Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

This Stanford class will introduce management tools for entrepreneurs. We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Finally, you’ll see how agile development can help you rapidly iterate your product to build something customers will use and buy.

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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. shoes in order to deduce possible competitors’ moves and anticipate customer needs. What do you think?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

To win in business you need to follow this process: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act. We are far too enamored with data collection and reporting the standard metrics we love because others love them because someone else said they were nice so many years ago. That metric is tied to a KPI.

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Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 156

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Convertible debt financings have become an increasingly attractive approach for seed rounds because it delays the valuation discussion, costs less from a legal standpoint, and is an easier financial instrument to “keep raising more small amounts of money” on. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

You can view previous essays in this series here: Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. They measure their success on metrics that reflect success in execution, and they reward execution.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

For our students, that can mean anyone from a Syrian refugee trying to make contact with his family back home, to a supply chain manager for a major apparel brand who wants to make sure his contract factory in Bangladesh doesn’t use forced labor. each while Sharpie markers run $0.375 apiece. Looking ahead. Christos Makridis, a Ph.D

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

For our students, that can mean anyone from a Syrian refugee trying to make contact with his family back home, to a supply chain manager for a major apparel brand who wants to make sure his contract factory in Bangladesh doesn’t use forced labor. each while Sharpie markers run $0.375 apiece. Looking ahead. Christos Makridis, a Ph.D

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Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 31, 2015

Every year, our team conducts more than 500 customer development calls to understand what challenges the community is facing. Prerna began her startup journey after leaving a job as a management consultant, and launched Yaari, a youth-oriented social network in India. Here are some of our favorites: 1.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Managing the Business. An early indication that you’ve found the right business model is when you believe the cost of getting customers will be less than the revenues the customers will generate. For web startups, this is when the cost of customer acquisition is less than the lifetime value of that customer.

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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. Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody. Being a manager didnt sound fun - deep down, who really wants to be held accountable for other peoples actions? So I wound up learning the discipline of managing other people.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. There are financial metrics (Return on Investment, Hurdle Rate, etc.) Lessons Learned.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

An investor had few hard metrics other than the actual financials, and little technology to make the process scaleable. Over the past few decades, better metrics became available, and investors could take a more analytical, data-driven approach. 4) Manage deal flow. Pitchbot.vc 3) Originate investments.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. The notion of “Market Type&# is there so startups have a metric of when to spend marketing and sales dollars.

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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. Agile software development. Customer development. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers dont want.

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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. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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The Startup Toolkit

DECEMBER 12, 2012

And if you focus on those metrics, you will go out of business too soon. Cohort analytics and funnel metric (start with Pirate AARRR Metrics if you are new) are priceless once you have a website live. Customer Development and UX both have good tools for doing this. You have questions.

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Lean Startup Metrics Retention 54

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. They are gaining valuable customer data. And yet, their investors are frustrated.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

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. Still, this manager is going to spend the company’s money, and needs to be held accountable. If it costs $0.10

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

ConversionXL

JANUARY 31, 2014

note: If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use customer development questions for your page to resonate with future traffic). Ask Peep about analytics, and he’ll tell you, “Metrics are there to provide actionable insight. You need to look at a metric, ask “so what?” – and have an answer.”. image source.

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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.

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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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In the old days, the brand manager of a consumer packaged goods product had to spend energy inferring the effectiveness of their television ads through a combination of trailing indicators (like market share) or time-consuming market research. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300.

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Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

It provides a basic introduction to analytics as they apply to Lean Startup, including sections on what metrics to use and how to interpret them. For instance, Ben lists out the worst of the “vanity metrics,” a term that describes appealing but meaningless or misleading numbers. Alistair: There are plenty. Consider a restaurant.

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Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. Small is beautiful.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. July 29, 2009 6:57 AM Heiner Wolf said.

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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. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

Each part of the program is organized around one phase of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop and begins with a keynote address from a heavy hitter: Steve Blank on Customer Development, Randy Komisar on "Getting to Plan B" and - a third person, not-yet-announced-but-extremely-cool-trust-me. I think this is a fair question.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

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. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

Lean 60

Lean Austin San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

Now with over 750 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.) By the time they reach the top, they are excellent managers of processes and procedures needed to deliver a consistent and repeatable execution of the current core mission (and typically excellent political players as well.).

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