Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. The report is set up to show you what happened to customers who registered in that period (a so-called cohort analysis ). This report is set up to tell you about new customers specifically. First of all, why split-test?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies. And this is true outside of games.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

In this model, your free users trade their time for the benefit of your paying customers. Both currencies are valuable, and free users can trade theirs to the paying customers, who are allowed to access benefits that would otherwise take a long time to achieve. At a high level, anything that drives virality should be free.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

This model has not translated well to the world of social networking, because customers of social networks engage sites in a different way than customers of search engines. If you ask an expert in Facebook apps to come help build yours, youll usually hear the same advice: build your app for virality.

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San Francisco Social Network Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. Organic notifications.

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Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

In most applications, most of the time, customers return to use the application not in response to a notification or event, but under their own volition. These decisions are critical to the success of any high-engagement product, and they take place entirely inside the minds of customers.

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. Customers and prospects are overwhelmed by the number of media and companies clamoring for their attention. Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

But from a customer experience point of view, Im not yet sold. Even with only a few months of development, third parties have crammed every single category in the store full of apps. On Facebook, viral distribution has proved decisive. So far, I dont see any apps that have much in the way of viral distribution.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Do your customers really read TechCrunch?

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

The larger-account division wanted to move the pricing in just the other direction – making the low-end products more expensive, so their large customers would have an increased incentive to upgrade. Many custom reports had been created for this meeting, and the data warehouse team was in the meeting, too.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

Having early customers means balancing the needs of your existing customers with the desire to find new ones. The advantages of cross-functional teams are well documented, and for a thorough treatment I recommend the theory in the second half of Agile Software Development with Scrum. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Sometimes, testing with existing customers is more complicated than with new customers. Existing customers already have an expectation about how your product works, and its important to take this into consideration when adding or changing features. On the other hand, existing customers can be a testing benefit.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 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.

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Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, " Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination? "). Customer discovery turns founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. We call these early adopters earlyvangelists.

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Customer Advisory Board Cofounder Engineer 119

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. It exists to serve the needs of customers, and it does this by offering its capabilities to other functions in the company, and partnering with them. I am basically a one-man shop. Expo SF (May.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Part-Time VPE 94

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 30, 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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Is the company growing because of an amazing viral loop paired with a strong engagement loop? Hopefully, they have internal reports that show the true correlation between their features and customer results. For each month, messages are sent by two kinds of people: new customers and returning customers. I sure hope so.

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San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

My favorite is to rearrange the steps of your registration process for new customers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? In the short term, tackling something too complex is more likely to lead to a lot of wasted time arguing about the validity of the test. Expo SF (May.

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