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. But there is more to technical debt than just the interest payments that come due.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuous deployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. Our code pushes take another six minutes.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 16, 2009 Continuous deployment with downloads One of my goals in writing posts about topics like continuous deployment is the hope that people will take those ideas and apply them to new situations - and then share what they learn with the rest of us.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. And like feedback on a simple microphone sound system, this would occasionally boil over into screeching.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

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. Even if a self-published book was every bit as good as one published by a top-tier press, how would the reviewers know?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? 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. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

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

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. It happens whenever youre writing code on your own machine, or you have a team working on a branch. It also happens whenever you have code that is checked-in, but not yet deployed anywhere.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesnt blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look. Hes just as comfortable writing code as racking servers, debugging windows drivers, or devising new interview questions. He throws off volumes of code, and it works.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. While it is still possible - and recommended to experiment with customers in order to determine the minimum that they need, the exercise is bit more complicated due to the formality of the release process.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time? How much will it cost to solve this problem now?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower. What counts as an iteration? Great post and awfully hard to do.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer). This is the simplest ecosystem and simplest driver of growth.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

My code base can be changed or refactored to support major changes to the feature. It will be very clearly stated that this feature will be available to everybody for a trial period, but they will have to pay to continue using it. The basic version of this feature will be available to everybody, but an upgraded version will cost money.

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Advisory Board 40

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Every change required a server restart.

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. peer review is NOT working.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158