Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward. 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.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

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. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Small is beautiful.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

By continuously adjusting, we eventually build up a robust series of defenses that prevent problems from happening. This approach is a the heart of breaking down the "time/quality/cost pick two" paradox , because these small investments cause the team to go faster over time. Id like to point out something else about the example above.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. Labels: agile , continuous deployment 1 comments: timothyfitz said. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

dalelarson : "Metrics are people, too." leanstartup ericnsantos : #w2e #leanstartup Metrics should be Actionable, Accessible and Auditable. Metrics are a key questions startups face. Metrics are people too" is a reminder I constantly needed when I was a manager. ericries s talk on Lean Startups absolutely fantastic.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

It seems many startups these days are under a lot of pressure to outsource their development organization to save costs. Labels: agile , continuous deployment , customer development , events , listening to customers , slides 3comments: Sean Murphy said. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

For example, heres him discussing our collective blindness to queues: To understand the economic cost of queues, product developers must be able to answer two questions. Second, what is the cost of these queues? Today, only 15 percent of product developers know the cost of delay. But, what is the cost of this buffer?

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure. The blog is fantastic as well.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 29, 2013

Often, in very young organizations, those people are simply the founders. Not to mention $200,000 in staff time and hard costs. Generously, it might cost you $20,000. In other words, you could test ten book ideas for the cost of publishing one. In more established places, they may have nearly any job title.

Lean 165

Lean Technical Review Startup Software Review 165

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder. Read the rest of The New Startup Arms Race at Huffington Post.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. Seems like a fairly low-cost method of gauging customer interest for a would-be product. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time? And in most situations, there is significant cost involved in negotiating over the right estimates to plug in. How much will it cost to solve this problem now? They are usually among the most heated arguments a company has.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, Expo (and a call for he.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

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 3, 2009

The same has been true of an unfortunate number of startups, they manage to generate a lot of hype, raise a lot of money, and sometimes make some of their investors, employees, or founders rich. ericries #leanstartup Another new idea in the section on continuous deployment and the cluster immune system. Danger, Will Robinson.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers dont want. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

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. If it costs $0.10 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. But $10.00?

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

But if you want to practice rapid deployment, you need to be able to deploy that build in one step as well. If you want to do continuous deployment, youd better be able to certify that build too, which brings us to. For more on continuous deployment, see Just-in-time Scalability. Can you make a build in one step?

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

[link] And - of course - going through [link] and reading up on the various different approaches different companies have (successfully) taken towards getting scalability at reasonably low cost. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. sadly, this blog forces you to use a google account.

Open Source 107

Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Since we were only paying per click, it didnt cost us anything to cast a wide net. ► 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. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

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). The root of that mistake is premature execution.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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. ► 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.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

Doesnt the communication overhead of a large team lead to chaos of overlapping experiments and continuously-deployed bugs?" "If And do I still need to get out of the building if Ive got great metrics and surveys?" Of course, readers of this blog know that the lean in "lean startup" doesnt refer to cost, but - rather - to Lean Thinking.

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an internet connection. The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an internet connection.

San Francisco 122

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 122

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 27, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. Continuously discover what customers want to buy before building or making follow-on investments in new features.

Lean 60

Lean Austin San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

In this post I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how to integrate continuous integration into your team, and how to use it to create two important feedback loops. First, a word about why continuous integration is so important. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. I cant really imagine how much it cost our "grownup" counterparts at other dot-com startups to get their first app up and running. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. Despite all the energy invested in talking to authors about the size of their platform, very few gatekeepers have a rigorous set of metrics for measuring it. I’ve met a lot of gatekeepers in the past few months.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Stick to some kind of absolute-cost rule, like "no one is allowed to spend more time on the refactoring for a given feature than the feature itself, but also no one is allowed to spend zero time refactoring." Only one occasion was a substantial rewrite justified based on performance metrics. January 29, 2009 12:48 AM mooderssaid.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

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. For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 19, 2009 Support the Startup Founders Visa with a tweet Its been an exhilarating first day here in Washington DC for the Geeks on a Plane tour. We can remedy it by creating a special visa for startup founders. I think the benefits are a no-brainer. 2gov.org will take care of the rest.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Founder DC Washington 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. One last thought.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 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. Founders struggle with this question.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 128