Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

In many startup situations, ask yourself "Do I really need to accurately know when this project will be done?" The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Small batches reduce overhead. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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? Let’s start with the startup personality attributes. for my more expansive definition).

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Fundamentally, lean startups do more with less, because they systematically find and eliminate waste that slows down value creation. I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure. Is it time to make your first operations hire? That depends.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web. Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years. Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Don’t startups exist for the same reason? How does that stack up?

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# Expo SF (May.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. We still struggle to create Firm software that is defect-free, and it still requires customer insight (and maybe some customer development) to discover what will Delight.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

That’s what most startup decisions are like. Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. This startup has been busy transforming their culture and process to incorporate split-testing.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

Its even more critical in lean startups when they need to manage growth. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. In a startup, we should take full advantage of our options, even if they feel dirty or riddled with technical debt. Startups are always moving, so invest in moving faster and better.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

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. After all, our startup is on a fixed budget.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

You can train your operations or customer service staff on how it works - all live in the production environment. In a successful startup, the development team is also growing. Very few startups can afford this overhead, and so they simply accept a reduction in coverage instead. Unfortunately, it gets worse.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, October 21, 2008 Lean startups vs lean companies Venture Hacks has a great article today on lean startups. If youre not familiar with their work, and how it relates to startups, this is a great place to start. But I do think it is a misconception of what lean startups are all about.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Thanks to those of you who were willing to fill out the survey, I learned my net promoter score (about 25) as well as some clear other segmentation insights: about 80% of you are founders of or work at a startup, you read many of the same other blogs, and many of you would like to engage with Lessons Learned in formats and venues beyond this blog.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 23, 2009

Customers say,&# Give me feature X,&# “Give me feature Y,&# and sometimes you do what they want, maybe sometimes you’re going to do what you want, and then they get mad at you. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Audio 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, November 5, 2008 Getting educated about advertising, agencies, and media buyers I see lots of startups whose business plans revolve around selling high-value ad space to brand advertisers. So many startups hope to benefit from that seismic trend. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

Advertising 60

Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. will this bug take 5 minutes or 5 weeks to fix?), What will this do?

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Of course, 1000 customers is pretty pathetically small too. When startups achieve that milestone, its a mixed blessing. Lets take an example of a startup I was advising a few years ago. Of their early customers, about 1/3 of them turned out to be high school or middle school teachers. Thank you all for stopping by.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Those of us who have had the privilege of working in the premier startup hub in the world often take its advantages for granted. In true startup form, the world was forever changed when the CIA and the National Security Agency acted as venture capitalists for this first wave of entrepreneurship. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

By far the most important thing you want to hire for in a startup is the ability to handle the unexpected. Those people also tend to go crazy in a startup. The "lone wolf" superstar is usually a disaster in a team context, and startups are all about teams. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 8, 2009 What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups? Beyond just those who will be hearing about the lean startup for the first time, Im expecting to shake a lot of hands and have a lot of interesting side conversations. And what hurdles could be eliminated?

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

MarkH : Key takeaways from Erics great talk #w2e #leanstartup 1) "building a culture to learn " @ericries Marks point is the one that seems to have had the biggest impact from the talk as a whole: that startups should be built to learn. The lean startup focuses on situations where we have both an unknown problem and an unknown solution.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

The idea was that these two people would operate as a unit, with the mentors job performance during this period evaluated by the performance of the new person. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. why didnt operations get paged? How do you get started with five whys?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

For startups (and other innovators ), that’s a decisive advantage. The work itself, especially in startups, depends primarily on intelligence, communication, creativity and empathy. Their recent article suggests that startups led by women are actually more successful, on average, than those led by men.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

When startups grow, they tend to have problems handling the inevitable conflicts that emerge from having to do multiple kinds of work all at once. Have you met that prickly operations guy who seems to love servers more than people (but would never let them fail on his watch)? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. Sharding for startups To support a single partitioning scheme is easy, especially if you design for it from the start. But startups rarely have either luxury.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. Maybe operations has changed the OS configuration in production in a way that is incompatible with some developers change. As with many lean startup practices, its getting started thats the hard part. Expo SF (May. .

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, December 6, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part three Those startups that manage to build a product people want have to deal with the consequences of that success. Having early customers means balancing the needs of your existing customers with the desire to find new ones.

San Francisco 74

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations. Or take a recent TechCrunch article about a startup I wont name: “X billion messages sent since June 2009.&# The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, March 20, 2009 How to build companies that matter (the lean startup on OReilly Radar) I have a post up today on OReilly Radar about using lean startup principles to build companies that matter. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the worlds largest operating systems monopoly.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

(a guide for hackers) (This post was inspired by a conversation with Nivi from Venture Hacks , but is otherwise not his fault) There has been a proliferation of frameworks and metaphors lately that are designed to help startups avoid the all-too-common fatal mistake of failing to find a market. Tough sell. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. And yet I keep returning to PHP as a development platform, as have most of my fellow startup CTOs. Given that startups depend on superstars to survive, why stick with PHP?

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166