Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 25, 2011

The Lean Startup movement has made tremendous progress in the past year. If you recall, around this time last year we were still fighting various myths , such as “ lean means cheap ” or that we don’t support having a big, world-changing vision. This year, the word pivot has become over-hyped ( even on TechCrunch ).

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, November 4, 2008 Principles of Lean Startups, presentation for Maples Investments Image via Wikipedia Steve Blank and I had the opportunity to create a presentation about lean startups for Maples Investments. My path to lean startups began with Kent Beck and extreme programming.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 5, 2010

When we demand overwhelming customer outcry before committing to the slightest product change, we're in danger of losing the value of creating a cool feature that takes too much effort but people just love. We're "lean" but we're not stirring hearts. We're effective but not playful. Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category. That new book is about to hit bookstores everywhere.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? Platform selection and technical design - if your business strategy is to create a low-burn, highly iterative lean startup, youd better be using foundational tools that make that easy rather than hard.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

For eBay, this is caused by the incredible network effects of their business (so-called demand-side increasing returns and supply-side increasing returns). For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. This has led to exponential growth.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Thanks to Suns amazing PR blitz, there was tremendous demand for experts on Java, and I did my best to convince people that I was one of that mythical breed. Ive founded and self-funded a (lean) startup on my own.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Steve Blank has devoted many years now to trying to answer that question, with a theory he calls Customer Development. This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. Heres the catch.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Analytics spark more questions and discussion than almost any other aspect of the Lean Startup method. Alistair and Ben, co-authors of the book Lean Analytics, will help you sort it out in our next webcast, Lean Analytics for Non-tech Companies.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Anyone who has worked in a real-world product development team can tell you how utopian that sounds. As a result, we tried many different stratagems to avoid giving the impression that we were a fully-featured IM system, going so far as to build our initial product as an add-on to existing IM programs.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Anyway, thanks Stevey for your thoughtful post. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2011

The Lean Startup Book is done. The finished book will come out on September 13, featuring an amazing cover designed by my IMVU co-founder Marcus Gosling and refined and tested by so many of you. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

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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. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. for Harvard Business Revie.

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Up and Running

JULY 26, 2017

In the course of this post, we’ll specifically talk about the cases when you should build a mobile app —a product that is specifically designed to run on smartphone, tablets, and wearables and requires installation; or a web app —a client-server software application that runs in the browser (both desktop and mobile).

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? What is customer development? Expo SF (May.

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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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Periodic or on-demand reports are one possibility, but we can do much better. I got a powerful taste of datablindness recently, as I’ve started to work with various large companies as partners in setting up events, speeches, and other products to sell around the Lean Startup concept. We can learn to see.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Is that a lot?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

For most companies it feels like innovation can only happen by exception and heroic efforts, not by design. The Enterprise: Business Model Execution We know that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. It needs the tools and processes pioneered in Lean Startups.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. With an online course from Stanford and a series of webcasts from the Lean Startup Conference team, you can learn a lot from your desk in the coming months. We’re lining up a series for entrepreneurs this fall, going in-depth on Lean Startup methods and applications.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

We talked about some simple design rules and I remember him thanking me for coming, saying we were the only chip company who cared enough to call on him (little did he know.) Long gone from Zilog I saw the picture of the original Macintosh design team. I thought nothing about the meeting until years later. Fast forward to today.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

Its even more critical in lean startups when they need to manage growth. I believe its important that product teams be cross-functional, no matter what other job function the product champion does. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The Use of a Product Development Model to Measure Sales Using the product development diagram for startup sales activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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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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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Many journalists and conference organizers attempt to fill this demand by giving successful entrepreneurs the opportunity to tell their stories: in magazines, on blogs, and on stage. Failures, pivots , and crappy minimum viable products are generally elided. Failures, pivots , and crappy minimum viable products are generally elided.

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Up and Running

AUGUST 4, 2016

True, you’re going to be in competition with a lot of other people, but you’re also going to be operating in one of the most in-demand industries, and in an industry of the future. Building Design + Construction. If your construction tastes lean toward the more aesthetic, check out Contract. Magazines and blogs.

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Up and Running

MARCH 1, 2016

The trick then is figuring out what your exact solution is, and whether or not there will be demand for it on a scale beyond just yourself, or whether or not you’ll be able to compete, if you’re entering an already-flooded market, like the shampoo market. You can do this on your own too using the lean planning methodology.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 11, 2010

High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand. High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand.

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K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

In fact, at the time (1996-1997) we offered both a downloadable product, that our customers could install on their own servers, and a “hosted-offering”, which came to be known as “On-Demand”, then the “ASP” (Application Service Provider) model, and today we call it “SaaS” (Software as a Service).

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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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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Execution by Vertical Market As the class progressed, students asked how the activities/functions of a startup; (Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product Development, etc.) How does product development differ in communications hardware versus enterprise software, etc. Waterfall, Agile, Lean?

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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. I was delighted to be asked to give a brief talk about the MVP at the inaugural meetup of the lean startup circle here in San Francisco. Thanks Eric.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 2, 2009 How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis In the lean startup workshops , we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. My intention is to describe a full working process, similar to what I’ve seen at IMVU and other lean startups.

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