Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 29, 2013

The Lean Startup Conference is an event by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs—except that our definition of “entrepreneur” may be different from the one you have in mind. Not to mention $200,000 in staff time and hard costs. Generously, it might cost you $20,000. 1) Can you tell me more about your audience?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

But lean startups cant afford to be satisfied with just that definition, because there are situations where working code is itself a form of waste. Most of all, these arguments stemmed from a simple misconception: that the code we had written was an asset, and that it would cost us to throw it away. Expo (and a call for he.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs. Just because something looks pretty, or feels like a good idea, or has a lot of sunk cost in it, does not mean it should be pursued. This is a version of the andon cord technique from lean manufacturing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

No engineering team. But where it makes sense, that team may also include engineers building new experiments or prototypes to try with customers. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. You need a problem team and a solution team."

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Its obvious that can lower your development costs, but I think its even more important that it can reduce your time to market. Definitely interested in the perspective of the open-source contributor solicited with a job offer. Im definitely curious about your thoughts on how to present the company right. Expo (and a call for he.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Yet, I think this definition is too important to leave out. davemcclure : amazing concepts on Continuous Development => "Cluster Immune System" @EricRies #LeanStartup @fbFund [link] dalelarson : Because most features take longer to argue and prioritize than to build. Nothing is more demoralizing to an engineering team.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. They know how much it costs to bring in a customer and they know how much money they can expect to make on each one.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer. If it costs $0.10 to acquire an early adopter, how much should it cost to acquire a mainstream customer? But $10.00?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Some companies definitely should. Others definitely shouldn’t. 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).

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

I was told they werent sure, because all of their engineers were currently busy refactoring. The engineering team has decided its reached a breaking point, and is taking several weeks to bring it up to modern standards, including unit tests, getting started with continuous integration , and a new MVC architecture.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. As a last disclaimer, please consult the definition of the word hacker if youre not familiar with the controversies surrounding that term.) Hire a CTO or VP Engineering.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Do you think that the long-term maintainability and reliability costs that result from using PHP are outweighed by how much time and money it saves you in the beginning?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

There are three fundamental situations that change what your company needs to do: creating a new market (the original Palm), bringing a new product to an existing market (Handspring), and resegmenting an existing market (niche, like In-n-Out Burger; or low-cost, like Southwest Airlines). Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

So let’s turn our attention from what may happen in the future to what is definitely happening in the present. As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Though technology tools and Web 2.0

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

In my presentation this morning, I emphasized three key areas: reducing the personal cost of failure for entrepreneurs, innovation-friendly legal reforms, and access to the digital means of production (slides from my White House presentation are available at the end of this post). Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Resegmented market (low cost variety). Heres a situation where you offer to do the job for 1/10th the cost. Here your challenge is to convince that manager that you really can do the job at such low cost. They must be thinking "if its costing people their jobs, it must really work. Maybe I should try that."

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Then, the company spends no more than a few hundred dollars marketing the product through search engines and to the contacts in its sales database and LinkedIn. Development time is typically no more than two to three weeks, and it generally takes just a few orders to cover development costs.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

We backed into prices from all sorts of angles, estimating the time-cost of equivalent functionality, competitive offerings, other tools we were potentially displacing -- but in the end, we lobbed a few numbers at them and waited to see if they flinched. BUT it definitely does NOT have the super-duper-hyper-ultra-cool Web 2.0

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. In the end, we managed to repair the damage, but only after losing a lot of time and at significant opportunity cost. We were totally unprepared for the magnitude of what happened.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

But if your new positioning message improves your engagement loop by more than the cost to your viral loop , you have a net win on your hands. You definitely brought clarity around the engagement loop re: A-B-C-D makes perfect sense and can be mapped against any flow that has the possibility to go viral. very cool post Eric!

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

In fact, there were some definite skeptics about whether they measured anything of value at all, since it is always dismaying to get data that says the changes youre making to your product are not affecting customer satisfaction one way or the other. The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

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