Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Thats why its so essential to have a co-equal problem team.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

If you watch the video/audio below, youll get to see some of the questions I was asked after my presentation. Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities. And do your customer development. Labels: audio , events , slides , video 4comments: TSFalls said.

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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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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast. How cofounders can collaborate without going crazy.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

As Im pontificating about agile, I see the name Kent Beck in my peripheral vision. Eric Names matter. By pulling in a web of associations, names help people quickly assess ideas. There is a dark side to naming. The naming question has been raised about the "lean" in Lean Startups. Eric Names matter.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Return the name of the hypothesis chosen or assigned.

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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. For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder. Similarly, 24% of all the patents filed in the US in 2006 had a foreign resident as inventor or co-inventor.

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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.

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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. Weve got slides , video , audio and twitter commentary. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? For what its worth, I like Silicon Mountain.

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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? It strokes your ego. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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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. And then we would use that simple analytics system I mentioned to monitor the conversion rates of customers from each campaign. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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ConversionXL

MARCH 28, 2014

The ratio of viewers/visitors watching the video are dependent on a number of factors – namely: Quality of traffic coming to the page. Neil Patel, co-founder of CrazyEgg says that even though the video below brought in an extra $21,000/ month back in 2012, it was the script that was really responsible for such incredible growth.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. More on that in a moment.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal. 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). Yet startups rely on collective learning in order to find their way.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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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. One example is having a real Customer Advisory Board. They had their own private forum, and a company founder (aka me) personally ran the group in its early days.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. I wont recount what happened next (although your can hear us recount it in audio ). Founders push for it. Who doesnt want to see their name in print? In some ways, founders are even worse. Help you raise money. But dont be too sure. March 13, 2009 7:32 PM Torley said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) 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?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

It moves at a rapid clip, each argument backed up with the relevant math and equations: marginal profit , Littles law , Markov processes , probability theory , you name it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? This is not for the faint of heart.

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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

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

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. One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. “Who is this guy?&# “Who is this guy?&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years. Recently, he was bitten by the lean startup bug and has started writing about his experiences attempting to apply lean startup and customer development principles. Read on to find out. Things started to slip.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Much of what I have found effective is counter-intuitive, because it requires investing more effort in each hire - all in the name of efficiency. Returning to our example of the beleaguered founder who still has the pager, before hiring an operations guy, try promoting someone from within to take on the job.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - lets face it - PHP can be pretty painful. The IMVU downloadable client, just to name one example, is written primarily in python.

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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. Ironically, meetings like this had given data and experimentation a bad name inside this company. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What a waste. What a waste.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. The problem should be familiar to anyone who plays Scrabble: not all letter are equally likely to be used as the first letter of someones name. Give each entity a name. For example, lets say you have data about customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

I’m sure other disciplines have their own names for it; even protozoans exhibit this behavior (its called taxis ). When you read stories of successful startups in the popular and business press, you usually hear about how the founders anticipated several of these challenges in their initial vision. and for which customer?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

We're starting our new business, fanminder.com, to help small merchants instantly communicate with their customers, and I'm increasingly hearing your name and reading your keen insights. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Simply put, we upload all the tasks and assign a name to each task. 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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names&# in the meeting. There’s no easy fix to this problem. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Absurdly, it works both for start-ups that are thinking structuraly about customer discovery (and hence want to experiment first, and design nicely second) and for start-ups that still follow the good old product dev. So far, this is all an academic exercise in naming - but I think it has an important real-world effect.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

It then proceeds to list a whole host of cool new features the Warhammer team has added since I last logged in. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

But we were cutting corners in the development methodology as well as in the code, in the name of increased speed. Excepting for cosmically co-incidental success stories, the fuzzy requirement stuff never congeals as a holistic engineering exercise. a is name, b is address, and c is tax percentage.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

Whether youre a US citizen or an immigrant, entrepreneur or investor, founder or employee, theres something you can do. If you are an immigrant founder who has helped build a company that has created jobs in the US, we need you to tell your story. This is especially true if you live outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, December 7, 2008 Getting started with split-testing One of the startup founders I work with asked me a smart question recently, and I thought Id share it. If youre a founder or top-level executive, have the courage to be wrong in a very public way. Either way, make sure you can be wrong.

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