Duct Tape Marketing

AUGUST 23, 2023

He is the co-founder of Boast.ai, where he leveraged the Community-Led Growth model to bootstrap the company. He is also the co-founder of Traction, a community empowering over 100k innovators through connections, content, and capital. He is the co-founder of Boast.ai They're hard to forget your last name.

Community 51

Community Kuwait Cofounder Bootstrapping 51

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. If she is, return the name of the hypothesis she was exposed to before.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Although I wish I could take credit for these pivots, the reality is that they were not caused by my singular insight or that of my other co-founders.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. 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.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

My 1,000th Post on This Blog - Tim Berry's Blog - Planning Startups Stories , July 21, 2010 Last night I was halfway through a draft post patting myself on the back, illustrated with champagne glasses, when my youngest daughter, Megan, called from San Francisco, where she lives now. Metrics availability. Not so bad. Performance.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Names have, of course, been changed to protect the innocent: Hope youre well; I thought Id relay a recent experience and thank you. ► 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.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal. In fact, we know so much that we already know what they will care enough about (namely, the product’s quality – as opposed to, say, missing features). No vanity metrics should be looked at. I understand this fear.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

I think Jim Murphys confusion comes where many peoples did, with the XP term "Customer", which was XPs name for the product management role. That naming issue aside, I think its probably good that Scrum and XP didnt really say much about how to manage products. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. The book takes its name from Steves theory of the four stages of growth any startup goes through. Most people cant sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries. Phases of product & company growth.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

As a result, for a lot of these companies, Boulder is just a gateway to San Francisco. Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. Articulate, inspirational.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. ► 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.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. The first version of the 3D IMVU client took about six months to build, and as the founders iterated towards a compelling user experience, the user base grew monthly thereafter. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Bring your questions.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Of the techniques he mentioned, I think four are fundamental and critical for any lean startup: TDD (or the even more politely named TATFT ) Continuous integration Automate your deployments Collect statistics The tools to help you do these things are getting better and better every day, but dont confuse tools with process.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

It’s easy to overestimate the impact of this kind of traffic because it just feels good to have your name and company featured. ► 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.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 16, 2015

What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Whatever the inspiration or relation may be, the naming of your business is one of the most important parts of becoming a CEO. businessname #business #entrepreneur #startup #name #compilation #instagram #ceoblognation #blog #newblog #blogpost #livetoday.

Naming 48

Naming Entrepreneur Haiti Nigeria 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

We would pretty much bid on any phrase that was "[name of competitive product] chat" and variations like that. ► 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. Bring your questions.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

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. Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

It moves at a rapid clip, each argument backed up with the relevant math and equations: marginal profit , Littles law , Markov processes , probability theory , you name it. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. The book is structured as a series of principles, logically laid out and briefly discussed - 175 in all.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

I want to thank Techstars for putting this event together and giving me a chance to experience the scene, even if it lacks a name. ► 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.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Ironically, meetings like this had given data and experimentation a bad name inside this company. Every experiment has to be evaluated based on a single standard report of 5-10 (no more) key metrics. True split-test experiments are easy to classify as successes or failures, because top-level metrics either move or they don’t.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

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. Even if it shows improvement in some micro metric, does that invalidate the overall design? That was evident in the metrics and in the in-person usability tests. No one feature is to blame.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) ► 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.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. “Who is this guy?&# “Who is this guy?&#

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Much of what I have found effective is counter-intuitive, because it requires investing more effort in each hire - all in the name of efficiency. This is another sub-optimization caused by incentivizing the wrong metric. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. If not, you can avoid making the hire with confidence.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned quite a few of these, including these most important ones: having engineers post on the forums in their own name when they make a change routinely split-testing new changes routinely conducting in-person usability tests and interviews Net Promoter Score Each of these techniques is fundamentally bottoms-up.

Advisory Board 151

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. Luckily, we also discovered that certain other metrics, like LTV and CPA were much better than we initially projected. .&# I think the problem with this approach is not the presence of the spreadsheet, but how it’s used.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names&# in the meeting. ► 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. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Founders push for it. Who doesnt want to see their name in print? In some ways, founders are even worse. My experience is that many founders actually have a deep anxiety that maybe they are not succeeding. Know what the success metrics are for the launch. See if their answer is about tactics or strategy.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer). Founders struggle with this question. Successful startups don’t.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. ► 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. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - lets face it - PHP can be pretty painful. Almost every PHP-based website is burdened with ugly URLs that contain the name of the file that implements each page. The IMVU downloadable client, just to name one example, is written primarily in python.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

Almost immediately, people started to dig what we were doing: Digital Trends named Localeur one of their favorite new apps of SXSW 2013 and other press followed. Second, I went on to raise roughly $5 million in angel investments from 100 individuals who did listen to, understand, and value my experience as a black founder and CEO.

Silicon Valley 48

Silicon Valley Technical Review Venture Capital San Francisco 48

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. The problem should be familiar to anyone who plays Scrabble: not all letter are equally likely to be used as the first letter of someones name. Give each entity a name. For example, consider this simple scheme.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years. Ive previously named his post Achieving Flow in a Lean Startup as one of my favorite blog posts of 2009. Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

But we were cutting corners in the development methodology as well as in the code, in the name of increased speed. Excepting for cosmically co-incidental success stories, the fuzzy requirement stuff never congeals as a holistic engineering exercise. a is name, b is address, and c is tax percentage.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I used to think a giant flat-panel screen that broadcast our companys key metrics would be what was required to get everyone to pay attention to them. Simply put, we upload all the tasks and assign a name to each task. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. I never tried it, but I recently got to meet a startup who did.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I think that if a web founder would come to me asking for an investment talking about how he's coding an immensly scalable, perfectly designed system, I will throw him out in an instant. So far, this is all an academic exercise in naming - but I think it has an important real-world effect. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168