Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 7, 2022

It’s easy to get so pre-occupied with handling the business rollout that you forget to maintain and increase your social media interactions, search engine optimization efforts, and highlighting positive customer reviews on your website. Continually add new marketing and distribution partners. Real growth always requires real marketing.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Cash flow is a basic survival metric for every startup. Of course, their answer is that the second intends to get to market faster, but every engine has limits regardless the fuel applied. Things will cost more than you expect. Desperate entrepreneurs lose their leverage and die young. You will make mistakes.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 9, 2020

It’s easy to get so pre-occupied with handling the business rollout that you forget to maintain and increase your social media interactions, search engine optimization efforts, and highlighting positive customer reviews on your website. Continually add new marketing and distribution partners. Real growth always requires real marketing.

Social Media 329

Social Media Metrics Viral Channel 329

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh). I mean, have you seen other people? Heres my take.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? Hence, cutting corners often paid huge dividends.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 29, 2013

Not to mention $200,000 in staff time and hard costs. Generously, it might cost you $20,000. In other words, you could test ten book ideas for the cost of publishing one. Last year, the co -founders of B ack to the Roots talked about their innovation accounting and how they were ignoring sales metrics in order to grow.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The engineering team would then build that feature, mimicking the UI as close as they could using the current primitives supported by the system. The meeting was tense.

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Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

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. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. And what of the product development team?

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

By the end of his workshop, you will know how to apply innovation accounting to truly track the progress of your product. Patrick Sheridan will lead a workshop on bringing mobile development to established companies , especially for execs and team leaders. If there’s a problem in production, developers need to own it.

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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.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Convertible debt financings have become an increasingly attractive approach for seed rounds because it delays the valuation discussion, costs less from a legal standpoint, and is an easier financial instrument to “keep raising more small amounts of money” on. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet.

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Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JANUARY 6, 2011

Ed Baker of Friend.ly , a fun way to meet new people, is focused on driving innovation: Encourage more product suggestions from our engineering team. Our engineers often come up with great ideas, and they are the most productive when they work on these ideas. Marketing who we are, not who we may want to be one day.

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Stealth Startup Lean Cofounder 60

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).

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We spent weeks working on this new product, racing the clock so it would be done in time for the real presidential debates. We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 29, 2016

It’s easy to get so pre-occupied with handling the business rollout that you forget to maintain and increase your social media interactions, search engine optimization efforts, and highlighting positive customer reviews on your website. Continually add new marketing and distribution partners. Real growth always requires real marketing.

Social Media 120

Social Media Metrics Viral Channel 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. As the product got better, we could see the rate getting closer and closer to the mythical “ one percent rule.&# But $10.00?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 14, 2015

We use the term “Minimum Viable Product” as a reminder to people with product development backgrounds that we’re going to build something. This is a built-in cure for the human tendency to over-engineer solutions. Measure its impact in the marketplace using actionable metrics that help us analyze customer behavior.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

In practice, how developers respond to this dilemma is determined by their incentives, which are driven by the culture of their team. Who will ultimately bear the cost of their mistakes? Continuous deployment is another such technique, one with a unique power to change development team dynamics for the better. Why does it work?

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

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.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Seeing Both Sides

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

By viewing product development and marketing as integrated functions, not silos, leading tech companies like Facebook and Pinterest are rethinking their approach to driving growth and achieving breakthrough results. Cost to execute the test. If data is the fuel of growth, then analytics is its engine.

Management 20

Management Analytics Technical Review Framework 20

Seeing Both Sides

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

By viewing product development and marketing as integrated functions, not silos, leading tech companies like Facebook and Pinterest are rethinking their approach to driving growth and achieving breakthrough results. Cost to execute the test. If data is the fuel of growth, then analytics is its engine.

Management 20

Management Analytics Technical Review Framework 20

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.

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San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Some are r esegmenting an existing market– directed at a niche that an incumbent isn’t satisfying (like Dell and Compaq when they were startups) or providing a low cost alternative to an existing supplier (like Southwest Airlines when it first started.)

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Although there is cost and overhead associated with continuous deployment, the benefits are immense. Nothing is more demoralizing to an engineering team. leanstartup bmorrow : Not just for engineers: ask why 5x every time something unexpected happens. Prioritizing in a vacuum is a leading source of waste. jellytheory : Ask WHY?

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. Despite all the energy invested in talking to authors about the size of their platform, very few gatekeepers have a rigorous set of metrics for measuring it. Ever-more artists and authors are petitioning them.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

ctotodevelopers.blogspot.com

JULY 11, 2012

The implementation and architecture can also suffer if the team under or over invests engineering time, implementation of standards, or testing discipline in the wrong areas. Left on its own, product owners and development teams just may make debatable and sometimes questionable decisions on priorities or implementation strategy.

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Agile Architecture Offshore Software Developers 40

Steve Blank

MARCH 1, 2010

In most startups the competitive analysis feature comparison ends up morphing into the Marketing Requirements Document that gets handed to engineering. Product development salutes and gets to work building the product. Your competitive analysis must be around those metrics. Lessons Learned.

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Customer Development Metrics Differentiation Engineer 260

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. This is a common mistake. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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