Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. We dont just abandon the vision of the company at every turn.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you. This is not for the faint of heart.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder. Similarly, 24% of all the patents filed in the US in 2006 had a foreign resident as inventor or co-inventor.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

I want to thank Techstars for putting this event together and giving me a chance to experience the scene, even if it lacks a name. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. The first version of the 3D IMVU client took about six months to build, and as the founders iterated towards a compelling user experience, the user base grew monthly thereafter.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal. Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action. I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

It’s easy to overestimate the impact of this kind of traffic because it just feels good to have your name and company featured. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. Now, in some situations, this over-selling would lead to a secondary problem, namely, that customers would realize they had been duped and refuse to re-subscribe. More on that in a moment.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities. Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. Then, create an encouraging environment for early-stage companies. I was really overwhelmed this time.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 29, 2020

fast.ai , the company he co-founded with Rachel Thomas and Sylvain Gugger is working to "radically democratize" deep learning by making it accessible to people beyond the tech world through courses, software and other methods. Jeremy Howard has had tremendous impact on the world of AI entrepreneurship. Jeremy Howard : Sure. Good Lord, no.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

It was actually my co-founder Will Harvey who taught me to present this data in the simple format weve discussed in this post. If she is, return the name of the hypothesis she was exposed to before. Return the name of the hypothesis chosen or assigned. Make a note of which hypothesis this user was exposed to.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. Im a huge fan of small batches as well.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

We would pretty much bid on any phrase that was "[name of competitive product] chat" and variations like that. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer. I explained it to people this way: agile lets you make the trade-offs visible to whole company, so that they can make informed choices. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. Reconciling these principles requires a little humility.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) So I don't think the Apple experience should be used to discount lean, agile, or customer development-type approaches. Regardless, they must cull a lot of bad ideas for every one that we hear about.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Founders push for it. Who doesnt want to see their name in print? In some ways, founders are even worse. My experience is that many founders actually have a deep anxiety that maybe they are not succeeding. Now that were beginning our first marketing, the key partners we need have heard our name long enough to trust us.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned quite a few of these, including these most important ones: having engineers post on the forums in their own name when they make a change routinely split-testing new changes routinely conducting in-person usability tests and interviews Net Promoter Score Each of these techniques is fundamentally bottoms-up.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. “Who is this guy?&# “Who is this guy?&# Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Much of what I have found effective is counter-intuitive, because it requires investing more effort in each hire - all in the name of efficiency. Returning to our example of the beleaguered founder who still has the pager, before hiring an operations guy, try promoting someone from within to take on the job. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. And what distinguishes a good app?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

We had all the tools in place but we didn’t actually practice agile development. No fancy tools needed here — it’s about the mentality, attention to detail, and the actions that foster agile development, not the tools & systems you set up in place to facilitate this. 1 comments: Josh Moore said. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years. Ive previously named his post Achieving Flow in a Lean Startup as one of my favorite blog posts of 2009. Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Ironically, meetings like this had given data and experimentation a bad name inside this company. This team had been working for many months in a standard agile configuration: a disciplined engineering team taking direction from a product owner who would prioritize the features they should work on. What a waste. And who can blame them?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Combining agile development with customer developm. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - lets face it - PHP can be pretty painful. Almost every PHP-based website is burdened with ugly URLs that contain the name of the file that implements each page. The IMVU downloadable client, just to name one example, is written primarily in python.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

We're starting our new business, fanminder.com, to help small merchants instantly communicate with their customers, and I'm increasingly hearing your name and reading your keen insights. I also think you're spot-on with the solution - viewing spreadsheets as big holes to fill in with early learnings. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. The problem should be familiar to anyone who plays Scrabble: not all letter are equally likely to be used as the first letter of someones name. Give each entity a name. For example, consider this simple scheme.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

This attention is valuable to yet another set of people: namely, the traditional businesses (see above) who are using marketing to grow, and are looking to advertise to new prospects. Startup founders need to use their own judgment to ask: which is the riskiest assumption underlying my business plan? Successful startups don’t.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names&# in the meeting. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. There’s no easy fix to this problem.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

.” Hackernews list of “Tools of the Trade” for startups - includes over 150 SaaS tools used by startups, and over 150 comments with interesting insights from founders. Add a class name to buttons, forms, quotes, etc. Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. Agile project management.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

I’m sure other disciplines have their own names for it; even protozoans exhibit this behavior (its called taxis ). When you read stories of successful startups in the popular and business press, you usually hear about how the founders anticipated several of these challenges in their initial vision. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

Whether youre a US citizen or an immigrant, entrepreneur or investor, founder or employee, theres something you can do. If you are an immigrant founder who has helped build a company that has created jobs in the US, we need you to tell your story. This is especially true if you live outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, December 7, 2008 Getting started with split-testing One of the startup founders I work with asked me a smart question recently, and I thought Id share it. If youre a founder or top-level executive, have the courage to be wrong in a very public way. Either way, make sure you can be wrong.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

By only releasing vanity metrics , companies co-opt the press into helping them mislead others. Or take a recent TechCrunch article about a startup I wont name: “X billion messages sent since June 2009.&# By only releasing vanity metrics , companies co-opt the press into helping them mislead others. The solution?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

As a founder of a company, there is nothing more painful than to see your most loyal and devoted customers suffering. No, I am the troll who who stood proudly on the APC until a man who was nothing more than an egotistical and maniacal bully named Clifford Hicks proved once and for all that IMVU only cared about IMVU - and not its community.

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