Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

He’ll talk about making a profit and making a difference in a conversation with New Media Ventures’ Christie George. Ben Horowitz ’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things is driving the conversation around startup management this year. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks. Eric Ries will interview him.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

People mistook extra doses of Ajax for a successful product. The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. I have seen really great product people espouse the death of the business plan. Do so at your peril.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2014

Today, I was fortunate enough to get Hunter Boyle – Senior Business Development Director of AWeber to talk with us about what exactly business development is, and the role it can play on conversions. In my interview with Hunter, we discuss: The key responsibilities of a business development professional.

Developer 104

Developer API Cofounder New Jersey 104

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. And all of that cost was caused by one activity: hiring. Hiring is no different from any other company process. Sounds a little abstract, though, doesnt it?

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

The Startup Toolkit

NOVEMBER 10, 2012

Spoiler: You can’t hire out sales because in the early days it’s about learning, not selling, and hired guns can’t bring back bad news. Your sales roadmap[2] is a asset built up over time which undergoes the same innovation & refinement of a tech product. It takes time to get the roadmap solid.

Hiring 51

Hiring Founder Viral Early Stage 51

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter? End result?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 20, 2013

by Dan Adams , president of Advanced Industrial Marketing and author of “ New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth “ Right now our economy and our nation feel anything but business-friendly. They’re afraid to hire, afraid to spend, afraid to risk. Just… afraid. You need to find this out up-front.

Product 251

Product B2B Product Development Developer 251

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Whether it’s managing your supply chain or automating customer service, look for ways to optimise every aspect of your operations. PDF to Word conversion tools can be a lifesaver for managing documents efficiently. Hiring the right people is critical, but it’s just the beginning.

Intellectual Property 153

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 153

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

That kicked off this long conversation about how you might try to leverage this evolution of education technology to create scalable impact in places where tuition couldn’t be the driver of growth. A college degree is great if you’re looking to get hired. ” At this time, we hadn’t even built the product yet.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 145

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Small startups act the same way, simply cloning each other’s products. Perhaps products like WeChat , designed for an international market, might be the beginning of real innovation.

China 327

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 327

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. Customer Development.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 26, 2018

In our experience, structured customer development work is right up there amongst the most valuable things a founder can do in the early days of their startup. Once you have an idea that feels strong, it’s imperative to speak with customers about it. But good customer development is tough to do.

Customer 75

Customer Framework Differentiation Customer Development 75

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

As soon as they had designed the product, they found a contract manufacturer to build the product in China. They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So What if a buyer asks, can you make a custom version of your product?

PR 319

PR China Lean Channel 319

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

That kicked off this long conversation about how you might try to leverage this evolution of education technology to create scalable impact in places where tuition couldn’t be the driver of growth. A college degree is great if you’re looking to get hired. ” At this time, we hadn’t even built the product yet.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Measure conversion rates.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Extra Lucrative Conversion Advice. Conversion Optimization Services. Conversion Research. It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Small startups act the same way, simply cloning each other’s products. Perhaps products like WeChat , designed for an international market, might be the beginning of real innovation.

China 219

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 219

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

As soon as they had designed the product, they found a contract manufacturer to build the product in China. They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So What if a buyer asks, can you make a custom version of your product?

PR 211

PR China Lean Channel 211

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2018

Much of the writing on startups focuses on two elements: finding product-market fit scaling the company once #1 is accomplished For product-market fit, we have a lot of source material to work with from the last decade: Steve Blank’s leadership on Customer Development , and Eric Ries’ on the Lean Startup ?—?along

Warrant 48

Warrant Bootstrapping Framework Hiring 48

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

I was glad to see him but it was clear over coffee that he was struggling with his first hiring failure. I’ve been running our company, cycling through Customer Discovery and Validation and the board suggested that I was running out of bandwidth and needed some help in closing our initial orders. selling a known product to.

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Startup Business Model Customer Development Bandwidth 317

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Heres an excerpt: The Startups Rules of Speed - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Every startup that achieves success eventually faces a critical moment — whether to speed up or slow down.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

A Phone Call After I left MIPS Computers I was in New York tagging along with a friend (a computer architect whose products at Apple a decade later would change the shape of personal computing) who was consulting for a voice recognition startup. It would be the company where I actually earned the title. The response from across the country?

North Carolina 131

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Five Whys has its origins in the Toyota Production System. The Five Whys for Start-Ups - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Root cause analysis and preventive maintenance are concepts we expect to see in a factory setting. Five Whys has its origins in the Toyota Production System.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery , iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments. Bob started hiring second rate developers.

Customer Development 332

Customer Development Cofounder Later Stage Software 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. Over the years marketers have found that using numbers to compare yourself to other products works well.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 127

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

Id be honored to have you join the conversation. The Conversation - Harvard Business Review For most of us, the phrase management science conjures up a decidedly non-entrepreneurial image, and for good reason. Read the rest at The Conversation - Harvard Business Review. Id be honored to have you join the conversation.

San Francisco 119

San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119

ConversionXL

MARCH 28, 2014

You’ve likely already heard that explainer videos can boost conversions anywhere between ten and ten bazillion percent. With over 100 years of movie & video history embedded in our collective subconscious, your customer’s expectations are really high. Or A Product Demonstration. What Is An Explainer Video?

Video 122

Video Software Review Cofounder Metrics 122

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. If you can harness the knowledge, natural enthusiasm, and peer influence of your very best customers — I call them “Rock Star” customers — they’ll market, sell, and help develop breakthrough products for your firm better than your internal resources can do, and often at a fraction of the cost.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. And the product that “talked to me&# , the loudest and most seductively, was the one that went home with me.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

The Startup Toolkit

AUGUST 29, 2012

You don’t need to collect the full set (tech, industry, product, customer, etc). If the founding team is non-technical and you can’t figure out whether you are being screwed by your developers or whether your potential new CTO is amazing, a tech advisor can help by joining you in interviews and reviewing commits.

Technical Review 38

Technical Review CTO Hire Cap Table Software Review 38

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

I believe it means were achieving product/market fit for a set of ideas. The way forward requires getting everyone together in a room, and having a conversation about where were headed. If you just throw a minimum viable product out the door to see what sticks, wont that necessarily be ugly and badly designed? Congratulations.

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

ConversionXL

JULY 1, 2014

Conversions are mostly about being relevant to your customers. If what you offer and the way you present it is relevant to your visitors they will convert to buying customers. Then again if you don’t understand who your customer is or worse it’s “everybody” then you have very little change of being successful at it.

Customer 76

Customer Design Software Review Lead Generation 76

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. First of all, why split-test? One last note on reporting.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. Many of them get hung up on understanding how to select the right minimal viable product. Your mission is your baby.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

In every start-up, finding initial product-market fit is a magical moment. Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. If you want to scale sales, you hire more sales reps. 80-90% software products vs. 40-50% advertising products) and company maturity (e.g.,

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175