View from Seed

AUGUST 10, 2021

We first invested in co-founders Ben Forgan & Pat Wilbur in early 2015, when NextView led a $1.3M And early-stage VC investors have increasingly ventured beyond their backyards of SF, NYC, and Boston to more actively invest in (and in some cases relocate to) places like Miami, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, and other cities.

Chicago 156

Chicago Cofounder Miami B2B 156

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

View from Seed

AUGUST 10, 2021

We first invested in co-founders Ben Forgan & Pat Wilbur in early 2015, when NextView led a $1.3M And early-stage VC investors have increasingly ventured beyond their backyards of SF, NYC, and Boston to more actively invest in (and in some cases relocate to) places like Miami, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, and other cities.

Chicago 136

Chicago Cofounder Miami B2B 136

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 30, 2008 Refactoring for TDD and interaction design In TDD , we follow a rhythm of “test-code-refactor.&# This basic pattern is useful in all aspects of product development. The same process works in Interaction Design. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Software Review 74

Software Review San Francisco Design Continuous Deployment 74

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

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. October 13, 2008 6:47 PM Luke G said. Eric, love the blog.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Take a look and let me know what you think.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

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. This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

These specs are handed to a designer, who builds layouts and mockups of all the salient points. Then the designs are handed to a team of programmers with various specialties. The programmers keep asking for more say in the designs and direction that they work on. First, he writes it nice and clear.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Its to everyones advantage to let the world think the founders thought of everything. I say this as a founder: the contribution of founders is always overestimated. The danger here is that new founders, looking at existing founders, will think that theyre supermen that one couldnt possibly equal oneself.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

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.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

And yet the key to startup speed is to maintain a disciplined approach to testing and evaluating new products, features, and ideas. As start-ups scale, this agility will be lost unless the founders maintain a consistent investment in that discipline. Techniques from lean manufacturing can be part of a startups innovation culture.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design. Either way, you can use any marketing channel thats available to bring in new customers, including word of traditional advertising, SEO, SEM - wherever you can find prospects who are going to find your product addicting.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

If your practice is not designed to cope with uncertainty, it has no place in a startup - even if your startup is located in government or enterprise. Now, I dont think even most dot-com era founders were bad people, I just think traditional startup methods make it too easy to become confused about whether were creating real progress or not.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build a truly mainstream product. Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? Your CTO might be a great architect, evangelist, interface designer or incredible debugger.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. This is a self-published book, originally designed as a companion to Steves class at Berkeleys Haas school of business. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. The new design improved on the old one in several ways, but these improvements didnt translate all the way through the funnel. Usually, I think that means youve lost some good aspect of the old design.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes product development in the feedback loop with customers. 2008 09 06 Eric Ries Haas Columbia Customer Development Engineering View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

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. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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. Some designers also hate optimizing (which is why the “41 shades of blue&# test is so famous – a famous designer claims to have quit over it ).

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. ► 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.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

None of it would have happened if we had plenty of cash, or were content to count our progress by traffic or product development milestones. Luckily for me, my co-founders eventually prevailed and we went on to build a product that customers actually wanted. Labels: product development 4comments: Doug said.

San Francisco 98

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I have personally sold many copies of his book, and continue to recommend it as one of the most important books a startup founder can read. It is incumbent upon you to listen. It is incumbent upon you to listen.

Customer Development 166

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 142

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

Come to TS in Boston! ► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Take a look and let me know what you think.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Ever since that time, I have struggled to explain how the feedback loop in customer development should interface with the feedback loop in product development. Eric Ries Lean Startup Schematic View Of Agile Development And Customer Development View more presentations from Eric Ries.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Take a look and let me know what you think.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

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. For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2009

Its also frustrating how some founders see ANY form of struture/approach as limiting and go to the total reverse of waterfall by just doing what they were told by "their wifes friend" This is great and practical stuff.will make sure I pass it on and use in my discussions (giving credit to you!)

Lean 115

Lean Video San Francisco Continuous Deployment 115