Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Is that a lot? Is that good?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

But instead of spending the time and money to develop products on spec, TPGTEX creates mocked-up webpages that list the features of a potential new product -- such as a system for making radio-frequency identification, or RFID, labels -- along with its price. Read the rest. Read the rest.

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

And while its true that metrics sometimes can lead to a better product, in my experience just as often they had led to no insight whatsoever, like fancy reports that nobody reads or after-the-fact rationalizations (with graphs!) We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. Labels: product development 4comments: Doug said.

San Francisco 98

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge. So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. 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. Similarly, government purchasing is a frustrating series of hoops, even compared to enterprise sales.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

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. gave us two years of a beta product to build up the service and the brand awareness. Slow progress, but has cost less than 150k aud so far.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. Sure, it seems efficient.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

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

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

We backed into prices from all sorts of angles, estimating the time-cost of equivalent functionality, competitive offerings, other tools we were potentially displacing -- but in the end, we lobbed a few numbers at them and waited to see if they flinched. I encourage B2B startups to keep them in their customer development arsenal.

San Francisco 144

San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.] We will not lose on their products -- after all, most of them are global.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. Most importantly, I encouraged the leaders of the company to bring awareness of the business challenges to the product development team. Great post, Eric.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

In the world of startups, this is like trying to sell a product to a very demanding customer who needs to see a lot of features before buying. Resegmented market (low cost variety). Heres a situation where you offer to do the job for 1/10th the cost. They must be thinking "if its costing people their jobs, it must really work.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

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. Because, and I quote, the top 10 developers never posted there.

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