Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. This was an effective approach to discovering a business by using a sequence of product prototypes to get early customer feedback. It would be hard to argue against this product development strategy, in general. If it didnt, wed trash it.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?&# And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. Having trouble meeting folks you think would be good co-founders?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. ► 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. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

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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. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Bring your questions.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Most executives, especially in startups, dont have the courage to hold their teams to a high standard for new products or features. Not even if its generating revenue. Will start to pay attention.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Work in small batches.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations. I mean, here we are, paying them to be there, and they won’t use the product!

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. We just add up the revenue we've made in the past few months from Win98 users, and compare to the pain that Win98 has caused as identified in 5Ys. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Still, theyre not really hitting it out of the park, because their product isnt growing new users as fast as theyd like, and they arent making any money from the current users. Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Now, Andrew’s excellent piece that I quoted from above correctly diagnoses two situations where consumer internet companies often get in trouble: They focus too much on short-term revenue, getting caught in a local maximum via constant optimization. Minimum viable product is a tactic for mitigating risk.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. Its likely that the new release will contain new bugs.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? In other words, what is the minimum viable product ? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

The Startup Toolkit

AUGUST 30, 2012

Entrepreneurs worldwide suspect the grass is greener in San Francisco. The vast majority of VC rounds go to revenue generating companies. 25% during product development. 60% are for revenue generating companies with a sellable product. But check it. Funding can be a red herring.

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mashable.com

JUNE 11, 2013

Perhaps the team is working on a product that really isnt that great or useful. Or maybe the co-founders have a poisonous relationship that will hinder the companys growth. Maybe they never thought about product-market fit. Check out the tips below from founders, CEOs and investors alike. Leave it in the comments.

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Cofounder Technical Review Startup Software Review 111

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. 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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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Software By Rob

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Business of Software is a conference organized by Neil Davidson and Joel Spolsky , and was held this year in San Francisco. Geoffrey Moore Author of Crossing the Chasm and four other books, Geoffrey Moore has been thinking about high-tech product development longer than most of have been doing anything on a computer.

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Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 27, 2022

Are there ways that you’ve seen local businesses use this in a way that might effectively drive revenue? [19:23] One is, you know, potentially revenue. There is a founder called Priscilla side. Not, not just to build numbers, but to do something that might effectively, uh, drive revenue. I have an example.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Growthink Blog

JANUARY 24, 2018

And with Warby’s 2017 “direct to consumer” eyeglass sales revenues of $250 million+, I am not alone. Whether your business sells a product or service, ask yourself how can your company look and perform better online? #8. driving 600% revenue growth and helping the company raise more than $24 million in growth capital.

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Artificial Inteligence San Francisco Valuation Reputation 48

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. For founders, I think it also has another big attraction: the ability to avoid a lot of " free vs paid " arguments. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Rashmi Sinha, co-founder and CEO of SlideShare , describes an early version of the analytics package that’s part of the Pro accounts the company announced today. If your company is using minimum viable product , you’ve probably said the same thing yourself. Eric] “The first user experience was actually terrible.&#

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San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In fact, it was the revenue trends that eventually alerted us to the magnitude of the problem. Unfortunately, revenue a trailing indicator. Its a great time to increase revenues without spending money on acquiring new customers.

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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

K9 Ventures

APRIL 28, 2010

The fund focuses on investing in companies that meet the following necessary but not sufficient criteria: Technical Founders : The founding team needs to be capable of building its own product and have the technical chops to make it happen. Technical Product : The product must have some technical depth.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. As a founder of a company, there is nothing more painful than to see your most loyal and devoted customers suffering. That is what company founders and staff do not get.

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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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maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Or should I launch products and a startup for each of them, focusing on only 1 product at a time? I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. Do that – nothing else but one product / company / focus and get to $1M in sales with atleast $15% net profit. do something else.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. A: yes, absolutely. Bring your questions.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 60

Duct Tape Marketing

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. Check it out. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way.

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