " free vs paid " arguments. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?

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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. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. That year, right before the IPO, those months mattered a great deal in terms of financial outcomes.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process.

San Francisco 164

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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

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. Beyond Apple, we can find examples of the Steve Jobs character at Toyota, in the form of the Chief Engineer. August 2, 2009 9:50 AM Milton said.

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VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Orcam was created by the founders of Mobileye (NYSE: MBLY and one of Israel’s largest IPOs ), Prof. Co-founders Ami Daniel and Matan Peled both served as naval officers. Cognata (2017) – still in stealth, Cognata is developing Artificial Intelligence simulation engines for automated vehicles.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. You declare how much someone clicking an advertisement is worth to you, and then the search engine does its best to get you as many clicks as it can at that price. Labels: search engine marketing 4comments: Tauya said.

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