ConversionXL

JUNE 2, 2022

Fullfunnel co-founder Andrei Zinkevich says, “ABM is not that complicated, and it’s also oversimplified.”. In 2020, smart home and building automation platform iRidium mobile wanted to land bigger clients and announce new products. iRidium invited top tier accounts to product demos. how long they spent on the site).

Marketing 105

Marketing Campaign Artificial Inteligence Sales Cycle 105

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

we had no revenue. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue. Normally, you’d expect us to explain our product — i.e., what “professional people search 2.0” To show potential revenue streams, we listed three products: ads, listings, and subscriptions.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

www.huffingtonpost.com

MAY 10, 2011

We sell the winning designs to customers in the form of personalized wedding invitations, Christmas cards , and other stationery and photo card products. Because we achieved our most aggressive revenue targets and built a strong community, we realized that we had a broader opportunity to change the world of graphic design.

CTO 43

CTO CTO Hire PHP Cofounder 43

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

When we build products, we use a methodology. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." The theory of Product/Market Fit is one key component of customer development, and I highly recommend Marcs essay on that topic.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

VC Cafe

MARCH 28, 2011

When asked why they’ve turned it down, Giora (Gig) Kaplan, one of Wix’s founders replied that his vision is to do a revolution and go where Israeli startups haven’t go before – grow a large company. Potentially an IPO in 2012. Wix’s product has also developed significantly since it started in 2006.

Flash 142

Flash IPO HTML 142

online.wsj.com

SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

Consumer Products. Paper & Forest Products. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghoshs research. Less than 1% are currently in IPO registration.

Venture Capital 107

Venture Capital Software Review Rhode Island North Dakota 107

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. SEM is a simple idea. chatted once?

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Most normal people dont understand it: what counts as a hit, anyway (an image, a page, a JS file.)? Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Way back when the money was doled out, the team made a compelling pitch about the large market that was going to adopt their new innovative product or service. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. My 2008 revenues were over $100k on a 35k inventory. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Many optimizers are in favor of split-testing, too: direct marketers, landing page and SEO experts -- heck even the Google Website Optimizer team. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

This also literally can’t catch every problem, because your test sandboxes or test clusters will never be exactly like the production system. But I will tell you not to have too little or too much, because those definitely ruin the food or product. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

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. Let’s look at some examples: In a traditional business, customers pay money for a physical artifact (a product) or a service.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If you dont have customers, a product, investors, or a board of directors, you can pretty much stay focused on just one thing at a time. Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

www.mint.com

MARCH 9, 2010

If the answer to the question centers around “We will achieve revenue soon so our net will improve and give us more runway,” it means the company is in trouble because no product ever ships on time nor achieves the company’s “conservative forecast.” Life is challenging for a company that has undistinguished products and services.

Software Review 68

Software Review Startup Post-Money Valuation Technical Review 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). The key is to be able to refute as many major hypotheses as you can.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

pandodaily.com

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

Meanwhile, the rash of early liquidity and recent IPOs — unsatisfying as they were — gave liquidity to thousands of employees at large companies, and a subset of those made very real money. This time around, there has been an explosion at the early stages, and the very late pre-IPO growth stages. Now it’s glutted.

Technical Review 93

Technical Review Silicon Valley Incubator Syria 93

www.paulgraham.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

And since a startup thatsucceeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies gettingrich is doable too. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, uselinks to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages withunintrusive keyword-based ads. Ideally you want between two and four founders. Hard, but doable.

Startup 105

Startup Cofounder Software Stock 105

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. My normal answer is that I dont really think thats how Apple products are built. Thats what so many techniques that I advocate are all about: customer validation , minimum viable product , vision pivots , and even throwing away working code. It just wasnt great.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They have a product that has a moderate number of customers. Still, theyre not really hitting it out of the park, because their product isnt growing new users as fast as theyd like, and they arent making any money from the current users. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

This condition makes it much easier for teams to innovate, experiment, and achieve sustained productivity. And, of course, the code rarely performs in production the way it does in the testing or staging environment, which leads to a series of hot-fixes immediately following each release.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy&# or “our team moves too slow.&# We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Question 1: When youre adding features to a product used by an existing user base, do you still do split testing to determine usage patterns? Existing customers already have an expectation about how your product works, and its important to take this into consideration when adding or changing features. Absolutely, yes.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

infochachkie.com

DECEMBER 5, 2011

Lousy Products Might Break Your Bones – But A Name Will Seldom Hurt You John Greathouse – Posted in: Entrepreneur , Strategic Planning. When selecting your company and product names, consider the following: Uniquely Familiar. Correspondingly, your products’ names contribute to, but do not dictate, their success.

Naming 40

Naming Technical Review Product Product Name 40

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And once you have a relationship with an author, musician, or journalist, it will be quite easy for them to offer new products and services – and for you to give them feedback that helps them shape ever more interesting (and ever more profitable) offerings. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? See Four Myths about the Lean Startup or The lean startup.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Most customers of most products hate new releases. Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

First, SlideShare is a fantastic product (that I use on a regular basis) and an impressive company example of Lean Startup practices in action. Rashmi Sinha, co-founder and CEO of SlideShare , describes an early version of the analytics package that’s part of the Pro accounts the company announced today.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

But you don't have any lords and masters to answer to and the pay out goes entirely to the founders and management team. The big enterprise software companies almost all bootstrapped their way to profitability before they got their first external investors (typically via an IPO). Learn the rule of 3.

Software 127

Software Startup Architecture Bootstrapping 127

Up and Running

APRIL 17, 2013

Catch up on Part 1 of his “Playing with Glass” series, this is Part 2… It was 2003, 10 years ago, but I remember meeting Larry Page like it was yesterday. My frat bro and uber-entrepreneur Adam Zweibel started asking Larry about advertising his IT computing services, and then I told Page about my publishing business.

Michigan 96

Michigan Boston Jordan Austin 96

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. There are many articles by many experts ( myself included ) extolling the virtues of listening to customers.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

But once the company has honed in on a strong value proposition and found initial product-market fit, what is the best approach to scaling it? With over $1 billion in revenue, 2000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion, Akamai has become a role model for scalable start-ups. After all, scaling is hard. Really hard.

Distribution 49

Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. For founders, I think it also has another big attraction: the ability to avoid a lot of " free vs paid " arguments. Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product?

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148