Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

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. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 1, 2009

Cloudonomics and 2010 Planning for your SaaS and Cloud Computing business. As we get close to the end of the year, I thought it would be interesting to put together a post on how to approach the 2010 planning. ► 2010. (5). State of the SaaS 13: Q1 2010 Sentiment. Happy New Year 2010! ► 02/20 - 02/27. (1).

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review Cloud Europe 48

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Every board meeting, the metrics of success change.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. The breakthrough idea of agile is that software should be built iteratively, with the pieces that customers value most created first. Enter Jims post.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Cracking the Code

MARCH 12, 2010

Friday, March 12, 2010. State of the SaaS 13: Q1 2010 Sentiment. So, here is the first edition, including the recent Q4 2009 earnings and the updated 2010 forecast. So, here is the first edition, including the recent Q4 2009 earnings and the updated 2010 forecast. ▼ 2010. (5). ► 02/20 - 02/27. (1).

Software Review 63

Software Review Technical Review Cloud Forecast 63

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics. I just want to do strategy.” Those were very short interviews.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 127

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

In April 2010 I received an email that said, “I’m an incoming Stanford student in the fall and working on a project that a number of people suggested I get in touch with you about.&#. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

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Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 334

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit.

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Acquisition Cost Customer Entrepreneur 103

YoungUpstarts

JULY 18, 2013

After all, they are created to make money by selling a product or a service to a customer. Since then, he has expanded his ideas into a full-fledged book covering both the theoretical and practical dimensions of what he labels as “Youtility” In Jay’s words, Youtility is useful marketing from the perspective of customers.

Technical Review 133

Technical Review Phoenix Metrics Singapore 133

SoCal CTO

APRIL 8, 2010

If I Launched a Startup - The Startup Lawyer , March 17, 2010 Great advice on initial steps of setting up a Startup. 9 Reasons Why Many Smart People Go Nowhere - Life Beyond Code , March 29, 2010 You would have met many smart people who live a mediocre life. There are MANY of them. You might be surprised why this is the case.

Software Review 150

Software Review Startup PR Exit Strategy 150

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In a follow up post, I will use this technique to walk through the design of a set of metrics for a SaaS company.

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more. I couldn’t care less about those.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? And we lost money when we did so.

Silicon Valley 157

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter. It did not mean building a startup into a company to flip or hype on the market with no earnings or revenue, but building a company that had paying customers. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 4, 2010 Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Kent Beck will give the opening keynote at the Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, March 25, 2010 Speed up or slow down? Defective prototype code was as often thrown out (because customers didnt want it) as it was fixed (when customers did). Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much?

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said. April 6, 2010 8:23 AM Colie Brice said. Good stuff. Great blog!

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

Financial Snapshot: 2010 Revenue: $713M. Revenue Growth: 2241% YoY (2010 vs 2009), 1357% YOY (Q1 2011 vs Q1 2010). 2010 Gross Profit: $280M. Gross Profit Margins: 42% (Q1 2011), 39% (2010), 36% (2009) –> i.e. for every $1 of Groupons sold, the company currently keeps $0.42 in net revenue and passes $0.58

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North America Chicago Boston Silicon Valley 100

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, October 4, 2008 About the author ( Update January, 2010: This post originally dates from October, 2008 back when I first started writing this blog. Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) hey eric, love the blog.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, June 2, 2010 The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business Review) I continue my series for Harvard Business Review with the Lean Startup technique called Five Whys. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much?

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. The report is set up to show you what happened to customers who registered in that period (a so-called cohort analysis ). This report is set up to tell you about new customers specifically. First of all, why split-test?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Berkeley in 2010 to run the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship in the Haas School of Business we were teaching entrepreneurship the same way as when I was a student back in 1995. Traction and evidence from customers were what investors were looking for – even in “slow” sectors like healthcare and energy. And there it was.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 31, 2016

Whenever Sean Elliot (who coined the term “growth hacker” back in 2010) joins a company, he writes it into the contract that the team needs to build proper growth monitoring dashboards and A/B testing platforms. In other words, if you’re looking at generic metrics, you’ll end up with a generic strategy.

Software Review 60

Software Review South Africa Hockey Stick Viral 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, January 15, 2010 Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business Review) The next part in the series I am writing for Harvard Business Review is online. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 8, 2010 Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review) The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. For more, read on.

Metrics 121

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, July 28, 2010 Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot (The following guest post is a new experiment for this blog. Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. says Rachleff.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. We finally settled on a $1.99 Setup a simple website.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. We hadn’t taken the time to learn the basics of packaging ourselves.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, January 7, 2010 Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Although much of it will sound familiar to readers of this blog, whats new is my first step towards the " new entrepreneurship " that is my goal for 2010. I think we have a lot to learn from each other. So, Id like to ask you a favor.

San Francisco 119

San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 9, 2010 Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23, 2010 in SF) Today we are opening up registration for the first ever Startup Lessons Learned Conference on April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 151

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

SAAS+ focuses on integrating high touch with their high-tech subscriptions, providing their customers with a platform for coaching and consulting needs. We’re able to achieve this by creating an ecosystem customized to a client’s needs in a professional manner. TSM: What inspired you to start Gin Consulting?

Leadership 166

Leadership Founder Technical Review Entrepreneur 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Scalable systems are no exception - if your assumptions about how many customers youll have, or how they will behave are just a little bit wrong, you can wind up with a massive amount of wasted code. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 23, 2011

It would have been easy to explain the difference by changes in the 2010/2011 revenue growth projections but unfortunately that is not the case. SaaS companies projected to grow 18% over this period in January 2010 and this projection moved up only to 20% today. ► 2010. (5). State of the SaaS 13: Q1 2010 Sentiment.

Software Review 101

Software Review Technical Review Valuation Europe 101