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A new field guide for entrepreneurs of all stripes

Startup Lessons Learned

In this excerpt from The Lean Entrepreneur , by using fishing as an analogy, Brant and Patrick reveal how market segmentation influences your business model and why “For Whom” is as important as “What” to build. Market segments drive your business model. Or perhaps you need to chum (freemium) the waters a bit?

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Fear is the mind-killer

Startup Lessons Learned

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

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Lessons Learned: Refactoring yourself out of business

Startup Lessons Learned

My most important lesson in refactoring is that small changes, if applied continuously and with discipline, actually add up to huge improvements. Compounding is not a process that most people find intuitive, and thats as true in engineering as it is in finance, so it requires a lot of encouragement in the early days to stay the course.

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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

What matters is proving the viability of the company’s business model, what investors call “traction.&# Of course this is not at all true of many profitable small businesses, but they are not what I mean by startups.) but few step back and really examine the underlying assumptions of startup finance.

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What is a startup?

Startup Lessons Learned

Many startups don’t innovate at all in the product dimension, but use other kinds of innovation: repurposing an existing technology for a new use, devising a new business model that unlocks value that was previously hidden, or even simply bringing a product or service to a new location or set of customers previously underserved.

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Top 120 Startup Posts for 2010

SoCal CTO

Some really great stuff in 2010 that aims to help startups around product, technology, business models, etc. 500 Hats , February 1, 2010 When to Use Facebook Connect – Twitter Oauth – Google Friend Connect for Authentication? .