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. What’s going on?

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. My belief is that these lean startups will achieve dramatically lower development costs, faster time to market, and higher quality products in the years to come. July 15, 2009 11:18 PM markmontgomery said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Way back when the money was doled out, the team made a compelling pitch about the large market that was going to adopt their new innovative product or service. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

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. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. SEM is a simple idea. chatted once?

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. 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. Frankly, we were embarrassed by how many bugs, crashes, and defects it had.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If you dont have customers, a product, investors, or a board of directors, you can pretty much stay focused on just one thing at a time. Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

When we build products, we use a methodology. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." The theory of Product/Market Fit is one key component of customer development, and I highly recommend Marcs essay on that topic.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And once you have a relationship with an author, musician, or journalist, it will be quite easy for them to offer new products and services – and for you to give them feedback that helps them shape ever more interesting (and ever more profitable) offerings. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They have a product that has a moderate number of customers. 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. On the other, they already have a team fully engaged on making their product architecture better.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

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. This is why I constantly stress the need to set specific, actionable targets for new product initiatives or new feature split-tests.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

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. Let’s look at some examples: In a traditional business, customers pay money for a physical artifact (a product) or a service.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. My normal answer is that I dont really think thats how Apple products are built. Thats what so many techniques that I advocate are all about: customer validation , minimum viable product , vision pivots , and even throwing away working code. It just wasnt great.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Question 1: When youre adding features to a product used by an existing user base, do you still do split testing to determine usage patterns? Existing customers already have an expectation about how your product works, and its important to take this into consideration when adding or changing features. Absolutely, yes.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy&# or “our team moves too slow.&# The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

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. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

Is this feature usable, and is the UX reasonably consistent with the rest of my product? It’s not enough to just launch a feature and see if your revenue increases. Obviously, it would be lovely if all of your products features thrilled all of your users. What is the expected ROI for this feature?

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Advisory Board 40

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

First, SlideShare is a fantastic product (that I use on a regular basis) and an impressive company example of Lean Startup practices in action. If your company is using minimum viable product , you’ve probably said the same thing yourself. But I have decided to make an exception today, for two reasons.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

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.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product? If so, thats a form of free-serves-paid, and we should be willing to cut those users off who arent continuing to advertise.

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. There are many articles by many experts ( myself included ) extolling the virtues of listening to customers.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

You could conduct an in-person usability test, which is very useful for getting a view of how actual people perceive the totality of your product. The tracking survey asks one simple question: How likely are you to recommend Product X to a friend or colleague? The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Heres the working definition Ive started using: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. LIKED: Y startups fail, cont deployment vs waterfall vs agile, small batches & learn fr biz metrics #leanstartup As concise a summary as Ive ever seen.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 60

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. All my products and ideas focus on early cash and a business model that works from the first day. Ultimately your product must be useful. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94