Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

One of the topics that raised heated debate was whether I had conflated technical design with product design , because I made the admittedly counter-intuitive claim that sometimes good technical design actually leads to increased technical debt. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Its different from selling a product, because it is not part of our regular business practice, is not something that relates to our core competence, and tends not to happen in a repeatable and scalable way. Ill exclude those non- lean startups who basically exist for the purpose of raising bigger and bigger sums of money.

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 128

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Austin Startup

AUGUST 20, 2017

And, there are potential tax traps as well, especially when Non Qualified options are traded for services. Your investors, the smart ones at least, are certainly making decisions the other way among competing deals. You want to see your product or service performing in the hands of real users. How about your Investors ?

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Software Review Cap Table Securities and Exchange Commission 48

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 7, 2022

I saw an opportunity to create a firm that would be significantly more prepared to compete in the LED lighting industry. By establishing a company dedicated to inventive and speedy product development, I am able to use cutting-edge technologies and consistently innovate faster than competitors. 11- Enjoy software products.

Entrepreneur 118

Entrepreneur Technical Review Software Review Non-Compete 118

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Here are your options: PayPal Offspring Go Work at a Start-Up The Hope: You can get some experience and you’ll find your future technical co-founder Why You Should: You don’t have any money saved up and you have no idea how to product manage, acquire users or fund-raise. We tried this at Yipit and failed. link] Mark V. Any advice?

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

As always, there are exceptions: if you build a viral consumer product (such as an Instagram) where people are just coming to your site / app in droves at no cost to you, then you’ve got a great business. Product second. But this is incredibly hard to do, and most sites cannot do this at scale. Marketing first.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

As always, there are exceptions: if you build a viral consumer product (such as an Instagram) where people are just coming to your site / app in droves at no cost to you, then you’ve got a great business. Product second. But this is incredibly hard to do, and most sites cannot do this at scale. Marketing first.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

K9 Ventures

OCTOBER 10, 2017

If it doesn’t have the product fully baked yet? A Seed round today — like the Series A round of yesteryear — requires some kind of traction or product. They shouldn’t even be looking for a fully built product. Or if the traction is not yet interesting enough to attract a full Seed round? Those times are long gone.

Seed Stage 82

Seed Stage Finance Later Stage Equity 82

Hearpreneur

JULY 19, 2021

It might be the products or the customers they deal with, or it could even be the fact that they are the ones in charge of it all. Through my non-profit Women Of Integrity Inc., Thanks to Sarah Ohanesian, SO Productive ! #12- 30- The opportunity to compete. The reasons are as varied as the businesses themselves.

Entrepreneur 136

Entrepreneur Jordan Non-Compete Community 136

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

How do you compete with one of the biggest names in your industry—and with a brand new product? Why compete with Slack? We had that luxury—we had three other profitable companies (focused on web design and development) when we decided to launch Chanty. We wanted to spend money on product development, not market research.

Differentiation 108

Differentiation Non-Compete Audio Algorithm 108

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. This is a customer development problem. Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, developed a methodology for creating businesses that runs in parallel with the traditional product development process.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2018

He had a laser-like focus on his key for-profit segment, but then some high-profile people approached him to extend this to a non-profit area. Doing less—and sticking to that narrow scope—is key, yet the temptations to prematurely expand to new customer groups, new features, new products and services, and new geographies is very strong.

Metrics 349

Metrics Startup Lean Detroit 349

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

How do you compete with one of the biggest names in your industry—and with a brand new product? Why compete with Slack? We had that luxury—we had three other profitable companies (focused on web design and development) when we decided to launch Chanty. We wanted to spend money on product development, not market research.

Differentiation 48

Differentiation Non-Compete Audio Algorithm 48

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It was always a welcome change of pace to leave the brown of the unchanging desert and travel into town and have dinner with them and have a non-technical conversation about books, theater, politics, travel, etc. Too often people abandon their ethics because “hey the other guys is doing it, I have to to do it to compete.&#

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 210

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

So for this first post, here’s the best advice I can give you: join an awesome founding team and get your product out the door ASAP. But six months in, you’re gonna cry when you see someone else put out that same product you’re pitching me right now. Like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Software By Rob

AUGUST 18, 2010

Not too long ago it seemed like every product I knew was offering some sort of free plan. The strategy was brilliant: get loads of people using your product and eventually turn them into paying customers. We want people to experience the product, the interface, the usefulness of what we’ve built. But is it the right data?

Software Review 78

Software Review Software Revenue Cofounder 78

BeyondVC

JANUARY 2, 2006

All too often we are enamored with how cool or sexy a technology is, invest lots of dollars to create that killer product, and sometimes forget that it is all about the people. The end of the year is always a great time to reassess and plan for the next one. The next question you may have is what is the definition of market.

