article thumbnail

How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

Startup Lessons Learned

But the early customers all compared it to MySpace. This was 2004, and we had never even heard of MySpace, let alone had any understanding of social networking. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: SEM on five dollars a day

Startup Lessons Learned

Those rates gave us a map that told us a lot about our customers; insights that proved stable even when the company grew orders of magnitude bigger. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing. BillSeitz - yes, but that was already true back in 2004.

SEM 164
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Why PHP won

Startup Lessons Learned

When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Yes, Python developers DO tend to cost more.

PHP 166