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Lessons Learned: Lean hiring tips

Startup Lessons Learned

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.

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

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. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh).

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Waves of technology platforms

Startup Lessons Learned

Meanwhile, we were building our app in PHP, using a generic DB driver and mysql, "for the time being." 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. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Fear is the mind-killer

Startup Lessons Learned

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.

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Lessons Learned: Three freemium strategies

Startup Lessons Learned

Here the key is for your free customers to get value from the site that is greater than the costs they perceive by the fact that youre selling access to them. When the goals not clear, I think you wind up with situations that are essentially value-destroying, where free users are actually driving up costs.

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Lessons Learned office hours

Startup Lessons Learned

The first event is January 21, and is being put on by Dealmaker Media as part of their Strategy Series events: In the Trenches: Cutting Costs in a Tight Economy. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. There are no canned presentations, so you can come set the agenda.

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Lessons Learned: CPI > CPC

Startup Lessons Learned

Those apps are generating even more page views, making it quite affordable to buy application installs (which is a cost-per-action ad that requires the user to install the app before the action is considered complete). These cost-per-install ads are a reasonable way to jumpstart traffic to a new app, which is what theyve been used for so far.