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? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

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Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

So Groupon obviously filed their S-1 the other day to formally being the IPO process. They’ve grown from nothing to >$2B in revenue in 30 months time, making the company among the fastest growing businesses in the histroy of the world. Financial Snapshot: 2010 Revenue: $713M. in net revenue and passes $0.58

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Agile VC

MARCH 5, 2019

There are a variety of quick write-ups on the Lyft S-1 for basic figures like annual revenue, rider growth, or who the largest shareholders are. Lyft helpfully provides the number of active riders, total number of rides, and average revenue per rider on a quarterly basis. Rough estimate of 2019 revenue, excluding new riders.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company. Finally the amount of capital needed to take a drug to FDA trials could be enormously expensive, at least 10x more than startup costs at an electron-based company. Here’s why.

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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. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

— Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed: IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm. In the 20th century tech companies and their investors made money through an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Who will ultimately bear the cost of their mistakes? The agile software movement has made numerous contributions: continuous integration, which helps accelerate feedback about defects; story cards and kanban that reduce batch size; a daily stand-up that increases tempo. How severely is failure punished? How important are schedules?

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Agile VC

AUGUST 9, 2012

The company’s lost nearly 80% of its value from the peak earlier this year, in the run up to Facebook’s IPO, and currently trades below $3/share… a fraction of it’s IPO price of $10. Zynga’s trailing revenue is nearly $1.2B trailing revenue multiple. That much we all know.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. What is the right revenue model? I’ve met a lot of gatekeepers in the past few months. They all have one thing in common: the world’s most painful case of information overload. ideas (e.g.

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Agile VC

JUNE 13, 2019

I know some of the investors in Chewy prior to the PetSmart acquisition, but I am not a shareholder nor do I intend to purchase shares in the IPO. revenue business still growing >50% YoY? Chewy now has over 10 million customers, repeat purchases by existing customers account for approximately 90% of their revenue today.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating. Business and Revenue Model – How do we organize to make money? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? M&A, IPO? New/Disruptive? Competition – Who is the competitor? Who is the Complementor?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. Here the key is for your free customers to get value from the site that is greater than the costs they perceive by the fact that youre selling access to them. Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Agile VC

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Companies are retrenching, VC firms are going through their own upheavals, and IPOs are non-existent. Year over year revenue growth rates are measured in multiples not percentages. But overall this is a period where the IPO market remains largely closed to VC-backed startups. Survival is the order of the day.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Ship more infrequently While this may decrease downtime (things break and you roll back), the cost on development time from work and rework will be large, and mistakes will continue to slip through. Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. But, unfortunately, startups cant afford to adopt that standard. We made it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution. Remember that the cost of the solutions is proportional to the problem caused. In fact, even the investigation itself is considered too much work.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs. Just because something looks pretty, or feels like a good idea, or has a lot of sunk cost in it, does not mean it should be pursued. Not even if its generating revenue. Expo SF (May.

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Duct Tape Marketing

MAY 23, 2019

Jenny Blake: At first, I started to ask, “How can people be as agile as startups?” The bottom line was we were sitting there now staring at 60% revenue loss or something overnight. But I know, I wish I had started pre-IPO, maybe I wouldn’t even be on this podcast, I would just be on a beach in Tahiti. So you pivot.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Since we were only paying per click, it didnt cost us anything to cast a wide net. Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer). This is the simplest ecosystem and simplest driver of growth.

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Agile VC

APRIL 13, 2012

And going even further back there have been a few random ones have been built before like Salesforce.com and e-tailer RedEnvelope (IPO’d in 2003 though now defunct as a company). If my memory serves me, <10% of our pre-IPO employees at PayPal lived in SF and literally 1 of the first 40-50 folks at LinkedIn were city-dwellers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In fact, it was the revenue trends that eventually alerted us to the magnitude of the problem. Unfortunately, revenue a trailing indicator. Its a great time to increase revenues without spending money on acquiring new customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. Great post, Eric. Expo SF (May.

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Agile VC

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

Square filed its S-1 several weeks ago and is now in the middle of its IPO road show process. A bunch of articles came out saying that Square had “priced” their IPO below last round and this was something terrible ranging from the bursting of a tech bubble to the coming of the apocalypse. Revenue Composition.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

For life sciences it was the Genentech IPO in 1980 that proved to investors that life science startups could make them a ton of money. Continuous innovation requires the imagination and courage to challenge the initial hypotheses of your current business model (channel, cost, customers, products, supply chain, etc.) The founders.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. In the end, we managed to repair the damage, but only after losing a lot of time and at significant opportunity cost. We were totally unprepared for the magnitude of what happened.

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