Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This slinging of whatever against the wall to see what sticks does not a market make, is to me a sign of too much capital in the wrong hands, and it's already the most over invested area in recent years- in both human and financial capital- particularly relative to revenue. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

And when companies pursue sustaining innovations — like a product line extension or a new technology designed to serve an existing customer segment — this procedure makes complete sense. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. All very reasonable, well designed, well argued. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. All very reasonable, well designed, well argued.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

Brant and Patrick have set out to write and design a book that not only describes practical steps for implementing Lean Startup principles in your innovative endeavors – but to inspire your creativity as well by sharing diverse examples of what works, and more importantly, what often doesn’t work. It will be published by Wiley this fall.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. And if you neglect maintenance, you may not have a business left at all.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This is a self-published book, originally designed as a companion to Steves class at Berkeleys Haas school of business. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Heres the catch.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

What is the right revenue model? Aside from the dramatically shorter development cycle that browser games enjoy, the split testing of features (which is intuitive to web application makers) is something that propelled Zynga's games and revenues to the top of the social games vertical. August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. I think a great example of freemium is 37signals' Haystack - they offer free listings to all designers, and premium listings that are larger, and have more pictures for $99 a month - thus increasing exposure for the paying customers.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Designed for large businesses, the channels let a company share several types of documents, brand the channel with their own design elements, and then include display advertising, contest promotions, blog aggregation, social media integration and metrics reporting. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Heres the working definition Ive started using: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?"

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds. In order to maintain game play balance, game designers have to take into account the needs of customers who have an excess of four different assets: time , money , skill , and passion. Having a balanced ecosystem is what game designers strive for.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ▼ 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

My guess is they have lots of people constantly working on interesting new tools for their designers to play with. Not even if its generating revenue. Discover whats in customers heads, and tackle problems where design is a differentiator. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

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 ). After you’ve spent months on a painstaking new design, who wants to be told what color blue to use? It takes some getting used to for most designers, though.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Whys is designed to avoid these nebulous arguments. We just add up the revenue we've made in the past few months from Win98 users, and compare to the pain that Win98 has caused as identified in 5Ys. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. So far, it's been a net win to keep supporting it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. The key is to be able to refute as many major hypotheses as you can.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. If you dont make predictions ahead of time, theres no way to call you on it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Revenue is always my preferred measure, but you can use anything that is important to your business: retention, activation, viral invites, or even customer satisfaction in the form of something like net promoter score. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

It’s not enough to just launch a feature and see if your revenue increases. You need to have some sort of plan for testing to see how it’s affecting key metrics , whether those are revenue, retention, registration, user happiness, or some other number you care about. How Am I Going to Get Feedback on this Feature?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Doing in-depth customer research, with long questionnaires with detailed demographic and psychograpic breakdowns, is very helpful for long-range planning, interaction design and, most importantly, creating customer archetypes. Designing the survey The NPS question itself (again, "How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague?")

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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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. or their privileging of only certain designers featured in Showcase and promos. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

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