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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

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.

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Lessons Learned: Why PHP won

Startup Lessons Learned

Youll notice a pattern: most of the key features that enabled PHPs success are considered among its defects by experts in language design. Ironically, as PHP has grown up, its designers have been busy "fixing" these shortcomings. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant.

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Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

Startup Lessons Learned

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. In a customer problem pivot, we try to solve a different problem for the same customer segment. Thats why its so essential to have a co-equal problem team.

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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

Joel is focused on the fact that in many environments, programmers are considered "just the hired help" akin to manual labor, and not treated properly. I love Joels approach to usability, and I still recommend his free online book on UI design. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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What is the perfect startup team?

www.quora.com

3d - developer, designer and distributor. But in the world following Jonathan Ive, designers are finally getting their due. It is interesting to see the emphasis that both Twitter and Quora have put on product design, not just engineering. 14 Comments • Nov 15, 2010 +1 for use of Platonic.

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You don't need as many tools as you think

Startup Lessons Learned

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. And wait until you see a "non-technical" designer writing simple code to try and speed up a release. If the task is not complete, you force people to surface the issue quickly. (It