Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? But all things are never equal.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 13, 2017

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Switch your attention from product development to sales.

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Mezzanine Private Equity Startup Bandwidth 141

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Another advantage of the early stages is that most dont have to juggle too many competing priorities. If you dont have customers, a product, investors, or a board of directors, you can pretty much stay focused on just one thing at a time. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 3, 2013

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Switch your attention from product development to sales.

Mezzanine 240

Mezzanine Private Equity Bandwidth Metrics 240

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

The companies I spoke to all agreed that the community there was extremely supportive, especially in the critical ulta-early-stage. Then, create an encouraging environment for early-stage companies. Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. And do your customer development.

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The Equity Kicker

JANUARY 10, 2020

Nic Brisbourne is Managing Partner at Forward Partners, the UK’s leading early-stage VC, currently supporting the UK’s next generation of AI, e-commerce and marketplace businesses. I think we differ a little from the rest of the industry, though, particularly with our focus on early stage companies.

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Partner Early Stage Portfolio Metrics 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

It provides a basic introduction to analytics as they apply to Lean Startup, including sections on what metrics to use and how to interpret them. For instance, Ben lists out the worst of the “vanity metrics,” a term that describes appealing but meaningless or misleading numbers. We often tell founders that a business plan is nonsense.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 4, 2015

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Switch your attention from product development to sales.

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Mezzanine Private Equity Startup Bandwidth 120

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 11, 2015

In a good Founder’s Notebook post on setting priorities in product development Ben Yoskovitz recommends that founders: learn as quickly as you can what your best users are doing in your product. That’s great advice. The reason, I think, is because it’s a tough thing to do. Also great advice.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

A discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students. ► 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. Tickets are available now and include dinner.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Most of the people building our product werent themselves target customers. So there was simply no substitute for seeing actual customers with the product, live. Today, when I talk to startup founders, the most common answer I get to the question "do you talk to your customers?" Dont confuse passion with volume.

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Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

I strongly believe that the first few hires of a startup should belong to the growth department, whether they’re marketers, community managers, or salespeople (selling your product is the best way to learn how to improve it). 1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

The economics of these process trade-offs are discussed in the Principles of Product Development Flow.) Heres an excerpt: In a previous article, we called Toyota’s product development system the “second Toyota paradox.&# Labels: product development 5comments: new york web development company said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2009

benjaminjoffe : early adopters of buggy product are visionary customers, sometimes smarter than founders! Many founders dont like to hear that visionary customers are as smart, maybe even more so, than they are. Getting to the chasm is actually quite difficult; most truly early-stage startups never even get that far.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 1, 2012

This is a choice that every startup founder must make , so I’d like to dig in deeper. To clarify the discussion, let’s use a simpler model: Companies A and B both sell products with recurring monthly revenue, and both brought in $10,000 in revenue last month. maximizing reach) versus selling more expensive units (i.e.

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The Equity Kicker

JULY 16, 2015

Team structure in early stage ecommerce and marketplace companies is a function of manpower and skills necessary to build the company and the founder(s)’ skillset(s). Design and development of landing pages and prototypes. Items 1 and 2 should be done by founders and require generic business skills.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

The core of the article is my first attempt to articulate the key metrics (in graph form) that I believe demonstrate customer value. That fostering and encourage entrepreneurs to bring companies and products to market is a great source of innovation, job creation, etc. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. One way to conceive of our goal in an early-stage venture is to incrementally “fill in the blanks&# for the business model that we think will one day power our startup. June 8, 2009 1:16 AM Colin said.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

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.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking? The Traditional VC Pitch Entrepreneurs who pursue the traditional product development model don’t have customer data to answer these questions.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 17, 2010

Three premier early-stage venture investors have joined forces to sponsor the event: Baseline , Floodgate , and First Round Capital. Three premier early-stage venture investors have joined forces to sponsor the event: Baseline , Floodgate , and First Round Capital. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

I liked the flattering Venture Hacks commentary so much Ill just quote it: Many founders believe that early stage startups are endeavors of execution. The customer is known, the product is known, and all we have to do is act. He believes that many early stage startups are labors of learning.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, March 13, 2009 Dont launch Heres a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? This is the usual reason given for a marketing launch, but for most early stage startups, its a failure. Founders push for it.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Most startups don’t have the luxury of hiring an experienced PM early in their journey. Many founders have to turn to brute force to figure it out, even when they themselves don’t have practitioner product management experience. growth/revenue target) to get to the next stage/financing round.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 12, 2009

However, this financial bar has had the effect of excluding one segment of potential customers that Id really like to see there - early stage entrepreneurs who have all the intelligence and vision of their later stage counterparts, but simply cannot afford the cash flow to attend.

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maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Written By Dan Martell on February 2nd, 2012 | Category: Hiring LeanStartup Marketing Metrics Startup Life | 6 Comments. Building Product 2. Building Metrics / Usage Reports / KPI 3. Product/Metrics (70%/30% time) * Get your product activation (sign-up + meaningful action) to 60% * then, Get your product retention to 20% weekly.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

As a consequence, this new startup is relentlessly metrics-driven. For short stories - I think it is always good to introduce some practical problem (you might have heard from entrepreneur at early stage) and how the lean startup method helped solved that. It is a company built to learn.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. In fact, I remember sending him and his obscure-to-me co-founder (aka Reid Hoffman ) a bug report early-on, instead of taking them up on their offer of an in-person meeting.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

What all these teachers had in common were two things: they were technology early adopters that were willing to take a chance on a new software product, and they all had similar problems organizing their classes and students. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 21, 2013

The book has been a year in the making, and authors Ben Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll —themselves successful founders with several exits under their belts—spent much of that time speaking with founders, investors, and analysts to understand a really basic, but seldom-asked, question: What's normal? to 3% a month.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Metrics Churn Rate 167

Scalable Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

In the last five years, there’s been this sort of acknowledgment of the consumerization of the enterprise, which is consumer product development, design methods applied to business software, of which SaaS and cloud and all these things are examples. It became very hard to get businesses to adopt new stuff.

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Software Review Startup Venture Capital Stock 22

YoungUpstarts

MAY 30, 2019

While each side has its priorities, both work toward a positive and user-focused product experience. Keeping this philosophy top of mind during the product management phase is crucial for early stage CTOs, especially when working through backlogs and other barriers that can undermine the user experience.

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Management Product SCRUM Early Stage 138

ConversionXL

MARCH 28, 2019

Product Hunt is a community-based website that allows makers and marketers to launch their products or services and get in touch with their first real users. The community can jump start products through votes and (honest) reviews, which are essential in the early stages of campaigns. Do you want 10,000 new users?

Campaign 127

Campaign Product Technical Review Social Media 127

Seeing Both Sides

JANUARY 13, 2015

Some VCs prefer investing at the earliest stages and then cycle off the board of directors. Others prefer to come in at the later stages, post product-market fit, and not have to deal with the risk and roller coaster of the early stages. Financing: Do we have the metrics to support a growth or mezzanine round?

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Mezzanine IPO Finance Business Model 20

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

VC Cafe covers early stage Israeli and European tech & mobile startups. ” Hackernews list of “Tools of the Trade” for startups - includes over 150 SaaS tools used by startups, and over 150 comments with interesting insights from founders. Startup Metrics for Pirates â?? SaaS Metrics Tutorial â??

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53