Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

For those whove heard it, it contains a length discourse on the subject of agile software development and extreme programming, including its weaknesses when applied to startups. As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. Eric Names matter. There is a dark side to naming.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below.

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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. Naturally, we already know the standard of quality that they will use to judge our product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

So, if youre interested in helping avoid mistakes like that, here are the steps: Get a domain name. It doesnt have to be the worlds catchiest name, just pick something reasonably descriptive. If youre concerned about sullying your eventual brand name, dont use your "really good" name, pick a code name.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

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Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

See Also: From Problem Solving to Organic Pickles: 7 Startup Lessons from an Inspiring Entrepreneur. Kanban: a method used to control production. The word kanban means “signboard” or “billboard” in Japanese, and it’s a concept most commonly applied to “lean” or “just in time” production. See Also: Want Your Team Engaged?

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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

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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. I have counseled innumerable entrepreneurs to change their focus to revenue, and many companies who refuse this advice get themselves into trouble by running out of iterations. And what of the product development team?

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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. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Heres the catch.

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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. This development philosophy created a culture around rapid prototyping of features, followed by testing them against large numbers of actual customers. If a feature worked, wed keep it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

A discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students. 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Pivotal Labs doesn't carry "Pivot" in its name by accident. A pivot is a classic strategy maneuver for entrepreneurs, chess players, and ballerinas alike! Thank you for your nice posting. I like this term.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

To give you a better idea of what entrepreneurs in this industry are thinking about during each phase of the startup process, I interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs from all over the world, including our own COO Noah Parsons. Noah has been a key figure in the making of LivePlan, our own SaaS product. The importance of a domain name.

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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. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Github - Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. Lighthouse – Issue Tracking Tool.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

But theres no denying the level of support for entrepreneurs that we enjoy. They take common stock, not preferred, a fact that the entrepreneurs mentioned to me many times. And every year, it looks as if one or two entrepreneurs from the program decide to stay. And do your customer development.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. It strokes your ego. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. my startup is Blank Label (www.blank-label.com), which is a provider of custom dress shirts that empowers consumers to become the designer of their own product.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

Rob Walling generously allowed me to reprint this excerpt from his new book, "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon and in PDF and ePub from StartupBook.net. Performing tasks you could pay someone else $6 to accomplish is a foolish use of an entrepreneur's time.

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bhargreaves.com

MARCH 7, 2010

Many capable founders aren’t developers, and I frequently meet with entrepreneurs that have taken a very different path. Most disturbingly, I’ve occasionally found myself agreeing with an entrepreneur’s decision to hire a development shop to build their product. Sometimes, it just makes sense.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

If she is, return the name of the hypothesis she was exposed to before. Return the name of the hypothesis chosen or assigned. From the point of view of the caller of the function, they just pass in the name of the experiment and its various hypotheses. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. Expo SF (May.

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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. The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource -- the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Startups are the lifeblood of our economy. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. We tried obvious competitors as well as long-shots.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Also SJ's obsession with better taste (positively) contributes to the overall product development process. There are some good anecdotes about Chief Engineers in the Toyota Product Development Book. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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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. What a waste.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. Our job as entrepreneurs is to invent the future, and any optimization technique – including split-testing, many design techniques, or even usability testing – can lead us astray.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

The key to successful integration of customer feedback is to make each kind of collection part of the regular company discipline of building and releasing products. Anyone who has worked in a real-world product development team can tell you how utopian that sounds. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

As entrepreneurs, more than any other industry, we’re in the meritocracy business. If women face structural barriers to becoming entrepreneurs, then those few who are able to overcome those barriers are probably exceptional to begin with. Or, maybe it is true that women make better entrepreneurs than men.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Even with only a few months of development, third parties have crammed every single category in the store full of apps. All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names&# in the meeting. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? There’s no easy fix to this problem.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuous deployment. Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Figuring this out takes time, and few entrepreneurs have the patience to wait it out, because the business plan does such a good job of explaining what customers are going to think. Who doesnt want to see their name in print? gave us two years of a beta product to build up the service and the brand awareness. Expo SF (May.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

A group of Seedcamp entrepreneurs started a startup tools wiki for that purpose, and we thought it would be well suited here. Add a class name to buttons, forms, quotes, etc. Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. Great for visualizing work of product development. Agile eLearning.

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