Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, January 15, 2010 Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business Review) The next part in the series I am writing for Harvard Business Review is online. This time, Im discussing the challenge for corporate CFOs and VCs alike in holding entrepreneurs accountable. Read the rest here.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

we had no revenue. First, understand your audience. If you don’t have some sense of their points of view, your likelihood of making the pitch go well is more random. You may happen to emphasize the right points that pique an investor’s interest, but you shouldn’t leave your financing up to chance.

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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.

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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.

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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. If you never have, you can create your own using Google Finance. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets.

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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). What counts as an iteration? Were talking PayPal -sized variations.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In order to maintain game play balance, game designers have to take into account the needs of customers who have an excess of four different assets: time , money , skill , and passion. Let’s look at some examples: In a traditional business, customers pay money for a physical artifact (a product) or a service.

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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.

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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. More manual testing. This obviously doesn’t scale with complexity.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

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. I just emailed your article to him and recommended that he take your advice to heart.

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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.

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www.mint.com

MARCH 9, 2010

Mint is the best way to manage your money. Go there now » Sign up or log in to mint.com Updates Drop Your Debt to Win 2 comments How To The Top 5 Customer Complaint Letters — And What You Can Learn From Them 5 comments Investing In Graphics: What Is a Stock? 2 comments Mint Life Know your money. Live your life.

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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. In this kind of work, its hard to predict when things will be done, what impact they will have, and whether youre making progress. Building and testing prototypes. 1 comments: Andy Lawrence said.

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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.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

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.

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pandodaily.com

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

And because capital requirements are lower, entrepreneurs are holding onto more ownership, making it a lot easier to flip your company for less than, say, $30 million and become very rich. This time around, there has been an explosion at the early stages, and the very late pre-IPO growth stages. In fact, if anything, there are fewer.

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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. But dont just pad all your estimates with "extra refactoring time" and make them all longer.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

If youre looking for resources on getting started, see " Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps ") The goal of continuous deployment is to help development teams drive waste out of their process by simultaneously reducing the batch size and increasing the tempo of their work. Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see.

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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. If you’re new to Five Whys, I’m eager to hear your feedback.

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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.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

What accounts for the difference? 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.

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infochachkie.com

DECEMBER 5, 2011

If youre new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed , follow me on Twitter , connect with me on Quora. Lousy Products Might Break Your Bones – But A Name Will Seldom Hurt You John Greathouse – Posted in: Entrepreneur , Strategic Planning. Great product names help and bad product names hurt.

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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. When SlideShare began the journey youre about to read, they already had more than a million visitors a day. As this is a new initiative for this blog, we especially welcome your feedback.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

When something works, its too easy to invent a story about how that was your intention all along. 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. If you try, share your story here.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

The most common reaction I get is something like, "that sounds great - for your business - but that could never work for my application." I would posit that those same people have never been on the receiving end of a phone call from a sixteen-year-old girl complaining that your new release ruined their birthday party.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

You know your direction - you are heading north. 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).

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, October 30, 2008 John Doerrs 10 lean startup tips I just saw video of John Doerrs talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn&# roundtable event. Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Pay attention to where your cash is.

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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. Do it right, and your conversion rates might be as high as 20%.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. Yet, as it turns out, the earlier you got laid off, the earlier you got your Google options. In time, success will come.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

It is an essential lean startup tool that combines seemingly irreconcilable attributes: it provides operational, actionable, real-time feedback that is truly representative of your customers experience as a whole. It does it all by asking your customers just one magic question. But split-tests also have their drawbacks.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Heres the working definition Ive started using: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Then again, "just because youre paranoid doesnt mean theyre not out to get you." Please feel free to post your thoughts. What can I say? He had a point.

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Professor VC

JUNE 20, 2011

Since the iControl system chronicles all meetings, I was able to find the automatic picture snapped from my first meeting with the founders, Reza Raji and Chris Stevens on April 22, 2004. One truth of start-up financing is that it generally takes twice as long and twice as much money to accomplish your milestones.

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