Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

There are three fundamental situations that change what your company needs to do: creating a new market (the original Palm), bringing a new product to an existing market (Handspring), and resegmenting an existing market (niche, like In-n-Out Burger; or low-cost, like Southwest Airlines). The root of that mistake is premature execution.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. One last thought.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

I now believe that the "pick two" concept is fundamentally flawed, and that lean startups can achieve all three simultaneously: quickly bring high-quality software to market at low cost. Thats why we need continuous integration and test-driven development. First of all, its a myth that cutting corners saves time.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic/WordPress, will talk about the way his company experiments constantly—even though his teams are fully distributed, with nearly everyone working from home. John Goulah will show you how Etsy gets engineers on board with continuous deployment, an important technical environment that many resist.

Lean 166

Lean Early Stage San Francisco Cofounder 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 23, 2009

Pretty soon you’re chasing your own tail a little bit because you’re not operating against a clear, long-term vision of what you’re trying to accomplish. There is a lot to be said about the opportunity cost of perfection, iterative evolution and the difference between shipping a lemon and shipping a band aid.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Audio 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. For example, heres him discussing our collective blindness to queues: To understand the economic cost of queues, product developers must be able to answer two questions.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. By continuously adjusting, we eventually build up a robust series of defenses that prevent problems from happening. Five whys helps us keep our cool.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. sachinrekhi : "Visionary customers are as smart if not smarter then the founders" #leanstartup Theres no skipping the chasm. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

That is just currently a full personal money sucking process, as you're taxed on income and have no business breaks yet, besides supplies, the majority of costs to start up a business have no tax advantages to creating a start up. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. September 8, 2009 6:25 PM dbsaid.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

In this post I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how to integrate continuous integration into your team, and how to use it to create two important feedback loops. First, a word about why continuous integration is so important. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

This has two major drawbacks: the central directory can become a single point of failure, and there is a performance cost for having to consult the directory ever time you want to access data anywhere in the cluster. Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation. This information is normally maintained by your operations team.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Having worked with dozens of founders over the past few months, I think I can safely say, without naming any names, that most of us are not too clear on what were talking about when it comes to markets. Founders are constantly being barraged by incoherent and contradictory advice. Resegmented market (low cost variety).

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

At the cost of a little extra indirection, you can organize your code around a series of long-lived objects, each of whom communicates with the other objects in simple, easy-to-understand ways. But I think debates about which language, which operating system, even which editor (emacs, vim, Visual Studio) can go on forever. Im curious.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

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. In the end, we managed to repair the damage, but only after losing a lot of time and at significant opportunity cost. That is what company founders and staff do not get.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158