Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way. Heres the catch.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks. Now he’s a leader in social impact investing and equality in education.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 21, 2012

I often get asked about finding cofounders and I usually give the standard list of characteristics of what I look for in a founder. And I emphasize the value of a founding team with complementary skills sets – i.e. the hacker/hustler/designer cofounder archetype for web/mobile apps. Taking Time. Taking Time.

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Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Jon Sebastiani , founder and CEO of KRAVE Jerky , a company that got its start in my class at Berkeley back in 2011 and was recently acquired by Hershey. Taking My Class.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. Lean was designed to inform the founders’ vision while they operated frugally at speed. ” Fire, Ready, Aim. He just hired Meg Whitman. The result?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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grasshopperherder.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

If you’re waiting for a technical co-founder to put up a landing page with signup form, you’re lazy. If you’re waiting for a marketing guy to talk to customers, you’ll never understand the target market. I just need a co-founder to web enable it!" Do you have a website up?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here: A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. Iterations and Pivots are Driven by Insight.

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David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

Should you co-found your company with a software development shop? I’ve talked with a number of software development shops who are eager to get into the business of cofounding companies, i.e., getting product revenue and equity instead of just consulting revenue. What are the terms of their relationship with the founder?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. First Round Search , Startupschool , and GSV Passport are examples of comprehensive founder resources from investors. I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog. Customer Development.

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The Equity Kicker

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

We see this all the time at Forward Partners where we invest right from the idea stage and most of the companies get a first version of their product live for less than £30k (that generally includes founder salaries and time spent doing customer research).

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features. The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. It turns out the term “visionary founder” was usually a synonym for someone who was hallucinating. The founders.

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Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

I just spent a month and a half at Imperial College London co-teaching a “Wicked” Entrepreneurship class. Co mpanies also face Wicked problems. Co mpanies also face Wicked problems. In contrast, designing AI-driven enterprise software or building dating apps are comparatively simple problems.)

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crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) | Customer Development Labs - [link]. Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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www.startuplessonslearned.com

MAY 4, 2012

Founders Dilemmas: Equity Splits. The following is an excerpt from HBS Professor Noam Wasserman’s new book, The Founders Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. On average, the founders who keep the most control over their company make the least amount of money. Lessons Learned.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. In this workshop, Fraser, Founder/CEO of LUXr and Klein, Director of Product & UX at One Jackson will offer practical techniques for getting and using customer feedback.

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SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. Startup Insights From Paul English, Co-Founder of Kayak - OnStartups , May 10, 2010 I’m just wrapping up several weeks of attending conferences across both coasts. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. It says what?!”).

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ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

The project has launched a survey to investigate "the science of startups," lessons from which it plans to incorporate into blackbox, a new seed accelerator that was created with the merger of techVenture, Cofounder Network, Founders First and Startup School.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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The Next Web

JANUARY 27, 2013

Amazed at all the beautifully designed products that came out of only 76 hours. One of the things I found most valuable from participating in the Founder Institute was a lesson about the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek. One of the darkest moments as an entrepreneur for me was to have co-founders leave the company.

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Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.

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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.

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2016

How entrepreneurs gather, understand and use customer feedback to improve their products was the focus of the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Hawaii Massachusetts 264

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

There is a wealth of resources that are unique to this town and a vibrant community of hackers, product designers, business people, and investors at various stages in their career. This guide is designed to help you hit the ground running and is a starting point for your entrepreneurial journey in Boston. MIT Start Lab. Harvard iLab.

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The Next Web

MARCH 11, 2014

Ryan Hoover is the co-creator of Product Hunt and EIR at Tradecraft. Visit his blog to read more about startups and product design. Even its founders couldn’t quite describe it, let alone foresee what it would become. The founders lacked the positive signals investors typically look for. Twitter is confusing.

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

He’s considering making me the permanent co-host so if you enjoy any of this episode or want to see me on the show on a more regular basis please Tweet @jason and let him know (he asked for direct feedback). That said, the founder is Stewart Butterfield , who co-founded Flickr. How do founder get “liquidity&# (e.g.

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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.

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Software Review San Francisco Design Continuous Deployment 74

Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2010

But startups can shoot themselves in the foot when founders use consultants at the wrong time or in the wrong way. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. Customer Development is the process of how you get out of the building and search for the model. Consultants Don’t Pivot, Founders Do.

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Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Peter Arvai , co-founder of Prezi , an interactive presentation platform. Prezi’s founding team is a classic startup mix of hacker, hustler and designer.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

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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.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

There are co-working spaces in basically every city in the world—from Nepal to New York. in developing these new models. We believe that using the customer development process to monetize these assets through new business models can create huge competitive advantage and more speed to market for us and other big companies.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. And that’s probably good.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

We hired a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Duke who had worked on helicopter design. He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Years later he would become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.) Blog at WordPress.com.

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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.

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