Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Interesting post.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Usually, that will be about finding new segments of customers that the company can profitably serve. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

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? Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

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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San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Naturally, they had just raised money, and their new investors were understandably pissed. The company struggled mightily with how to explain this bad news to their board. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Because this is a new skunkworks-type project, everyone involved is savvy enough to understand that the initial ROI is likely to be low, much lower than projects that are powered by sustaining innovation. And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Or follow all of the New York Times columnists equally? This is good news for everyone except those who have huge legacy investments in large-batch distribution. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Its likely that the new release will contain new bugs. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

Should you co-found your company with a software development shop? incubators, e.g., the many options in New York. intrapreneurs, e.g., the employee of GE who is tasked with launching a new business. incubators, e.g., the many options in New York. equity that belongs to departed cofounders)?

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

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. It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 18, 2019

by Anish Sebastian, Co-Founder of Babyscripts. The article is authored by Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook. The article is authored by Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook. and encourage users to share even more personal information; ostensibly to improve their targeted ad services.

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Security Cofounder Social Media Affiliate 127

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.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

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. If your company is using minimum viable product , you’ve probably said the same thing yourself. The process started with a few moving parts.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

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

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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 ? So what gives?

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

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.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. This was an effective approach to discovering a business by using a sequence of product prototypes to get early customer feedback. It would be hard to argue against this product development strategy, in general. If it didnt, wed trash it.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Or should I launch products and a startup for each of them, focusing on only 1 product at a time? I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. Do that – nothing else but one product / company / focus and get to $1M in sales with atleast $15% net profit. do something else.

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Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

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). A checklist of practices in the new Joel Test for Startups.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

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?" The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? A: yes, absolutely. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. 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?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

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.) Most executives, especially in startups, dont have the courage to hold their teams to a high standard for new products or features. Not even if its generating revenue. Great post Eric.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations. I mean, here we are, paying them to be there, and they won’t use the product!

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

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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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?&# And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. Having trouble meeting folks you think would be good co-founders?

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 66

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. Minimum viable product is a tactic for mitigating risk.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Transformify

APRIL 12, 2020

Usually, the remote workers work from home or co-working spaces and visit the company office once per month or even once per quarter. If the broad audience is more or less familiar with the beforementioned criminal schemes, round-tripping maybe something new to many. No revenue at all. Looks great, isn’t it?

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Bangladesh Philippines Salary Cofounder 98

Designmantic Blog

MARCH 6, 2018

It is apparent that the United States has the highest performing entrepreneurship, but what is truly amazing is how women contribute the biggest growth in revenue, employment and financial efficiency. Here are some of the most interesting facts about female founders as well as startups. Background Image: Unsplash/Rawpixel. ’ 14.

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Entrepreneur Social Media B2B Cofounder 76

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In fact, it was the revenue trends that eventually alerted us to the magnitude of the problem. Unfortunately, revenue a trailing indicator. Its a great time to increase revenues without spending money on acquiring new customers.

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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

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. Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. Today startups build products differently.

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 243

mashable.com

JUNE 11, 2013

Perhaps the team is working on a product that really isnt that great or useful. Or maybe the co-founders have a poisonous relationship that will hinder the companys growth. Maybe they never thought about product-market fit. Check out the tips below from founders, CEOs and investors alike. Leave it in the comments.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. As a founder of a company, there is nothing more painful than to see your most loyal and devoted customers suffering. That is what company founders and staff do not get.

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