Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

In the past two decades, they have accounted for nearly all the net job growth in our country. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. [.] We will not lose on their products -- after all, most of them are global. We will not lose on their products -- after all, most of them are global.

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San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. Net Promoter Score NPS is a methodology that comes out of the service industry.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. SEM is a simple idea. chatted once?

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

All of the incentives described in the article focus on making it easy and highly desirable to launch your product: [He] claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Googles internal ecosystem tends towards, and its because they pump so much energy into pointing people in that direction. Focus on launching.

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Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

When we build products, we use a methodology. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." The theory of Product/Market Fit is one key component of customer development, and I highly recommend Marcs essay on that topic.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Combined with the technology trends above, it also enables rapid deployment strategies like just-in-time scalability.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

In the very early days, the trick is to find anyone at all who can understand you when you are talking about your product. In our first year at IMVU, we thought we were building a 3D avatar chat product. As product people, we thought of competition in terms of features. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If you dont have customers, a product, investors, or a board of directors, you can pretty much stay focused on just one thing at a time. Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products. The key to successful integration of customer feedback is to make each kind of collection part of the regular company discipline of building and releasing products. Just those few IM features made the product dramatically better.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy&# or “our team moves too slow.&# The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

Even if it helps optimize one stage, if it slows you down somewhere else, it might not be a net win. This is why I constantly stress the need to set specific, actionable targets for new product initiatives or new feature split-tests. Customer Development Engineering : techniques for accelerating your product development.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

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.

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

But they are often counter-productive when placed in a management role for other kinds of work. Successful products and features have a natural lifecycle. The problem is that people who were essential to the product in a previous phase can get carried along and find themselves stuck downstream.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

I believe its important that product teams be cross-functional, no matter what other job function the product champion does. At IMVU , we called this person a Producer (revealing our games background); in Scrum , they are called the Product Owner. about what their function needs to do to fully support the product.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. For a marketing job, for example, its reasonable to expect that a candidate will have done their homework and used your product (maybe even talked to your customers) before coming in.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Question 1: When youre adding features to a product used by an existing user base, do you still do split testing to determine usage patterns? Existing customers already have an expectation about how your product works, and its important to take this into consideration when adding or changing features. Absolutely, yes.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Thanks to those of you who were willing to fill out the survey, I learned my net promoter score (about 25) as well as some clear other segmentation insights: about 80% of you are founders of or work at a startup, you read many of the same other blogs, and many of you would like to engage with Lessons Learned in formats and venues beyond this blog.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Add onto that the incredible amounts of infrastructure code that we reused, and we were able to bring our product to market months earlier. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, and more ► January (6) Lo, my 18891 subscribers, who are you?

Campaign 84

Campaign San Francisco Lean Agile 84

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. And what causes them to choose one product over another?

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Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Youd better be able to speak their language and translate what your product does into benefits that they understand. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

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Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

This wasnt an education product - it was a pretty surprising group to find using it. What all these teachers had in common were two things: they were technology early adopters that were willing to take a chance on a new software product, and they all had similar problems organizing their classes and students.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Hewlett and David Packard, who in 1938 began developing their first product, an audio oscillator, in this garage. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

All my products and ideas focus on early cash and a business model that works from the first day. You made me remember that maybe, and just, MAYBE, the early days is not at there to earn money, but rather understand your user and improve your product. Ultimately your product must be useful. I really appreciate this post.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94