Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. So, if youre interested in helping avoid mistakes like that, here are the steps: Get a domain name. It doesnt have to be the worlds catchiest name, just pick something reasonably descriptive.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. That means that I (and other engineers) were able to participate in the problem team discussions. Such discussions would have been impossible in our execution-oriented engineering team meetings. Pivotal Labs doesn't carry "Pivot" in its name by accident.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. I help lead the Engineering Leadership SIG at SDForum and wonder if you would be interested in speaking to our group about lean starups. Blew my mind.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. You declare how much someone clicking an advertisement is worth to you, and then the search engine does its best to get you as many clicks as it can at that price. Labels: search engine marketing 4comments: Tauya said.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. You can learn more about that by reading The engineering managers lament.) Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Continuous Deployment 113

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

In a startup, rather than think of ourselves as having a marketing department and an engineering department, I now believe its better to think of ourselves as focusing our energies on unknown problems and unknown solutions. That naming issue aside, I think its probably good that Scrum and XP didnt really say much about how to manage products.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

It’s easy to overestimate the impact of this kind of traffic because it just feels good to have your name and company featured. You might get a bunch of inbound emails from other press and partners, and all of these things can contribute to a feeling that you’re on your way to getting tons of traffic. It strokes your ego.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Of the techniques he mentioned, I think four are fundamental and critical for any lean startup: TDD (or the even more politely named TATFT ) Continuous integration Automate your deployments Collect statistics The tools to help you do these things are getting better and better every day, but dont confuse tools with process.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

I want to thank Techstars for putting this event together and giving me a chance to experience the scene, even if it lacks a name. Building on this, I’ve recently become fascinated with the notion of continuous deployment , a concept that has been popularized by Eric Ries and others. Read the rest. Try About the author.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names&# in the meeting. We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. Soon, each new engineer was assigned a mentor, and we made it part of the mentor’s job to teach the curriculum.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Beyond Apple, we can find examples of the Steve Jobs character at Toyota, in the form of the Chief Engineer. There are some good anecdotes about Chief Engineers in the Toyota Product Development Book. Apple also hired away key engineers from Pixo, who I believe still work there. August 2, 2009 9:50 AM Milton said.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

It moves at a rapid clip, each argument backed up with the relevant math and equations: marginal profit , Littles law , Markov processes , probability theory , you name it. If we showed the Toyota Production System to an Internet protocol engineer, it is likely that he would remark, "That is a tail-dropping FIFO queue.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Startups are the lifeblood of our economy.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

If she is, return the name of the hypothesis she was exposed to before. Return the name of the hypothesis chosen or assigned. From the point of view of the caller of the function, they just pass in the name of the experiment and its various hypotheses. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

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. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. One last thought.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. We're starting our new business, fanminder.com, to help small merchants instantly communicate with their customers, and I'm increasingly hearing your name and reading your keen insights. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - lets face it - PHP can be pretty painful. Almost every PHP-based website is burdened with ugly URLs that contain the name of the file that implements each page. Through my platform choices, I have forced many people to learn PHP and to work with it on a regular basis.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. After Ive built my first successful app, and all kinds of competitors have copied me and have similar apps right next to mine in the store, how will I continue to get new customers? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned quite a few of these, including these most important ones: having engineers post on the forums in their own name when they make a change routinely split-testing new changes routinely conducting in-person usability tests and interviews Net Promoter Score Each of these techniques is fundamentally bottoms-up.

Advisory Board 151

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Ironically, meetings like this had given data and experimentation a bad name inside this company. The first few changes, like a price change, may not require a lot of engineering effort. But they require coordination across departments – engineering, marketing, customers service. What a waste. And who can blame them?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

In fact, we know so much that we already know what they will care enough about (namely, the product’s quality – as opposed to, say, missing features). The second misunderstanding is a concern for what will happen if things turn out exactly as we originally predicted (namely, badly). I understand this fear.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Much of what I have found effective is counter-intuitive, because it requires investing more effort in each hire - all in the name of efficiency. Particularly the Continuous Deployment and Split testing posts. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. The blog is fantastic as well. Keep them coming.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

The book takes its name from Steves theory of the four stages of growth any startup goes through. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Phases of product & company growth.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. Now, in some situations, this over-selling would lead to a secondary problem, namely, that customers would realize they had been duped and refuse to re-subscribe. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. That leads to cashing many checks.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Most engineers are terrible visual designers, but if the designer on their team is struggling, maybe they can help out with an icon or two. Simply put, we upload all the tasks and assign a name to each task. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. While simple, it is easy to manage.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 68

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. Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. The problem should be familiar to anyone who plays Scrabble: not all letter are equally likely to be used as the first letter of someones name. Give each entity a name. For example, consider this simple scheme.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

This attention is valuable to yet another set of people: namely, the traditional businesses (see above) who are using marketing to grow, and are looking to advertise to new prospects. The level of engineering quality will vary. The level of engineering quality will vary. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

A few days ago, I received a great email from Warhammer Online. And yet, WoW never sends me emails. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ▼ 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Want to learn more about me?

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

When people (ok, engineers) who have been trained in this model enter most startups, they quickly get confused. I’m sure other disciplines have their own names for it; even protozoans exhibit this behavior (its called taxis ). In Google’s case, often in the millions of people.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Who doesnt want to see their name in print? Now that were beginning our first marketing, the key partners we need have heard our name long enough to trust us. If so, I might have something that can help with more of a grass roots effort1 Or email me at rush1527@yahoo.com March 14, 2009 11:25 AM Maria Marsala, EduCoach said.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

If youre a startup investor, and you support the goals of the Startup Visa proposal, wed like you lend your name to our efforts. If youre a startup investor, and you support the goals of the Startup Visa proposal, wed like you lend your name to our efforts. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 118

San Francisco DC Startup Lean 118

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on split testing SSL certificates and the effect of domain names. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Want to learn more about me?

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 132

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

They don’t participate heavily in the forums, and they don’t send email when they are dissatisfied. No, I am the troll who who stood proudly on the APC until a man who was nothing more than an egotistical and maniacal bully named Clifford Hicks proved once and for all that IMVU only cared about IMVU - and not its community.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 31, 2009

lets you post a description of a job without having to reveal the name of the company who is offering it, or the contact information of the hiring manager. The actual exchange of information occurs in private, in email. Know someone whod make a great engineer at a startup? That said, this is pretty different from an email.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Startup Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

The same is true of brand-name products in almost every category (and it can be measured ). Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ▼ 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. February 19, 2009 5:23 PM Maryam Asif said.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Or take a recent TechCrunch article about a startup I wont name: “X billion messages sent since June 2009.&# Or take a recent TechCrunch article about a startup I wont name: “X billion messages sent since June 2009.&# Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Want to learn more about me?

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154