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? That means knowing whats written and whats not, what the architecture can and cant support, and how long it would take to build something new. Thats more than just drawing architecture diagrams, though.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products. Today that’s built on the premise that an x86 architecture is the one best suited for big data. Startups are unencumbered by the status quo.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” One of the times I screwed this up it left a legacy of 25 years of questionable design in microprocessor architecture. I was just in marketing. No, not really.

Customer Development 284

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

The limited partners could put their money in the stock market, but instead, they give it to you, the venture capitalist, which is much more risky, but you’re promising them huge returns. — Getting Keen Home’s smart vent to market was no small task. So there’s what called spot market, and a futures market (for parts).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. That’s every marketeers excuse for putting their kids in an ad.)

Video 184

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 184

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline. For example, at a previous virtual world company , we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. It was still a good trade.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Or by then other customers would tell us something quite different. Which required Ben hearing from the same customers I did.

Founder 321

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 321

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. And once you got the data you asked for, it still took weeks or months for a marketer to tease out any customer insight and trends from the data. An Epiphany.

San Francisco 230

San Francisco Database Advisory Board Silicon Valley 230

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 28, 2010

Yet the Customer Development process uses a series of checklists to ensure that you walk through the Customer Discovery and Validation steps. Who the hell were these engineers telling me how to market and sell our product? I think we invented our meta-data architecture diagram that Friday.)

Business Model 242

Business Model Customer Development Engineer Vesting 242

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 4, 2012

I think the fact that NorCal didn’t have strong industries in financial services, manufacturing, autos, marketing or other traditional industries also made experimentation more acceptable. 4:30 How did you come up with the idea of customer development? Steve, thanks so much for joining us today! What brings you to LA?

Community 350

Community Silicon Valley Detroit Chicago 350

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I suggested that we change the underlying architecture of our UI system so that the artists would be able to build their own UI pieces themselves and then integrate them into the product without requiring new code every time. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ▼ June (3) What is a startup?

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

We were using it to get features to market faster, and that was working well. But we were cutting corners in the development methodology as well as in the code, in the name of increased speed. Keeping in mind that caveat, in our world the biggest factor in total project ROI was time to market. Top managements #1 was usually ROI.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Does legal need to sign off for cyber operations?

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. You can turn your entire application infrastructure investment into a pay-as-you-go variable cost, and bring new products to market at speeds an order of magnitude faster than just 10 years ago. yeah, its awesome.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

And as Kapor himself points out, the core ideas have even older origins: The Roman architecture critic Vitruvius advanced the notion that well-designed buildings were those which exhibited firmness, commodity, and delight. Customer Development is itself an example of SBCE. We owe a lot to this seminal document.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Status Report At Ardent the marketing department was responsible for acquiring applications for our supercomputer. This required convincing software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. You can get away with effective behavior in a large company.

Silicon Valley 331

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 331

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2016

While finding product-market fit is important, getting the rest of the business model right is the difference between and a great demo and a great business. We did do a lot of … customer discovery. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Grant Warner. And download any of the past shows here.).

Cofounder 120

Cofounder DC Entrepreneur Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 9, 2016

At the Rockwell Group, the architecture and design firm, he co-founded Studio Red and the Lab , an incubator for integrating digital technology into physical spaces. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. He founded Mouth in 2012. I don’t get them. I don’t understand them.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Cofounder Entrepreneur IPO 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 17, 2016

The mission of tech transfer is to get as much out of the (university) labs and into the market as possible, because you never know what’s going to be a hit. Orin : …You can imagine what a priority that would have been for the government at the time … to actively market these technologies and find venture capitalists and all that.

Government 120

Government Entrepreneur Intellectual Property Silicon Valley 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Both sides start to think of their point of view in moralistic terms: “those guys don’t see the economic value of fast action, they only care about their precious architecture diagrams&# or “those guys are sloppy and have no professional pride.&# Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Switching these customers directly to continuous deployment sounds harder than it really is. A typical "new feature" release is, in my experience, about 80% changes to underlying APIs or architecture. The second shift in mindset required is to separate the concept of a marketing release from the concept of an engineering release.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Open APIs and data-oriented architecture (aka "web 2.0"). Many complex apps can now be prototyped as a simple mashup in order to prove market viability - and this is true beyond just software apps. For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

blog.startupsquare.com

APRIL 13, 2010

2 Comments Tags: Customer Development , lean startup , pivot , Strategy. Having gone through 51 iterations of my mockups and gathered as much as feedback as I could with our primitive alpha, I feel confident about our basic customer problem hypothesis. Market Pivots: - Can we apply the same product / tech to a different market?

Lean 40

Lean Startup Cofounder Architecture 40

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

For a marketing job, for example, its reasonable to expect that a candidate will have done their homework and used your product (maybe even talked to your customers) before coming in. and going into a long diatribe about how insecure the ActiveX architecture was compared to Javas pristine sandbox. What is customer development?

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. So far, this is just a summary of what all of us who have attempted to build web-scale architectures considers obvious. Customer data is normally partitioned according to customer id.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. When the architecture needs modifying - why do we need a meeting? Building a good application architecture is not just coding. Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2018

Some examples of innovation tools are Customer Development, Design Thinking, User-Centric Design, Business Model Canvas, Storytelling, etc. Or a team that achieved product-market fit building a non-standard architecture could find no way to maintain it at scale within the parent organization.

Programming 325

Programming Incubator Leadership Silicon Valley 325

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. I think Eric missed his true calling as a Marketeer.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

It seems your cluster architecture is one of the key architectural constraints making continuous deployment possible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. The US was once known as a free market democracy that could make the trains run on time. We are barely even trying to measure this.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 10, 2012

If you send me 50k people from a classic tractor repair website and 500 from a prominent marketing site, which one is going to be better for my business? The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. Google Analytics custom reports are highly useful.

Audience 122

Audience Analytics B2B eCommerce 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Someone has managed to convince themselves that they have to do their big architecture change in one fell swoop. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? When Ive worked to get everyone to build in small batches, I would see this pattern in action.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

The plug-in co-processor architecture was too complex and couldn’t be made to work reliably. Nothing else was in the development pipeline for the next 12 months. Now we were faced with the fact that even though we were gaining market share daily, there was nothing coming out of Engineering. What could we do?

Silicon Valley 145

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 145

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Not everybody can, especially if they need to run with the idea to get to market. Pitching to investors before building is a waste of time especially if they do not understand the timing to enter the market. By now it is useless except bragging rights as traction and market disruption have been lost.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84