Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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SVPG

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

But one of the real advantages from a product point of view is that there’s no legacy to drag along, there’s no revenue to preserve, and there’s no reputation to safeguard. However, once your product develops to the point that it can sustain a viable business (congratulations!),

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing. There is much work that I need to do (the only developer so far) before we have something customers can use.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

They are long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. They are long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations. I mean, here we are, paying them to be there, and they won’t use the product!

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

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. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. Is there s choice?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company. Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

These two principles combine to free up tremendous resources for raw R&D and innovation, because so few people are stuck working on "death march" internal projects or maintaining low-success released products. For one, capacity development. Not even if its generating revenue. What do all those other people do?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

It allows teams to diagnose sources of waste in their development process and continuously improve, reversing the usual trend of teams getting slower over time. These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules. My experience is: usually not.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Its an essential discipline of good software development, especially in startups. 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. Heres a company I met with recently. Great post, Eric.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

All successful media companies had at their heart a series of editors, producers, and agents tasked with discovering and developing new talent. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? Is that a lot? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them. We cultivated a passionate community that nurtured a skilled set of developers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

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. Let me end with a challenge: see if you can find and kill just one myth in your development team. But our team would never do that, right?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. That is customer development. The process started with a few moving parts. The A/B testing did have its challenges.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

At a certain point in IMVU’s development, we faced a difficult choice. This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In fact, it was the revenue trends that eventually alerted us to the magnitude of the problem. Unfortunately, revenue a trailing indicator. Its a great time to increase revenues without spending money on acquiring new customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. A: yes, absolutely.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Want to learn more about me?

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