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. For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

So What is Customer Development? Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, developed a methodology for creating businesses that runs in parallel with the traditional product development process. The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing has been very active in the Lean Startup movement. With case studies like this, we aim to illustrate specific Lean Startup techniques through the stories of current practitioners. .&# kaChing has been very active in the Lean Startup movement. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. says Rachleff.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

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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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Steve Blank has devoted many years now to trying to answer that question, with a theory he calls Customer Development. This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development.

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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. Of course, the sales folks had new features as their #1 priority.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2011

The Lean Startup Book is done. If you've been waiting for a comprehensive account of the Lean Startup and how it can help you achieve dramatically better business results, this is it. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Despite all the energy invested in talking to authors about the size of their platform, very few gatekeepers have a rigorous set of metrics for measuring it. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that a lot?

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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. Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

They measure their success on metrics that reflect success in execution, and they reward execution. 20 th century Management Tools for Execution In the 20 th century business schools and consulting firms developed an amazing management stack to assist companies to execute. It needs the tools and processes pioneered in Lean Startups.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. They’ve figured out the revenue model (subscription, license, direct sale, etc.) Lessons Learned.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. What happened?

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JANUARY 6, 2011

Improve the product. Lisa Marino of RockYou , a leading developer of social games and advertising solutions for social media, is focused on building a great team with more gaming DNA to improve the quality of the games it publishes: Make RockYou the place talent wants to be. Internalize culture and values. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

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Up and Running

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

Learn why the traditional way of writing a five-year business plan is often a waste of time and how to use a Lean Plan instead for smarter, easier strategic planning to establish your long-term vision. Sales and expense projections that far into the future are just wild guesses, especially for startups and new businesses.

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Business Plan Lean Forecast Exit Strategy 83

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. With an online course from Stanford and a series of webcasts from the Lean Startup Conference team, you can learn a lot from your desk in the coming months. We’re lining up a series for entrepreneurs this fall, going in-depth on Lean Startup methods and applications.

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Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

One of them used to be a lead developer at [insert hot consumer tech company here]. They need to raise money before building anything substantial after determining that they needed a little dough to follow the Lean Startup methodology. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet.

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Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 10, 2021

When you put together a business plan, you have to spend time thinking about things like your target market , your sales, and marketing strategy , the problem you solve for your customers, and who your key competitors are. If you have “traction” in the form of early sales and customers, that’s even better. Marketing & Sales Plan.

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Business Plan Forecast Balance Sheet Exit Strategy 138

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, October 30, 2008 John Doerrs 10 lean startup tips I just saw video of John Doerrs talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn&# roundtable event. What I find remarkable about this list is how many of them apply to lean startups in good times and in bad.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth. Aug-15: Head of Sales (growth team). Nov-15: Graphic Designer (growth/product). Nov-15: Graphic Designer (growth/product). Dec-15: Developer (product team). Lean marketing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

But if that piece-parts solution is great, then its unlikely they are going to need to buy any additional products. 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. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. If they had done this, there would have been zero dollars in sales. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 14, 2015

We use the term “Minimum Viable Product” as a reminder to people with product development backgrounds that we’re going to build something. Measure its impact in the marketplace using actionable metrics that help us analyze customer behavior. Clarify what MVPs are and why they’re important.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Very few people turn up with a strong sense of “what we should be doing” or ready to lean into a productive conversation The financials were prepared by the VP of Finance / CFO. Often board members themselves don’t do the work to say “what metrics would we like to see.” Sometimes they don’t even know.

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Stock Options Metrics Stock Valuation 226

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Step 1: Start with a lean plan. It’s the fastest way to get your idea onto paper, and it’s the very first step in the lean planning process, which is much easier and more iterative than traditional business planning methods. In the tactics section, list your sales channels and describe how you will be selling your products.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

First, SlideShare is a fantastic product (that I use on a regular basis) and an impressive company example of Lean Startup practices in action. Second, their story illustrates a key Lean Startup idea: proving the business in micro-scale. As this is a new initiative for this blog, we especially welcome your feedback.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 1, 2012

Because you get organized around marketing metrics, because your campaigns get optimized, because your landing pages and drip campaigns become stronger, because word of mouth produces sales “for free,” and so forth. For example, the average cost of customer acquisition diminishes. Less time training customers.

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Customer Revenue Acquisition Cofounder 320

BeyondVC

DECEMBER 10, 2009

So first and foremost, I let him know that while it was nice to have a well thought out spreadsheet, that the most important thing was getting the product developed and the right team in place. So if a SAAS company signed up $1.2mm in bookings for December, it may only recognize $120k each month.

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Churn Rate Burn Rate Startup Metrics 112

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. There is no way to know for sure. Read the rest.

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2018

They take on many priorities—for example, working on 3 product development projects simultaneously—and then work hard to accomplish all of them, which means they cannot go all in and obsess over a few things. “Do And does that value provide societal benefits beyond sales and profits? That’s no surprise.

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Metrics Startup Lean Detroit 349

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 21, 2013

Lean Analytics is the latest addition to the Lean Series. If you're working on the Sticky Engine of Growth , you're focused on very different metrics from those that you care about in the Viral Engine of Growth. Similarly, a two-sided marketplace cares about different things from a traditional e-commerce product.

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Analytics Lean Metrics Churn Rate 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, February 28, 2009 Throwing away working code Lean startups work by systematically eradicating waste. 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.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

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. The lean startup focuses on situations where we have both an unknown problem and an unknown solution.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. Your presentation doesn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

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. Know what the success metrics are for the launch. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

So What is Customer Development? Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, developed a methodology for creating businesses that runs in parallel with the traditional product development process. The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60