Remove Aggregator Remove Customer Development Remove IPO Remove Metrics
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Can You Trust Any vc's Under 40?

Steve Blank

On top of all this it was considered very bad form not to have at least four additional consecutive quarters of profits after an IPO.) They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The IPO Bubble – August 1995 – March 2000 In August 1995 Netscape went public, and the world of start ups turned upside down.

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It's a startup, not a spreadsheet

Startup Lessons Learned

In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. Similarly, it’s easy to generate large aggregate numbers by simply falling back to non-disruptive or non-sustainable tactics (see Validated learning about customers for one example).

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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. 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. Time-to-complete-a-sale is not a bad metric for validated learning at this stage.

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Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

Unfortunately, this content-less decision-making process is inhibiting the ability of media companies to develop interesting new content at the very time when this supposed expertise should serve as their one true competitive advantage. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300.

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Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events

Startup Lessons Learned

Recently, he was bitten by the lean startup bug and has started writing about his experiences attempting to apply lean startup and customer development principles. Managing weekly releases got a lot harder once I started doing customer development. Things started to slip. Things started to slip.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. ► May (3) Thank you Philosophy Helps Start-Ups Move Faster (WSJ on the.

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Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium

Startup Lessons Learned

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. That is customer development. “But it never happened.&# [Alas, customers dont know what they want!