Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This gets me into trouble, because it conjures up for some the idea that product development is simply a rote mechanical exercise of linear optimization. You just constantly test little micro-changes and follow a hill-climbing algorithm to build your product. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

They raised around $350 million to try and sell cars direct over the Internet. Scott left the company, which eventually IPO’d and became Internet Brands. Money to be used for hiring and additional product development. Company plans to use the capital to build out sales and marketing and r&d. -a

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. And here is the howto for your sales bell: [link] Have fun! :-) June 9, 2009 1:42 AM David Skillern said.

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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. ► 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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

To acquire new money managers, the company makes traditional sales calls, which means they’ve interviewed many, many professionals and gotten a strong sense of their needs. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? .&# says Rachleff. says Rachleff.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Because this language may lead you to believe this concept is for enterprise sales only, I thought Id walk you through an example from the world of consumer electronics. It connects to the internet to automatically download the necessary codes. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

Interestingly, the company’s founding vision was not a lean idea, but rather a big idea: to accelerate and manage Internet traffic on a global, highly scalable, highly distributed scale. The company quickly realized that its initial commercial product was in huge demand – they had reached product-market fit nirvana.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. ► 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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

But instead of spending the time and money to develop products on spec, TPGTEX creates mocked-up webpages that list the features of a potential new product -- such as a system for making radio-frequency identification, or RFID, labels -- along with its price. Read the rest. Read the rest.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Meanwhile, individuals and smaller companies emailed by the hundreds to say that they wanted the features of custom channels, but the sales model—arranged like a media buy—didn’t make sense to them. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

And while its true that metrics sometimes can lead to a better product, in my experience just as often they had led to no insight whatsoever, like fancy reports that nobody reads or after-the-fact rationalizations (with graphs!) We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. Labels: product development 4comments: Doug said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge. So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. Traditional department labels just make it harder.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Of course, the real thanks should go to a startup - Gogo Inflight Internet - that I was lucky enough to meet at a recent workshop. I'll add two ideas: The modern structure of university patent licensing and technology transfer works really well in the life sciences and other fields with expensive product development processes.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. Does this sound familiar?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Here was our experience at IMVU, which I have seen replicated at many other consumer internet startups. In most situations, this fear is misplaced.

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Scalable Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

And now all of a sudden you have got this global market of all these early adopters that have smartphones connected to the Internet, and they can just pick up their things and run with them. So it would seem like they are an antidote to, or at least less offensive than, social/consumer Internet companies are to the public markets.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

Sales depend on being right (whereas in UGC we can pretty much try anything, and promote the winners). Your platform may require you to staff up a large production department to crank out enough content to satisfy your customers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

I wrote about this challenge for iPhone developers, in an essay on retention competition : the battle over what icon the user will click when they go to the home screen. At that point, theres no opportunity for marketing or sales; the battle is already won or lost in the persons mind. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

We got instantaneous feedback on the validity of the idea and started our sales process concurrently. LOIs, while clearly not as good as signed sales contract, do have meaning and are valuable. I encourage B2B startups to keep them in their customer development arsenal. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.] The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.]

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. Most importantly, I encouraged the leaders of the company to bring awareness of the business challenges to the product development team. Great post, Eric.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I’ve watched the Valley go from Microwave Valley – to Defense Valley – to Silicon Valley to Internet Valley. And to today, when its major product is simply innovation. the wave of internet commerce applications in the first decade of the 21st century. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s U.S.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Without a basis for comparison, you first have to drive home the need, then you will have an easy time making the sale (after all, youre the person who they trust to bring it to their attention). Toughest part of the sale is to get agreement that you really can deliver benefits that they didnt previously know were possible.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

turn customer feedback into sales and relationships. Great for visualizing work of product development. SaaS Sales Team Compensation â?? Likelihood of Confusion -trademark, copyright and Internet Law. Internet trends. Internet TV. Startups For Sale. State of the Internet. SnapEngage â??

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

To imagine that this person does so only to get attention, or only to harass others, or only to harass you are to play into the hands of this geek autocracy on the Internet that just isn't viable anymore. However, you have opened yourself onto the internet with some really great points that are so wonderful to see written.

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