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. At IMVU it’s a core part of our culture to ship.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2013

Also among the new speakers is Keya Dannenbaum, founder and CEO of ElectNext. So we spent some time iterating--leanly, we thought--on the revenue model. She’ll talk in practical terms about how her organization is learning to be one that pivots. Usage of a new feature was a useless stat for us until we changed it to repeat usage.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

They are long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. They are long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market.

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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. Is there s choice?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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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

AUGUST 24, 2009

All successful media companies had at their heart a series of editors, producers, and agents tasked with discovering and developing new talent. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. That is customer development. Eric] “The first user experience was actually terrible.&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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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. In fact, I remember sending him and his obscure-to-me co-founder (aka Reid Hoffman ) a bug report early-on, instead of taking them up on their offer of an in-person meeting.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

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?" The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. A: yes, absolutely.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

It allows teams to diagnose sources of waste in their development process and continuously improve, reversing the usual trend of teams getting slower over time. These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules. My experience is: usually not.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them. We cultivated a passionate community that nurtured a skilled set of developers. Founders struggle with this question.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For one, capacity development. For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Not even if its generating revenue. Also SJ's obsession with better taste (positively) contributes to the overall product development process.

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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. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing. There is much work that I need to do (the only developer so far) before we have something customers can use.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations. Recall that the biggest source of waste in product development is building something nobody wants.

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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. Let me end with a challenge: see if you can find and kill just one myth in your development team. But our team would never do that, right?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In fact, it was the revenue trends that eventually alerted us to the magnitude of the problem. Unfortunately, revenue a trailing indicator. Its a great time to increase revenues without spending money on acquiring new customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Its an essential discipline of good software development, especially in startups. Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. Labels: agile , product development , Test-driven development 11comments: William Pietri said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

At a certain point in IMVU’s development, we faced a difficult choice. This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much.

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