Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 24, 2009 The lean startup at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Image by Jessica_Mah via Flickr Last week I had the opportunity to lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at Haas, which is always a great learning experience - for me at least! Eric takes a different approach.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

The higher the vanity ratio, the more effective the PR. It helps companies with PR. This is also why I get so outraged when people treat Lean Startup like a religion. You can test theories like Lean Startup in your own practice, and discover if they deliver the outcomes they predict – and you can do it in small batches.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

This "success theater" is occasionally useful for PR or getting through a tough board meeting. Then, in each development cycle, use the insights gained by studying customers to make improvements. This is the source of validated learning — proof that the customer insights translate into tangible metrics improvements.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 17, 2010

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Worse, if you are not geared up to make the best use of those customers when the launch sends them your way, its a pretty big waste. Help you raise money.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2013

This post was written by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference. Exciting news: we’ve nailed down dates for The Lean Startup Conference 2013. We know Lean Startup methods are being applied by people around the globe, in startups and established organizations alike, and in sectors of every stripe.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. This is completely analogous to the situation elsewhere on the internet, where launching a new website, product, or service with PR is getting harder and harder. Customers and prospects are overwhelmed by the number of media and companies clamoring for their attention.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other. Instead, lets focus on building companies that matter , on creating real value for customers, and learning. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. I already advocate cross-functional teams as part of the lean startup methodology. Last year, I traveled to dozens of cities talking about lean startups and meeting people interested in entrepreneurship.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Journalists, PR firms, investors, and the public at large love a scrappy come-from-behind story about two guys in a garage who figured out how to take down Goliath. A crisis is sometimes needed to force that reexamination.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, April 7, 2010 Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem) Lean startups don’t optimize. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Even worse, entrepreneurs are faced with a constant barrage of vanity metrics from competitors and other companies engaged in PR. That’s what you pay PR firms for: to get an article written that is entirely factual and yet still provides positive spin for your company. The PR firm helpfully left out that context.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. Synthetic notifications. Organic notifications.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. Here are a few: We know what customers want. By hiring experts, conducting lots of focus groups, and executing to a detailed plan, the company became deluded that it knew what customers wanted. Stealth is a customer-free zone.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

To wit: achieving product/market fit , getting customer validation , making something people want , things that matter , and of course the many excellent books on the topic, of which Ill mention just two of the best, Crossing the Chasm and The Innovators Dilemma. Is a market a set of paying customers? Tough sell.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

There are many articles by many experts ( myself included ) extolling the virtues of listening to customers. In fact, there are so many of these propaganda pieces that this question might naturally cross your mind: if listening to customers is so great, why do we need so much propaganda? We did not take this step lightly.

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