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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. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. The last thing you need is a manager telling you how to do your job. Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers.

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Lessons Learned: Why PHP won

Startup Lessons Learned

At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. In my role as a CTO, Ive always tried to choose the right tool for the right job.

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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. IMVU had a roughly two-month-long development cycle. At this meeting, we would present our goals for the cycle, all the raw results wed managed to collect, and our conclusions about what was next.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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What is the perfect startup team?

www.quora.com

Smart teams understand quickly that all three skills are essential - if you can't recognize the need, you won't be able to hire for it or value it. Tools that technical people have had for years (project management methods and tools, programming frameworks, etc.) Colin Hayhurst , CTO co-founder then CEO of start-up b.

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You don't need as many tools as you think

Startup Lessons Learned

This has lots of benefits, but one strong one is that it causes everyone to check the status of the build all the time. Accurate - if youve ever been managed by task-tracking software, youll relate to the feeling that you either have to spend ludicrous amounts of time posting updates or the information goes stale.