Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

The higher the vanity ratio, the more effective the PR. And the kinds of failures that do get airtime are usually failures to adequately plan, anticipate, or design in advance. It helps companies with PR. And companies crave positive PR and control over their message – all for rational reasons.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Metrics PR 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 17, 2010

Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, and more ► January (6) Lo, my 18891 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 107

San Francisco Romania Cleveland South Africa 107

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

This "success theater" is occasionally useful for PR or getting through a tough board meeting. This "success theater" is occasionally useful for PR or getting through a tough board meeting. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. But its lethal when we start to run the company using vanity metrics as a guide.

Metrics 121

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 121

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

Some highlights, at least for me: We experienced a great science experiment for the scenario: what would happen if a big company tries to compete with you given complete knowledge about your idea and designs? What happened when we got early press (circa 2004) in violation of our own no-PR rule. That led to much shorter (and better!)

Lean 74

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

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. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. Dont do PR upfront, dont put out a press release. My advice: dont launch big.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Even if you must launch to your customers, avoid the urge to also launch in extra places, just because your PR firm can do it at the same time. If you are having trouble raising money, sometimes a little PR can help. Help you raise money.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

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 have personally taught many “non-technical&# people to program – graphic designers, QA folks, even artists and animators. Contrast that with a traditional siloed department.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other. Google was not the first search engine, but it's the one that succeeded. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. I think its wasteful. In time, success will come. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

When people (ok, engineers) who have been trained in this model enter most startups, they quickly get confused. Some designers also hate optimizing (which is why the “41 shades of blue&# test is so famous – a famous designer claims to have quit over it ). It takes some getting used to for most designers, though.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

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. Customer Development Engineering : techniques for accelerating your product development. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

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. My point is that this article does not contain the kind of information we’d need to draw reasonable inferences, which is by design. The PR firm helpfully left out that context.)

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. As with many Silicon Valley failures, a flawless PR launch turned into a flawed customer acquisition strategy.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

(a guide for hackers) (This post was inspired by a conversation with Nivi from Venture Hacks , but is otherwise not his fault) There has been a proliferation of frameworks and metaphors lately that are designed to help startups avoid the all-too-common fatal mistake of failing to find a market. Expo (and a call for he.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

or their privileging of only certain designers featured in Showcase and promos. I can't do anything for the hurt you experienced in the past, other than to apologize on behalf of all platform designers out there. Have you personally visited the Content Creator forums and read through the PR thread? Desperately.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158