Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Behind this analysis is a spreadsheet model, complete with detailed metrics for a set of customer behaviors that show just how valuable the new product will be. They are long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market. Expo SF (May.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

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. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

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.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 30, 2015

5 Content Metrics Every Marketer Needs to Analyze written by Alex Boyer read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. Actions such as downloading gated content, signing up for a webinar, or purchasing from your e-commerce site advance leads through the buyer’s journey.

Metrics 28

Metrics Marketing B2B Analytics 28

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. And if you neglect maintenance, you may not have a business left at all. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. Its really helped me articulate my thinking on this topic, and includes an entire chapter on the topic of reducing batch size.)

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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. Monitoring of real-world metrics.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

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. What is the right revenue model? Is that a lot? Is that good?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. This is a common mistake. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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. .

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

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.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Designed for large businesses, the channels let a company share several types of documents, brand the channel with their own design elements, and then include display advertising, contest promotions, blog aggregation, social media integration and metrics reporting. The idea seemed to SlideShare to be a natural direction.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. ► April (11) Video update on the Startup Visa Act Lean Enterprise Institute webinar, April 28 Four myths about the Lean Startup Sneak preview, KISSmetrics (and more) Sneak preview, Grockit The Lean Startup Intensive at Web 2.0

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

LIKED: Y startups fail, cont deployment vs waterfall vs agile, small batches & learn fr biz metrics #leanstartup As concise a summary as Ive ever seen. 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?" A: yes, absolutely.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 60

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

Because they used the magic term ‘personas,‘ development teams were discouraged from developing their own, not realising that a market segment might contain multiple personas. Development teams couldn’t use marketing personas to make design decisions, so they decided personas weren’t that useful. (It

Software Review 115

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 115

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. This development philosophy created a culture around rapid prototyping of features, followed by testing them against large numbers of actual customers. It would be hard to argue against this product development strategy, in general.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

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. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

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. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. Will start to pay attention. Great post Eric.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Turns out, what customers really meant was "let me use IMVU with somebody I dont know" so they could get a feel for the social features of the product without incurring the social risk of recommending it to their friend. Luckily, the metrics helped us figure out the difference. Lets run a thought experiment. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

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. Leave your thoughts in a comment. I’ll do my best to help.) Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

ConversionXL

MARCH 7, 2017

Because they used the magic term ‘personas’, development teams were discouraged from developing their own, not realising that a market segment might contain multiple personas. Development teams couldn’t use marketing personas to make design decisions, so they decided personas weren’t that useful. (It

Software Review 102

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. ► April (11) Video update on the Startup Visa Act Lean Enterprise Institute webinar, April 28 Four myths about the Lean Startup Sneak preview, KISSmetrics (and more) Sneak preview, Grockit The Lean Startup Intensive at Web 2.0

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer). This is the simplest ecosystem and simplest driver of growth.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

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. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

VC Cafe

APRIL 22, 2020

A sales plan often includes overarching targets, specific revenue, and performance goals for a given period. We had to triple our revenue. Now, after going through our second year, every bolt sits in place, ready for the extra triple in revenue. Build an initial sales plan. After the GTM, we started formulating our sales plan.

Sales 113

Sales Cofounder Channel Revenue 113

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 11, 2018

Or look at MailChimp, a startup-turned-$400-million-revenue-machine that is always creating viral campaigns that set them above their competition, like this recent “Did You Mean Mailchimp” one. Product development is iterative—rapid prototyping, fast changes, continual improvement. Join me in a webinar on January 9.

Campaign 134

Campaign Marketing Design Differentiation 134

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. Expo SF (May.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 3, 2018

Most businesses have a handful of target accounts they dream of closing—big, prestigious companies that could generate a whole lot of revenue in a single deal. Virtually any type of content is fair game with industry publications sharing: Webinars, like this webinar targeted directly at call-center managers looking to improve performance.

B2B 133

B2B Marketing SEO Search 133

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.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

There are tons of metrics you can monitor: Conversion rate; Bounce rate ; Click-through rate ; Pageviews; Lead captures; Purchase conversion rate. Setting up your experiments for success: Define success metrics. million; Total revenue: $97.5 Try out different tactics, tools, offers, and designs. Do your research!

Artificial Inteligence 114

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114

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. "This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline." Expo SF (May.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158