Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

To win in business you need to follow this process: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act. We are far too enamored with data collection and reporting the standard metrics we love because others love them because someone else said they were nice so many years ago. That metric is tied to a KPI.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics.

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The Next Web

MARCH 11, 2014

Visit his blog to read more about startups and product design. For the past year, they invested in the team and technology to prioritize speed of iteration with disregard to traditional methods of customer development and company building. Ryan Hoover is the co-creator of Product Hunt and EIR at Tradecraft.

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andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design.

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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. Stories like these are what has led me to this definition of progress for a startup: validated learning about customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Yet there is one silver lining when it does happen: we wind up throwing out working code , debt-riddled and elegantly designed alike.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

We lack a consistent and clear definition of the job. When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

And that narrow definition of entrepreneurship doesn’t count all of the managers inside established companies who are effectively engaged in the same process of building an internal startup (see What is a startup? for my more expansive definition). for my more expansive definition). What motivates all these entrepreneurs?

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.”

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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. There are financial metrics (Return on Investment, Hurdle Rate, etc.) Lessons Learned.

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Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need. Start-ups by definition have few, if any, of these.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

And do your customer development. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. And one last specific practice that came up at this session: feverishaaron : UI, design and programmers are all in the same department, all have the same title, and all are evaluated the same.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Yet, I think this definition is too important to leave out. If your practice is not designed to cope with uncertainty, it has no place in a startup - even if your startup is located in government or enterprise. Use some customer development to find out. Definitely like to see video of the full talk.

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conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses. Website Analysis.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

So let’s turn our attention from what may happen in the future to what is definitely happening in the present. 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. My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example.

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Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly. Related articles.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. Luckily, we also discovered that certain other metrics, like LTV and CPA were much better than we initially projected.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Recently, he was bitten by the lean startup bug and has started writing about his experiences attempting to apply lean startup and customer development principles. Managing weekly releases got a lot harder once I started doing customer development. Things started to slip. Just dont push it. Things started to slip.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Now there was nothing wrong with their analysis: anyone who invents a technology as sophisticated as The Transformers is definitely going to make a lot of money. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? They even included a slide with The Transformers on it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

The response so far has been nothing short of overwhelming, and I want to especially thank those of you who participated in the survey and customer validation exercise that helped shape this event. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? For now, Id like to ask a favor.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

For background, we invite you to watch Diane’s talk from last year’s Lean Startup Conference , where she discussed devising an ongoing, iterative development cycle for Summit’s math curriculum, which she reorganized around the principle of student self-designed learning. In the second, the audience was 8th-grade students and parents.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Anything that doesnt contribute to figuring out what customers want is waste, even if its a cool feature. I think where we get into trouble is we have many definitions of quality. For many projects, customer approval and sign off was required as well. October 21, 2008 8:40 PM Eric said. larry - well said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Continuous deployment is another such technique, one with a unique power to change development team dynamics for the better. First, continuous deployment separates out two different definitions of the terms “release.&# Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see. Why does it work?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 21, 2010

So let’s begin with a definition of a startup that captures its essential nature, and tries to leave behind the specific associations of the most famous startups. A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is a tricky part of the definition, too.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

How many employees would a medium-sized business have in your definition? Some people have different definitions of that. I mean they have these definitions. Meetings are definitely one of those places, but email is another primary way that that comes in. Jason: Okay. I’m just clarifying. Edwin: Yes.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

I used a freelance web designer and I only created the core functions to create, send, and manage invoices. Further functions such as expense tracking, recurring invoicing, and quoting were on my development list but I waited with the implementation until I was able to prove that my customers were interested in these additions.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

The theory predicts this, of course, because the definition of a startup as “a human institution creating a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty&# says nothing about sector, size of company, or industry. The key ideas are customer development , the pivot , MVP, and root cause analysis.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

By definition these 10,000 founders wouldnt be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldnt work for existing companies, only new ones theyd founded. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I think this concept is necessary in order to answer the truly vexing startup questions, like: “Should startups charge customers money from day one?&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies. I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds. are nonsensical.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Basically, the definition of waste is different when you know less about your customer. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Labels: lean startup 3comments: Nivi said. I like the distinction. It isnt the goal. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

Given the time constraints, I organized my presentation around two simple ideas: STARTUP = EXPERIMENT FASTER STARTUPS = MORE EXPERIMENTS PER DOLLAR I tried to make clear my usual definition of a startup, one that has nothing to do with size of company or sector of the economy. once it launches.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve. When people start using quality, reliability, or design as an excuse to delay, it used to make me nervous, even when these suggestions were well intentioned. No vanity metrics should be looked at. And it’s really hard.

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