Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. They might do anything !

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

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. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design. Thats why eBay advertises on search engines, and Facebook doesnt. Thats where Id like to pick up the discussion.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. I had been teaching Z8000 design to customers for the last year and a half. I also knew our customers. I understand how our products were being used and why we won design-in’s over Intel or Motorola.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

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. What a great idea.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 203

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

for Harvard Business Review) Over at Harvard Business Review, Ive been building up a series designed to introduce the Lean Startup methodology to a business-focused audience. This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Labels: product development Speed up or slow down?

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The class teaches the three basic skills all entrepreneurs need to know: business model design. customer development. agile engineering. Some general customer development slides click here. The Slides/Video tab on the top of this page has all the open source course material for my classes. Find it here.

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Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In this post I hope to talk about how to do it well, in terms appropriate for both audiences. In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. The new design improved on the old one in several ways, but these improvements didnt translate all the way through the funnel.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2014

million to educators who want to bring their classroom innovations to a wider audience. Their goal was to train University scientists and researchers to use Lean Startup methods (business model design, customer development and agile engineering) to commercialize their science. million to fund the next 24 teams.

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Lean Minnesota Jordan Agile 288

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Two studies have shown that only about 10 percent of promoters actually refer profitable new customers. Some of the most creative technology coming out of Silicon Valley is designed to do exactly that. Wrong message, wrong audience. That’s right.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Alice and Bettina had taken an idea they had tested in the class – building toys for young girls to have fun with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and started a company. As soon as they had designed the product, they found a contract manufacturer to build the product in China. They learned a ton. You want us to do this?

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PR China Lean Channel 319

Duct Tape Marketing

AUGUST 29, 2014

The first report to review is the Mobile Overview report (Audience > Mobile > Overview), as this will provide an idea of the kind of impact mobile visitors are currently having on your website. This tells you where your mobile users are coming from, which can influence how you design campaigns to attract more visitors.

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Analytics Mobile Channel Conversion 64

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

At IMVU , our engineering team accumulated thousands upon thousands of tests, and we had a build cluster (using BuildBot ) that ran them. Thats possible now, and it means that the historical ratio of QA to engineering is going to have to change (on the other hand, QA is now a lot more interesting of a job). Completely necessary.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

And do your customer development. And, as usual, I wanted to share some of the audience reaction with my commentary. These quotes are, as is my custom, straight from twitter. When they could hear the customers complaints in their own voice, it became clear when it was time to up the quality level.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

Expo to explain the lean startup concept to a larger audience. The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products.: Im looking for a few people to run ideas by, give feedback, and generally help craft ideas so that they can have the biggest impact on this audience.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Ive written about this before in some detail, but this was an opportunity to try and frame it for a general business audience. Ive written about this before in some detail, but this was an opportunity to try and frame it for a general business audience. Five Whys has its origins in the Toyota Production System.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

You are the ones that consistently blew the audience away. When I first encountered customer development , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs. You are the ones that consistently blew the audience away. And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

“Some people weren’t comfortable because it wasn’t as fun, and one senior engineer thought we’d be losing the part of kaChing that was an enabler for anyone who wanted to make it as a pro,&# Rachleff recalls. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c.

San Francisco 142

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Alice and Bettina had taken an idea they had tested in the class – building toys for young girls to have fun with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and started a company. As soon as they had designed the product, they found a contract manufacturer to build the product in China. They learned a ton. You want us to do this?

PR 211

PR China Lean Channel 211

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Do the engineers understand what they are building? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Waves of technology platforms The lean startup Customer Development Engineering Greasemonkey compiler Great open source scalability tools from Danga Ideas.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Continuous deployment is another such technique, one with a unique power to change development team dynamics for the better. One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production. Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see. Why does it work? One last benefit: morale.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. In other words, they have learned to grow renewable audiences.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Beware The Need for Critical Mass I’m going to lead with a quote from Seth on this one: “Failing for small audiences is a loud cue that you will fail even bigger with big audiences.&# The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

In almost all Agile Development systems, thousands of automated tests are run against every change to the software. These tests are written by the engineers themselves, and they must all pass every time. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

But these students completely failed to address the one and only question on their audiences mind: can you three guys really build the robots of the future? Turns out, they were incredibly well-credentialed graduate students who had, in fact, developed some interesting new robotics technology. whos on the engineering team?

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 128

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Another thought would be to outline who the intended audience for your blog is and the topic areas you will focus on. This is a good sign for you! :) I subscribed because I was inspired by the O'Reilly video, and feel I want to go deeper into the customer development field. September 19, 2008 4:54 PM SkyHammer said.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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