Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. And all of that cost was caused by one activity: hiring. Hiring is no different from any other company process. Sounds a little abstract, though, doesnt it?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. Unfortunately, its easy to lose track of positioning effects when optimizing for a single metric.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

Prescriptive analytics The digital analytics metrics you need to know How to use analytics to improve marketing campaigns Define your mission, goals, and KPIs Set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure marketing performance What to look for in a digital analytics product 9 tools for your digital analytics stack 1. Conversion rate.

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ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2018

Amazon has hired more people for their Alexa division than Google has for the entire company – it’s not hunch, this is going to be the focus. Corporate Agility. Transparency correlates to agility (Does your CEO know how many tests you ran last month?). Map out each lifecycle stage and variations, and name each.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics. Your often mention, but never name, your pre-IMVU company, which was presumably Will Harvey's There Inc. Some caveats right off the bat. Thank you.

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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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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. The importance of a domain name. For Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin, finding a good domain name was a key part of his branding strategy. Pick a name for your business.

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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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Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 20, 2023

And there's a bit of a sense that digital was a bit sort of the wild west in terms of, oh, it's all about agile and people improvise the method and you can't measure things as well. But there isn't actually a top down roadmap of how to do it with real milestones and metrics and uh, around it. (07:01): They were the same mm-hmm. ,

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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. What about a hardware business with some long-lead-time components?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you. This is not for the faint of heart.

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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

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Leading up to a pivot, each cycle, despite our best efforts, the metrics werent good enough. Pivotal Labs doesn't carry "Pivot" in its name by accident. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. It was painful.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Now, in some situations, this over-selling would lead to a secondary problem, namely, that customers would realize they had been duped and refuse to re-subscribe. Go on an agile diet quickly. Time-to-complete-a-sale is not a bad metric for validated learning at this stage.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action. In fact, we know so much that we already know what they will care enough about (namely, the product’s quality – as opposed to, say, missing features). No vanity metrics should be looked at.

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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. Labels: agile , continuous deployment , lean startup , product development , Test-driven development 4comments: Nivi said. But, unfortunately, startups cant afford to adopt that standard.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. If she is, return the name of the hypothesis she was exposed to before. 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. Every experiment has to be evaluated based on a single standard report of 5-10 (no more) key metrics. True split-test experiments are easy to classify as successes or failures, because top-level metrics either move or they don’t.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

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. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. Expo SF (May.

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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. My name is Crystal Williams, and I maintain a small business blog called Babeofbusiness.com. Keep up the great work!

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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. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. Im a huge fan of small batches as well.

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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. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Expo SF (May.

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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. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. It strokes your ego.

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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. The book takes its name from Steves theory of the four stages of growth any startup goes through. Phases of product & company growth.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

After all, if you already have an all-male startup, you’re already at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring the very women that could fix that imbalance. Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin.

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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. Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. Startups are the lifeblood of our economy. Take the example of Indianas Passageways. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - lets face it - PHP can be pretty painful. Almost every PHP-based website is burdened with ugly URLs that contain the name of the file that implements each page. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. As a language, its inelegant.

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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. Even if it shows improvement in some micro metric, does that invalidate the overall design? That was evident in the metrics and in the in-person usability tests. No one feature is to blame.

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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. 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?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer. I explained it to people this way: agile lets you make the trade-offs visible to whole company, so that they can make informed choices. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

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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. This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter.

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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. Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. Reconciling these principles requires a little humility.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. Luckily, we also discovered that certain other metrics, like LTV and CPA were much better than we initially projected. .&# I think the problem with this approach is not the presence of the spreadsheet, but how it’s used.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Who doesnt want to see their name in print? Know what the success metrics are for the launch. Now that were beginning our first marketing, the key partners we need have heard our name long enough to trust us. See if their answer is about tactics or strategy. Founders push for it. In some ways, founders are even worse.

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www.ere.net

JULY 15, 2012

It might surprise you to know that the average recruiter cannot name the distinct steps in the recruiting process, nor the goals or common failure points for each step. Even among recruiting leaders, it’s common for them to realize that their hiring process is failing but be unaware of which steps in the process are causing the problem.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

In talking with Mary Poppendieck about it, she said that the Chief Engineer role at 3M was called a "Product Champion" The name is less important than understanding the depth of competence that this person has, and what it takes to build it. Apple also hired away key engineers from Pixo, who I believe still work there.

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