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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. 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. Imagine you are crossing the street.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." Theory of market types.

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Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. As the company grows, this kind of work generalizes into "executing the companys current strategy."

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

We were using it to get features to market faster, and that was working well. But we were cutting corners in the development methodology as well as in the code, in the name of increased speed. Keeping in mind that caveat, in our world the biggest factor in total project ROI was time to market. Top managements #1 was usually ROI.