Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The new design improved on the old one in several ways, but these improvements didnt translate all the way through the funnel. Usually, I think that means youve lost some good aspect of the old design. The designers might be telling you that the new design looks much better than the old one, and thats probably true.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.) There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) In contrast, startups search for a business model. (Or

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customer development?

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

vs. sustainable: Compare this to the renewable strategies, like viral marketing, SEO, widgets, and ads, which can scale into 10s of millions of users but are primarily centered around tough, non-user centric work. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Startups could now get a first version of a product out to customers in weeks/months rather than months/years. That requires building a company using Agile and Customer Development.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. Some products have relatively obvious monetization mechanisms, and the real risks are in customer adoption. April 15, 2009 4:06 PM Eric said.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

The Four Steps to the Epiphany (highly recommended book by Steve Blank) preaches for customer development before product development, advocating a quick launch with a minimal feature set rather than a full fledged product offering. Like on a date, you pretty much create a judgement in your mind in the first 15 seconds.

Lean 120

Lean Customer Development Audience Viral 120

crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 15, 2013

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link].

Social Media 105

Social Media Small Business Design Media 105

crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) | Customer Development Labs - [link]. Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

Social Media 93

Social Media Small Business Design Media 93

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. As soon as possible!&#

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

At a high level, anything that drives virality should be free. To take your specific example about virality - why do we want to have more users sign up? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? January 28, 2009 1:54 AM startupcfo said.

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

If you ask an expert in Facebook apps to come help build yours, youll usually hear the same advice: build your app for virality. Thats sensible advice; most people who have made a business on Facebook rely on the viral driver of growth. If you have a virally-growing app, you dont need the extra installs.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Social Network Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Some designers also hate optimizing (which is why the “41 shades of blue&# test is so famous – a famous designer claims to have quit over it ). After you’ve spent months on a painstaking new design, who wants to be told what color blue to use? It takes some getting used to for most designers, though.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

This is a common problem that results from viral-loop optimization. By copying the exact same registration flow as every other successful viral app, many viral apps completely lose their positioning. Customers cant even remember what apps theyve signed up for, and become entirely dependent on notifications to bring them back.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

On Facebook, viral distribution has proved decisive. Those companies who have learned to build apps that optimize the viral loop dominate in every category where they compete. Not many customers ever browse the app directory or search for specific apps - they dont have to, they find out about apps by being invited by a friend.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. If your app has strong word-of-mouth or viral components, your retention drives new acquisition, and its not so important to have good placement in the store.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

If it's the number of invites sent, it's virality. That’s because they require you to have a deep understanding of your customers. In the Lean Startup world, this is called customer development. But even if the hypothesis isn’t founded in hard data, the experiment design must be. But they are.

Metrics 156

Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 156

conversionxl.com

FEBRUARY 4, 2014

note: If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use customer development questions for your page to resonate with future traffic). All of this is to inform a landing page design that’s in-line with your target market expectations which plays a huge role in reducing the amount of friction it takes for them to convert.

Analytics 98

Analytics Software Review Conversion Video 98

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

” April, 2012 – Andrew Chen writes Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing , which goes viral (2.4K Startups are designed for astronomical growth. Now, people begin defining growth hacking as a process, a systematic approach, a “viral loop”, etc. Conducted Customer Development.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 5, 2014

Yesterday Kissmetrics blogged A recipe of viral features used by the fastest growing startups. It’s a good read for anybody who wants to increase the number of free customers they are getting. It’s a design principle. You must understand your audience and design a user flow that leads to sharing. It’s engineered.

Viral 92

Viral Lean SEO Software 92

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. If the product needs to be tweaked just a little bit in order to convert users into customers, you want to figure that out before the launch. If the viral coefficient is 0.9, And if your product doesnt retain customers, whats the point of driving a bunch of them to use it?

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

This will help me improving me my work skills in term of coding and designing. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I should be worried and tensed while coding, twice. I should feel the embarrassing feedback which an unsatisfied user can mail me. That what actual CI is.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

ConversionXL

MAY 29, 2013

Looks like your 12-year old cousin designed it. #7 13 It looks like my grandma designed it. Great visual design helps conversions a whole bunch. Since responsive design boosts mobile conversions , that’s the way to go. “Add social sharing buttons so your landing page can go viral!” Get rid of it.

PPC 132

PPC Mobile Conversion Stock 132

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.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

When registration is too easy, customers can get confused about what they are registering for. This is similar to the problem that viral loop companies have with the engagement loop : by making it too easy to join, they actually give away the positioning that allows for longer-term engagement.)

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

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. These are two other Extreme Programming practices that are explicitly designed to counteract the problems inherent in this situation.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

To begin with, see if you can get designers, programmers, and QA on the same team together. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lets start with the most important thing you can do to help product teams succeed: make them cross-functional.

San Francisco 74

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 30, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 83

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 83

Duct Tape Marketing

MARCH 1, 2016

Referral Marketing – This includes intentional word of mouth activities, viral tactics as well as intentional referral generation. Let’s say you sell a pretty standard $4,000 web design package. Create workshops and offer to conduct them for your partner’s customers. Here’s quick rundown of the various channels to choose from.

Lead Generation 28

Lead Generation Channel Partner Campaign 28

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever. "Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?" When Zuckerberg started Thefacebook.com he was a PHP coder (translation: not a real developer).

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In established companies, the MRD process ensures that engineering will build a product that appeals to existing customers in a known market, where customers and their needs are known. On a startup’s first day, there’s limited - if any - customer input for creating a formal product specification.

Customer 119

Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Is the company growing because of an amazing viral loop paired with a strong engagement loop? My point is that this article does not contain the kind of information we’d need to draw reasonable inferences, which is by design. Is the company growing because of an amazing viral loop paired with a strong engagement loop?

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

grasshopperherder.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

Q: “What will be your best channel for customer acquisition?&# We’re testing a viral loop, direct sales, and affiliate marketing.&# &# A: “I don’t know, I’m targeting a six month schedule.&# A: “I don’t know. Those are answers I respect, because you don’t know everything and neither do I.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder NDA Founder Sweat Equity 47

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 16, 2013

Seems like every third startup nowadays is using the “Freemium” business model: The lowest service tier is free, and the business is designed to get those users hooked and then upgrade to a paid plan. It also means you essentially have to build a viral product, because you can’t afford advertising.

Marketing 318

Marketing Viral Campaign Business Model 318