Management 60

Management Equity Forecast Salary 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 13, 2008 Five Whys Taiichi Ohno was one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System. His book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production is a fascinating read, even though its decidedly non-practical. Each five whys email is a teaching document.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Software By Rob

AUGUST 5, 2010

You own a wall of books, or perhaps a Kindle or iPad bulging at the edge of its hard disk with non-fiction you’ve earmarked for future reading. Nor will it save you a single minute during product development, or sell one more copy of your application. Knowing you need to make your product remarkable is one thing.

Founder 78

Founder Startup Software Review Software 78

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Non-Technical Co-Founders Co-Founders Technical Co-founders Finding Co-Founders Startups & "How Important Are Ideas?" " Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea. 24 Comments • Nov 8, 2010 I love this answer.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

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. Truth be told, we've got defense contractors here just like California does too. September 10, 2009 4:37 AM Dale B.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

The Startup Toolkit

JANUARY 10, 2017

Potential acquirers can enter due diligence to learn your trade secrets and then launch a competing product. In most non-cofounder cases, when you get screwed, the correct response is to complain about it over a beer, avoid working with that person again, and move on. After all, they knew the product better than anyone.

Cofounder 20

Cofounder Technical Review Vesting Ratchet 20

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

These decisions are critical to the success of any high-engagement product, and they take place entirely inside the minds of customers. The solution for app developers caught in this vicious cycle is to develop competency in positioning. Its the ultimate high-engagement product. Impressive. It all depends on: 1.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

The Next Web

OCTOBER 17, 2013

Carlos Eduardo Espinal is a partner at Seedcamp , an early stage mentoring and investment program that engages startups through monthly Seedcamp Events, where entrepreneurs present their companies, network, receive mentoring, and compete for investment by Seedcamp. Seedcamp invests in approximately 20 companies annually.

Customer 128

Customer B2C Startup Early Stage 128

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Building Product 2. Product/Metrics (70%/30% time) * Get your product activation (sign-up + meaningful action) to 60% * then, Get your product retention to 20% weekly. Would it be a good idea clubbing all the other products / services under 1 venture, because some of them are totally unrelated. I just didn’t stop.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 21, 2013

Similarly, a two-sided marketplace cares about different things from a traditional e-commerce product. Certain products or services are very sticky, in part because of the lock-in users experience. So churn for those product categories may be lower. That turns out to be a much harder number to replace.”

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Metrics Churn Rate 167

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. I loved to compete against these companies. Your thoughts are much appreciated.

Silicon Valley 132

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 132

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

It got me thinking about what decisions are essential when building a virtual goods product. These decisions cause problems that will challenge you for years, if you are lucky enough to be successful with your product. Others, like IMVU or Second Life, rely almost exclusively on third-party developers to create goods.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

www.kalzumeus.com

FEBRUARY 6, 2013

Virtually every production system has security bugs in it. The first reported compromise of a production system was in an industry which hit the trifecta of amateurs-at-the-helm, seedy-industry-by-nature, and under-constant-attack. Ruby on Rails security sucks lolz amirite? Well, no to the nuance. Was anyone actually compromised?

Security 101

Security Software Review Ruby Startup 101

Scalable Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

Also, yesterday the winner of the latest Crunchies was GitHub and #2 was Palantir, both non-consumer, big data organizer companies. And then IBM came along and productized the mainframe, and then all of a sudden big normal companies — manufacturing companies and banks — could start to buy computers. ALEXIA TSOTSIS.

Software Review 22

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Stock 22

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 3, 2018

They’d built a range of products that completely solved the problem—but they couldn’t reach their potential customers. Many B2B companies run into the same problem, particularly those that are: Complex, with products that require deep expertise to understand and use.

B2B 133

B2B Marketing SEO Search 133

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Remember that story I told about the three business school students telling me about their tech startup, leaving me to wonder who’d actually build the product? Just make sure to not violate any non-competes, etc, in the process! But at the end of the day, it is about a product being accepted. Same with Pets.com?

Cofounder 66

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 66

Hearpreneur

JULY 10, 2017

After seeing the negative effects of dehydration, both me and my co-founder, Ming, decided that we want to spread knowledge about hydration and create a product that could help with this problem. Prior to starting Ozmo both Ming and I worked in a design house creating new and better products. That’s how Ozmo was born.

Entrepreneur 101

Entrepreneur Hungary Software Review Cofounder 101

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

It is interesting to see the emphasis that both Twitter and Quora have put on product design, not just engineering. Sure, you can create a product, but it takes someone who can sell something that doesn't exist yet to people who don't know if they need or want it, to drive revenue.

Technical Review 51

Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

questions and answers for non-programmers. Great for visualizing work of product development. agile product management. agile product management and Scrum tool. agile product management and Scrum tool. Agile project management tool collaborative product life-cycle. Automates Agile / Scrum development.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. It took me a long time to understand that benefit of our product. This probably sounds illogical.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158