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A real Customer Advisory Board

Startup Lessons Learned

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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Lessons Learned: About the author

Startup Lessons Learned

He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. Thanks to Suns amazing PR blitz, there was tremendous demand for experts on Java, and I did my best to convince people that I was one of that mythical breed.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Building Great Founding Teams

Steve Blank

(However, in some industries such as life sciences, founders may be tenured professors who are not going to give up their faculty positions, so they often become the head of a startup’s scientific advisory board, but aren’t part of the founding team.). A couple of caveats about founders with “ideas.”

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The curse of prevention

Startup Lessons Learned

It could be fixed by refactoring the code itself, or by partitioning the data horizontally or vertically, or by adding additional capacity at the point of the bottleneck, or by shaping end-user demand, or even by removing the feature itself. Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a resp.

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[Excerpt] Earlyvangelists: The Most Important Customers of All

ReadWriteStart

They can be relied on for feedback and initial sales; they’ll tell others about the product and spread the word that the vision is real. Moreover, they can be potential advisory board candidates. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) First. MVPs for Web/Mobile Are Different.

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Startup Tools

steveblank.com

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.