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.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. When I asked him if he actually had personally left the building and talked to these potential customers, or even had gotten them on the phone, he sounded confused. But what information to collect?

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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. They measure their success on metrics that reflect success in execution, and they reward execution.

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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.

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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. After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. They never understood Market Type.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

Or depending on your metrics for success, get users, grow traffic, etc.). A business model diagram also shows how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Behind this analysis is a spreadsheet model, complete with detailed metrics for a set of customer behaviors that show just how valuable the new product will be. They are long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

As a consequence, corporations used metrics like return on net assets (RONA), return on capital deployed, and internal rate of return (IRR) to measure efficiency. These metrics make it difficult for a company that wants to invest in long-term innovation. Filed under: Corporate Innovation , Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. More agile competitors are starting to eat into our business. What Drives Innovation?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? And if you neglect maintenance, you may not have a business left at all.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Dave McClure, “Startup Metrics for Pirates”, [link].

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SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue? Unlike an org chart, which describes how a company executes to deliver known products to known customers, the business model canvas illustrates the search for the unknowns that most new ventures face.

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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. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven. .&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

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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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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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

And the final lesson was that we were keeping score on our packaging with the wrong metrics – it wasn’t about awards, it was about sales in the retail channel. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Continuous deployment offers three significant advantages over large batch development systems. Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment. Monitoring of real-world metrics. Monitoring of real-world metrics.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

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!

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. Over-communicate with employees, investors, customers. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. Offer equity instead of cash.

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andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. Portals that want to unify news, communication, tools, etc. Please comment!

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. And we can offer investors metrics to play Moneyball – with the Investment Readiness Level. We think we can do better. Here’s how.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

You cannot draw a direct line to reducing waste or improving revenues or cutting costs…whereas the cross-functional teams, you can tie it to a performance metric that has a direct result in the corporate objectives. You’ve got your validated learning with the customer development you’ve been doing with your own market segment.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

LIKED: Y startups fail, cont deployment vs waterfall vs agile, small batches & learn fr biz metrics #leanstartup As concise a summary as Ive ever seen. I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" A: yes, absolutely.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late. Expo SF (May.

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Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Here at Palo Alto Software in 2007 and 2008, we embraced these planning concepts and moved towards a more agile planning process. Also, the “customer relationships” section didn’t seem to fit for many traditional businesses. At the time, we used Business Plan Pro and Basecamp for this. Do startups have a manual?

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. Even if it shows improvement in some micro metric, does that invalidate the overall design? No one feature is to blame.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Maybe, but the thought never even entered our minds. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Not even if its generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. Not everything has to follow lean startup and customer development principles, and I write that as a devoted practitioner of both. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Turns out, what customers really meant was "let me use IMVU with somebody I dont know" so they could get a feel for the social features of the product without incurring the social risk of recommending it to their friend. Luckily, the metrics helped us figure out the difference. Lets run a thought experiment. Expo SF (May.

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