Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. Here’s what the product development diagram looks like from a sales perspective.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. Customer development.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

What those sites have in common (despite their very different audiences) is that something is causing their customers to become addicted to their product, and so no matter how they acquire a new customer, they tend to keep them. For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

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. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups. StageGate Process.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? By delegating and training, we create a corps of leaders who could step in to provide CTO-like services on demand. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. Expo SF (May.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

I believe its important that product teams be cross-functional, no matter what other job function the product champion does. ► 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.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

They assume that each person on the team is genuinely interested in testing their work and ideas against the reality of what customers want. Anyone who has worked in a real-world product development team can tell you how utopian that sounds. Every time you listen to customers, you fear diluting your vision.

Advisory Board 151

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. Struggling to explain the successes and failures of those companies, I discussed principles like continuous deployment, customer development, and a hyper-accelerated form of agile.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. Periodic or on-demand reports are one possibility, but we can do much better. In order to use data effectively, we have to find ways to overcome this blindness.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

As a consumer internet company with millions of customers, it may seem to have little relevancy for an enterprise software company with only a handful of potential customers, or a computer security company whose customers demand a rigorous audit before accepting a new release. Expo SF (May.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 11, 2010

High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand. High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand.

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility. When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

Advertising 60

Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Many journalists and conference organizers attempt to fill this demand by giving successful entrepreneurs the opportunity to tell their stories: in magazines, on blogs, and on stage. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Metrics PR 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. What if customers actually like the “crap&# product? Good enough never is (or is it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

It’s important to note that system I’m about to explain evolved organically in response to new demands on the system and in response to post-mortems of failures. Nobody gets here overnight, but every step along the way has made us better developers. Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Key attributes of an entrepreneur on a founding team are passion, determination, resilience, tenacity, agility and curiosity. They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture. And what is critical is trust.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

So bowing to popular demand the 2009 blog posts are now available on Amazon on a portable device which provides instant and random access to any post and does not require power or an internet connection. After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures.

Silicon Valley 202

Silicon Valley Customer Development IP Developer 202

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability. Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. oh, and on the book front, you'll be able to get all of my essays so far in ebook, print-on-demand, and kindle editions - coming soon. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. We didnt even practice TDD across our whole team.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

As the company grows, hes the go-to person for almost everything technical, and so hes very much in demand. Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. He throws off volumes of code, and it works.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156