article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167
article thumbnail

It's a startup, not a spreadsheet

Startup Lessons Learned

It’s entirely possible for the startup to be a massive success without having large aggregate numbers, because the startup has succeeded in finding a passionate, but small, early adopter base that has tremendous per-customer behavior.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events

Startup Lessons Learned

Alerts and monitoring I use nagios and ganglia to implement both system and application level monitoring and alerting on the overall health of the production cluster. Examples of things I monitor are the numbers of user activations, active users, and aggregate page hits to user galleries.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Please teach kids programming, Mr. President

Startup Lessons Learned

But aggregated across many schools, there are thousands or tens of thousands of them. Youre highlighting one of the challenges that I think this kind of initiative faces, which is that there are probably only a few kids at any given school who this program can reach.

article thumbnail

Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that a lot? I have given more than two-dozen paid speeches this year – is that a lot? Is that good? link] August 24, 2009 2:50 PM Quentin said.

article thumbnail

Support the Startup Founders Visa with a tweet

Startup Lessons Learned

2gov.org automatically routes your tweet (aggregating it with everyone else whos expressed a similar point of view) to the right legislator or agency. 2gov.org automatically routes your tweet (aggregating it with everyone else whos expressed a similar point of view) to the right legislator or agency.

article thumbnail

Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium

Startup Lessons Learned

Designed for large businesses, the channels let a company share several types of documents, brand the channel with their own design elements, and then include display advertising, contest promotions, blog aggregation, social media integration and metrics reporting. The idea seemed to SlideShare to be a natural direction.