Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes product development in the feedback loop with customers. 2008 09 06 Eric Ries Haas Columbia Customer Development Engineering View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. And what of the product development team? First of all, they are not selling their product by hand.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Stage 1: Target the right metrics for an effective long game. In today’s market ( 8,000 martech products alone ), it’s easier to attract the right customer with material they value than it is to chase down and convert a prospect who isn’t ready to buy. Metrics for your demand generation funnel. email, ads, retargeting, etc.)

Demand 124

Demand B2B Distribution Channel 124

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth. This is when metrics come into play. Your customer acquisition cost and lifetime value are the two magical numbers you need to calculate for each one of your campaigns. Apr-15: Head of Marketing (growth team).

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 29, 2016

Continually add new marketing and distribution partners. There is no magic lever for growth, so several initiatives are required, with metrics to assess value returned. Openly reward employees who make the extra effort, champion cost-cutting issues, and enhance the sales process. Real growth always requires real marketing.

Social Media 120

Social Media Metrics Viral Channel 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. They’ve learned the best distribution channel to get the product from their company to the customer.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh).

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 12, 2010

It’s human nature to prioritize the metrics that get measured, so the simple act of keeping track is often enough to have a significant positive impact. Products: You obviously can’t create value without a viable product (or service) to sell. Detail isn’t important; tracking your progress is.

Intellectual Property 223

Intellectual Property .Net Valuation Distribution 223

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. I cant really imagine how much it cost our "grownup" counterparts at other dot-com startups to get their first app up and running. Looking back, that was a special moment.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

It provides a basic introduction to analytics as they apply to Lean Startup, including sections on what metrics to use and how to interpret them. For instance, Ben lists out the worst of the “vanity metrics,” a term that describes appealing but meaningless or misleading numbers. Alistair: There are plenty. Consider a restaurant.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value. For readers concerned about the chasm, I recommend reading Seth Godin's thoughts on "Being remarkable" and finding a unique edge/twist for your products and marketing (edgecraft). we dont talk enough about how it feels.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

And, drawing up a budget that contains all of your fixed expenses, will help you keep a handle on your finances and assist in stripping out any non-essential costs. Product development also occurs in small iterations or changes. Year-on-year growth metrics in unique site traffic is 7.8

Bootstrapping 85

Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. Another great way to test your idea is to create a minimum viable product, or MVP. This is the simplest version of your product minus the frills and frosting. Estimating Realistic Startup Costs.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

. “Growth hackers have a passion for tracking and moving a metric. Without metrics or data, a growth hacker can feel out of place and uncomfortably exposed. This strong bias towards data drives a growth hacker away from vanity metrics towards metrics that will make or break the business.” ” Creativity.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 22, 2023

With a singular focus on building unicorns, very rapid growth has been a key metric. Assemble a distributed A-team from top world talent. Silicon Valley’s conventional model is to integrate local experienced engineering, product development, and marketing people for the big push.

Global 345

Global Silicon Valley Marketing Indonesia 345

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our tests suite takes nine minutes to run (distributed across 30-40 machines). Ship more infrequently While this may decrease downtime (things break and you roll back), the cost on development time from work and rework will be large, and mistakes will continue to slip through. On commit automatically run all tests. We made it.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

Because they used the magic term ‘personas,‘ development teams were discouraged from developing their own, not realising that a market segment might contain multiple personas. Development teams couldn’t use marketing personas to make design decisions, so they decided personas weren’t that useful. (It In fact, it was fun!

Software Review 115

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 115

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 21, 2013

If you're working on the Sticky Engine of Growth , you're focused on very different metrics from those that you care about in the Viral Engine of Growth. Similarly, a two-sided marketplace cares about different things from a traditional e-commerce product. So churn for those product categories may be lower. to 3% a month.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Metrics Churn Rate 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system. link] And - of course - going through [link] and reading up on the various different approaches different companies have (successfully) taken towards getting scalability at reasonably low cost. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

Open Source 107

Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs. Most executives, especially in startups, dont have the courage to hold their teams to a high standard for new products or features. This is a version of the andon cord technique from lean manufacturing.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Written By Dan Martell on February 2nd, 2012 | Category: Hiring LeanStartup Marketing Metrics Startup Life | 6 Comments. Building Product 2. Building Metrics / Usage Reports / KPI 3. Product/Metrics (70%/30% time) * Get your product activation (sign-up + meaningful action) to 60% * then, Get your product retention to 20% weekly.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 1, 2020

With a singular focus on building unicorns, very rapid growth has been a key metric. Assemble a distributed A-team from top world talent. Silicon Valley’s conventional model is to integrate local experienced engineering, product development, and marketing people for the big push.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Indonesia Venture Capital Global 312

ConversionXL

MARCH 7, 2017

Because they used the magic term ‘personas’, development teams were discouraged from developing their own, not realising that a market segment might contain multiple personas. Development teams couldn’t use marketing personas to make design decisions, so they decided personas weren’t that useful. (It In fact, it was fun!

Software Review 102

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

We ran ad campaigns against every single product we could think of in an adjacent market space to ours. Since we were only paying per click, it didnt cost us anything to cast a wide net. We would pretty much bid on any phrase that was "[name of competitive product] chat" and variations like that.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

This has two major drawbacks: the central directory can become a single point of failure, and there is a performance cost for having to consult the directory ever time you want to access data anywhere in the cluster. This is great for something like a huge DHT or a distributed work queue.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Occam's Razor

APRIL 23, 2012

While there is a great deal of appreciation for the power of metrics/data, I've come to realize that Sr. Leaders don't quite appreciate the deep, and often corrosive, consequences of choosing metric x over metric y as a key performance indicator (KPI). It is a standard metric. Don't believe me?

Metrics 152

Metrics Analytics Search Channel 152

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 3, 2018

Even in this obscure niche, their napkin-math suggested that improper moisture management cost companies $1 billion in repair and replacement costs each year. They’d built a range of products that completely solved the problem—but they couldn’t reach their potential customers. It generates lots of irrelevant traffic.

B2B 133

B2B Marketing SEO Search 133

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

We walked them through what we thought would be the major application of our product. We backed into prices from all sorts of angles, estimating the time-cost of equivalent functionality, competitive offerings, other tools we were potentially displacing -- but in the end, we lobbed a few numbers at them and waited to see if they flinched.

San Francisco 144

San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

Scalable Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

In the last five years, there’s been this sort of acknowledgment of the consumerization of the enterprise, which is consumer product development, design methods applied to business software, of which SaaS and cloud and all these things are examples. I can switch to SaaS for less than the cost of the maintenance on the old software.”

Software Review 22

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Stock 22

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production.

San Francisco 122

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 122

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.] We will not lose on their products -- after all, most of them are global.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

There are tons of metrics you can monitor: Conversion rate; Bounce rate ; Click-through rate ; Pageviews; Lead captures; Purchase conversion rate. Setting up your experiments for success: Define success metrics. Always consider the impact of your winning tests on your growth and cost. It costs money to learn.

Artificial Inteligence 114

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

For most of its existence, PHP didnt have a standard package-distribution system or very good module support. Although this was annoying for sysadmins, security consultants, and language purists (and for those who had proprietary modules that couldnt be bundled), it was a huge boon for developers. A "senior" PHP gal for around 55-62.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110