Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

It’s easy to overestimate the impact of this kind of traffic because it just feels good to have your name and company featured. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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. Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence. hey eric, love the blog.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities. And do your customer development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Instead, focus on getting them ready for that stage.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

I want to thank Techstars for putting this event together and giving me a chance to experience the scene, even if it lacks a name. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Traveling to new startup hubs is one of my favorite things about being able to do this full-time.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

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. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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. Ive previously named his post Achieving Flow in a Lean Startup as one of my favorite blog posts of 2009. Continuous Deployment is Continuous Flow applied to software.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

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. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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. He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Much of what I have found effective is counter-intuitive, because it requires investing more effort in each hire - all in the name of efficiency. In fact, unless you are adding capacity to a bottleneck in your development process, you probably should not be hiring at all. Not in my experience.

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Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

If youre a startup investor, and you support the goals of the Startup Visa proposal, wed like you lend your name to our efforts. If youre a startup investor, and you support the goals of the Startup Visa proposal, wed like you lend your name to our efforts. You can read about the latest iteration of the proposal at StartupVisa.com.

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San Francisco DC Startup Lean 118

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

To give our leadership an estimate of the Soviet’s nuclear production capacity, the CIA also had to estimate how many nuclear weapons could the Soviet Union make. Where were their production facilities? If you want to refer to PVO by name, call it just PVO (acronym for “Air Defense&# in Russian). Reply Nelson A.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. As Steve writes in the Four Steps to the Epiphany , we always seek to find a market for the product as currently specified , not conduct a focus group to tell us what the spec should be.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

The same is true of brand-name products in almost every category (and it can be measured ). Beyond their brand, I want to argue that every product contains both tangible and intangible sources of value, and that everything you buy has at least some "virtual goods" component.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. Eric Names matter. By pulling in a web of associations, names help people quickly assess ideas. There is a dark side to naming. The naming question has been raised about the "lean" in Lean Startups. Was that really the Kent Beck?

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

All the good domain names were taken, all the good ideas were being implemented. If Id bought just a handful of the "best of the rest" domain names that were available at the time (for a whopping $70 each), I probably could have just retired right then. Ultimately your product must be useful. I really appreciate this post.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

Take a look at The App Store after the gold rush - FierceDeveloper : According to a recent BusinessWeek feature , the flood of new games, productivity tools and related iPhone software is making it difficult for the vast majority of apps to crack the consumer consciousness. Dont do PR upfront, dont put out a press release.

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San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, heres my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesnt go out and ask customers what they want. He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right. We stopped production for five months.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Many of them have really cool products shipping or about to be released, and I wholeheartedly agree with my friends at the iFund that the next generation of applications is going to be amazing. Even with only a few months of development, third parties have crammed every single category in the store full of apps. I cant really tell.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

This also literally can’t catch every problem, because your test sandboxes or test clusters will never be exactly like the production system. But I will tell you not to have too little or too much, because those definitely ruin the food or product. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

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? In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. SEM is a simple idea.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Product launch) In todays world, there is no reason you have to do these two things at the same time. Do some Customer Development instead.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 31, 2009

They may not have an open req for a specific job, but if the right amazing person walks in the door, they will always find something productive for them to do. lets you post a description of a job without having to reveal the name of the company who is offering it, or the contact information of the hiring manager.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Startup Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy&# or “our team moves too slow.&# Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names&# in the meeting. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 11, 2009 Innovation inside the box I was recently privy to a product prioritization meeting in a relatively large company. The team spent an hour trying to decide on a new pricing strategy for their main product line. It was fascinating. The whole process had taken. What a waste.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. Over many years, we’ve learned a lot about what customers want.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

In most applications, most of the time, customers return to use the application not in response to a notification or event, but under their own volition. These decisions are critical to the success of any high-engagement product, and they take place entirely inside the minds of customers. Impressive. It all depends on: 1.

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The work product is a more realistic test, although it requires much more work on the part of the candidate. For more on this subject, take a look at The product managers lament.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I usually recommend a three-part board, where the left column is where the scrum-style "product backlog" is maintained in priority order, the middle represents tasks in progress, and the right column is for tasks recently finished. Simply put, we upload all the tasks and assign a name to each task. 1 comments: Josh Moore said.

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San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. The problem should be familiar to anyone who plays Scrabble: not all letter are equally likely to be used as the first letter of someones name. Give each entity a name. For example, lets say you have data about customers.

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San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

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Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84