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.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

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.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

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.

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Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

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. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

It was actually my co-founder Will Harvey who taught me to present this data in the simple format weve discussed in this post. If she is, return the name of the hypothesis she was exposed to before. Return the name of the hypothesis chosen or assigned. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

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.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. The book takes its name from Steves theory of the four stages of growth any startup goes through. Most people cant sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries. Phases of product & company growth.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

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 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. Returning to our example of the beleaguered founder who still has the pager, before hiring an operations guy, try promoting someone from within to take on the job.

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Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

Whether youre a US citizen or an immigrant, entrepreneur or investor, founder or employee, theres something you can do. If you are an immigrant founder who has helped build a company that has created jobs in the US, we need you to tell your story. This is especially true if you live outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley.

San Francisco 118

San Francisco DC Startup Lean 118

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Although I wish I could take credit for these pivots, the reality is that they were not caused by my singular insight or that of my other co-founders. Context matters.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. Alan mentions above what I believe is the critical learning element your team needs to gain insight into via the Minimum Viable Product, Compelling Product Offering or other named approach. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

The same is true of brand-name products in almost every category (and it can be measured ). ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Expo (and a call for he.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 102

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

DECEMBER 16, 2009

As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. Eric Names matter. By pulling in a web of associations, names help people quickly assess ideas. There is a dark side to naming. The naming question has been raised about the "lean" in Lean Startups. Eric Names matter.

Lean 140

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

All the good domain names were taken, all the good ideas were being implemented. If Id bought just a handful of the "best of the rest" domain names that were available at the time (for a whopping $70 each), I probably could have just retired right then. Google was not the first search engine, but it's the one that succeeded.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

If necessary, consider doing this under a different brand name than the one you are wedded to using. Labels: iPhone , search engine marketing 3comments: Th.Khangs said. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Having that data will let you pick an acquisition strategy that is appropriate for your app.

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San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

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. Know someone whod make a great engineer at a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Its incredibly simple, and its called joblink.tw.

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San Francisco Lean Startup Continuous Deployment 68

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

OCTOBER 11, 2010

The key to understanding Lean Startup is to recognize two things: Lean Startup techniques confer maximum benefit in the upper-right quadrant, namely high market uncertainty coupled with fast cycle time. It is written by Ronald Mannak, who is currently the CEO of a startup named Yobble. What follows are solely his opinions.

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Continuous Deployment Technical Cofounder Cofounder San Francisco 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) 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.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal. 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). Yet startups rely on collective learning in order to find their way.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

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

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. “Who is this guy?&# “Who is this guy?&#

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

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

MARCH 13, 2009

Founders push for it. Who doesnt want to see their name in print? In some ways, founders are even worse. My experience is that many founders actually have a deep anxiety that maybe they are not succeeding. Now that were beginning our first marketing, the key partners we need have heard our name long enough to trust us.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

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

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. Startup founders need to use their own judgment to ask: which is the riskiest assumption underlying my business plan? Successful startups don’t.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

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. 1 comments: Josh Moore said.

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San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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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

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.

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San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

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.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

Namely, that they agree to use it free of charge if we deliver it to them and it is capable of X, Y and Z. We have seen our competitors whose feature sets are very rich, to say the least, but we think in some cases, are as over-engineered as they are feature-rich. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144