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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Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

I was having coffee with the CEO of a new startup, listening to her puzzle through how to communicate to potential customers. This is often a tough concept for engineering founders who believe that if we just tell customers about the features that make their product faster, cheaper, etc. they’ll win.). Step 3: Media.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

70% of Chinese Internet users are under 30. Internet penetration in Beijing is greater than 70% while it’s less than 25% in Yunnan, Jiangxi, Guizhou and other provinces. The slide below from the Zhen Fund shows the breadth of business coverage of each of the Chinese Internet incumbents. New Rules for China. Fear of Failure.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I’ve watched the Valley go from Microwave Valley – to Defense Valley – to Silicon Valley to Internet Valley. the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s, the emergence of Venture Capital as a professional industry, the personal computer revolution in 1980’s, the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally.

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Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

Max entered Stanford in the fall of 2010 as a freshman, took as many of the engineering entrepreneurship classes as he could and independent study with me. (He They went to work gathering deep knowledege of what makes successful Internet startups. Max and his partners interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

We’re now in the second Internet bubble. VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

70% of Chinese Internet users are under 30. Internet penetration in Beijing is greater than 70% while it’s less than 25% in Yunnan, Jiangxi, Guizhou and other provinces. The slide below from the Zhen Fund shows the breadth of business coverage of each of the Chinese Internet incumbents. New Rules for China. Fear of Failure.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. I hope this thinking already sounds inane to you. What plan says that?

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. Sales channels are the paths through which your product lands in customers’ hands. It has a growth engine.

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Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

Everybody and their mom uses the internet to discover new brands, influencers and ultimately to buy new products and services. If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. Custom development. Custom developers can really bring your vision to life.

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SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” I first witnessed this many years ago when I was an engineer for HP, building platform and tool technology products for “the enterprise.” ” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. 5) Funding.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

So bowing to popular demand the 2009 blog posts are now available on Amazon on a portable device which provides instant and random access to any post and does not require power or an internet connection. After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures.

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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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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

It ultimately failed because she was focused on engineering the product, but didn’t validate the rest of her business model (product/market fit, distribution channel, customer acquisition, etc.). Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Chase that idea, stop hiding, carve out the time you need. …

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications. When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. The software was idiot proof.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. That means that I (and other engineers) were able to participate in the problem team discussions. Thats why its so essential to have a co-equal problem team.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Knowing your customers is the single biggest driver of startup success, and there’s no substitute for getting out of the building to learn about their problems and needs. Like Matthew, Jason sees enormous value in talking with customers: The biggest thing I learned was just how much you don’t know. Get out of the building.

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crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 15, 2013

Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. I bet you over-engineered your startup – [link]. How did Internet Explorer get to be so bad (relative to Chrome, Safari, and Firefox)?

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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.

Technical Review 164

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. SEM is a simple idea.

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The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

The best approach to hire a developer for your app project is to research professionals online. Evaluate your potential developers’ knowledge, experience, and the skills listed on their software engineer resume. Additionally, some project communications may be misconstrued when you engage in internet-based communications.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Thats why eBay advertises on search engines, and Facebook doesnt. Labels: search engine marketing 0comments: New comments are not allowed. Thats where Id like to pick up the discussion.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT; it was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the internet. An engineer who can talk intelligently about gender!

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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. I want to add one last idea, even though I recognize it is controversial, bordering on the boundary between the CTO and VP Engineering. Heres my take.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. After I was done teaching each the day, I continued to write the operations manuals and work with the test engineers. (I Are You Single? Sign me up.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

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.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Objects in Our Mirror are Larger than they Appear Our first goal was to set up benchmarks to measure the performance of our own graphics boards on the real applications our customers used (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker.) Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.

Silicon Valley 124

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Beyond Apple, we can find examples of the Steve Jobs character at Toyota, in the form of the Chief Engineer. There are some good anecdotes about Chief Engineers in the Toyota Product Development Book. Some of these reaffirm that they do indeed validate assumptions through interaction with customers. 1) RE: 'At Pixar.We

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. Terrorists harnessing the internet to radicalize and recruit new members. Christos Makridis, a Ph.D

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. Terrorists harnessing the internet to radicalize and recruit new members. Christos Makridis, a Ph.D

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. I have found this quite rare in engineers. Many of us engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Its why, at my previous job, we were able to get a new engineer completely productive on their first day. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day. Let me show you what this looked like after a few years of practicing five whys in the operations and engineering teams at IMVU.

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