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Freelancing is the new normal: oDesk and the future of the workforce marketplace

The Next Web

Over the last three years we saw an explosion in non-technical work, everything from data entry to customer service to marketing, SEO, SEM, legal, financial… We’ve reached the point now where if a job can be done in front of a computer, somebody’s doing it on oDesk.”.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. The lean startup is an application of Lean Thinking.

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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes.

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On deployment

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 2, 2008 On deployment My favorite question to ask a software development team is "how do you do a release." The mechanical steps, the culture of how its done, how they evaluate success, how they cope with failure. You can tell a lot about a company from their deployment flow.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

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These Innocent Hiring Mistakes Can Kill Your Startup

Transformify

It could be a digital marketing assistant to take charge of your social media accounts, a virtual assistant to organize your schedule across different time zones, or a SEM expert. Outsource the development of your MVP. This could be the right move as the software development companies have well-trained teams which mitigates the risk.

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This Week in VC Episode 6 with @Jason Calacanis: Best One Yet

Both Sides of the Table

He is the author of “ Joel on Software ” and I was a reader nearly 10 years ago when I had never heard of Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and VentureHacks didn’t exist. WordStream – Provides software and services that help businesses manage SEM and SEO campaigns.

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