Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 Waves of technology platforms I still remember the first time I switched to LAMP. That startup didnt turn out so well, but not for lack of technology. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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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

MARCH 18, 2011

Dot.com Bubble ( 1995-2000): “ Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability. With Netscape’s IPO , there was suddenly a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit. The New Bubble : (2011 – 2014): Here we go again…. (If

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? 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. Heres my take.

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

They bought distribution and engineering talent. In the former case many people scoffed at paying up for Google at IPO. Rumored: Digital Sky Technologies. Stitcher - San Francisco-based service that lets users customize talk radio programming on their mobile devices. No big surprise. Good deal for all.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

One would think that designing a medical device would be a simple engineering problem, and startups would be emerging right and left. government is the leading payer for most of health care, and under ObamaCare the government’s role in reimbursing for medical technology will increase. Life Sciences II – Medical Devices.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build a world-class technology platform, with patent-pending algorithms and the ability to scale to millions of simultaneous users. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. Ship it when its done, not a moment before.

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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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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.

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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

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. 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. An engineer who can talk intelligently about gender! hope to hear from you.

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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

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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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. Turns out, they were incredibly well-credentialed graduate students who had, in fact, developed some interesting new robotics technology. whos on the engineering team?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

As Ive written previously , lean startups are built upon three main trends: Technology commoditization. Combined with the technology trends above, it also enables rapid deployment strategies like just-in-time scalability. Customer development. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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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

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I know it's going to help me immensely! August 13, 2009 3:43 AM Robert said. Thanks Eric.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Do the engineers understand what they are building? Of course, its easy to sit outside any team and criticize its failures. ► 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.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

My most recent startup created a marketplace for customers to buy and sell virtual goods for their 3D avatar. So you can imagine how I expected some skepticism when pitching ideas about technology innovation to, say, the U.S. My most recent startup created a marketplace for customers to buy and sell virtual goods for their 3D avatar.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

At IMVU , our engineering team accumulated thousands upon thousands of tests, and we had a build cluster (using BuildBot ) that ran them. Thats possible now, and it means that the historical ratio of QA to engineering is going to have to change (on the other hand, QA is now a lot more interesting of a job). Completely necessary.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

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. Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Just change it. Does this sound familiar?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

In almost all Agile Development systems, thousands of automated tests are run against every change to the software. These tests are written by the engineers themselves, and they must all pass every time. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Behind this analysis is a spreadsheet model, complete with detailed metrics for a set of customer behaviors that show just how valuable the new product will be. They are long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. This reverses the standard intuition about what engineering activities add value, which usually concludes that test coverage is a form of necessary waste but a refactoring is value-added work. As a culture, we hadn’t yet learned how to make long-term decisions.&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Among his ideas are that todays kids should be taught in class in a way that is relevant to their actual lives, which necessarily means allowing them to use technology. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Recent economic events, technological change, and the rapid diffusion of information about the old models have combined to help us all realize just how important entrepreneurship is - and just how little we really know about it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

For example, should we invest a week of engineering time into making our website more failure-proof (which were pretty sure will pay off right away) or into experimenting with a new technology (that might pay off in months, years, or never)? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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