Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 21, 2021

Then there is the pressure to go public ( IPO ), and open your investment to thousands, maybe millions, of small investors. Switch your focus from product development to sales. Now is the time to start buying your competitors, rather than just crushing them, or trying to develop enough new products internally to overrun them.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. Talk about waste.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. Steve Blank has devoted many years now to trying to answer that question, with a theory he calls Customer Development. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." Theory of market types.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I have personally sold many copies of his book, and continue to recommend it as one of the most important books a startup founder can read.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. You can learn more about the event here. Its hosted by Kontagent and sponsored by Intel.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 15, 2010 Some IPO speculation Inspired by Steve Blank’s post today about the “lost decade&# of IPO’s , I’d like to make some predictions. The fact that IPO’s are disappearing makes intuitive sense to me. Let me be clear: Steve is the historian.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 1, 2008 Test-Driven Development as andon cord You cannot control what you cannot see, and the hardest part of managing software projects is that the final product is so intangible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down?

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Our mystery keynote is now revealed and I couldnt be more excited.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. As far as I know, there are no products that are immune from the technology life cycle adoption curve.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics. You refer to an anonymous Valley-based MMORPG that consumed years and tens of millions in development, but got little commercial traction.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

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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. No vanity metrics should be looked at. It works to undermine excuses for poor or shoddy work.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. I used to think that investments in metrics were a form of waste. Customers dont care if you have good metrics, only if you have a good product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ▼ June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said. This post has been removed by the author. Nice write-up.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The goal is to have split-testing be a continuous part of our development process, so much so that it is considered a completely routine part of developing a new feature. Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. And what of the product development team? And yet, their investors are frustrated. Go on an agile diet quickly.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. 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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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 8, 2010 Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review) The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. Remember "metrics are people, too."

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team. For software, the easiest batch to see is code. I dont think so.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 30, 2008

This basic pattern is useful in all aspects of product development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 30, 2008 Refactoring for TDD and interaction design In TDD , we follow a rhythm of “test-code-refactor.&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Joel said it: "Top notch development teams dont torture their programmers."

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Nobody gets here overnight, but every step along the way has made us better developers. They’ll increase code quality, prevent defects and educate your developers. You cant make these global efficiency improvements until you get clear about the goal of your development process. On commit automatically run all tests.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

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. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. What made them exceptional?

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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

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. I think Drucker said it best.

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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

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. And this was a huge product, which took years to develop.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Its an essential discipline of good software development, especially in startups. Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. Labels: agile , product development , Test-driven development 11comments: William Pietri said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 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?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 8, 2009 Datablindness Most of us are swimming in a sea of data about our products, companies, and teams. That’s because many of our reports feed us vanity metrics: numbers that make us look good but don’t really help make decisions. Too much of this data is non- actionable.

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