Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

How to recognize when it’s time to pull the plug on your startup idea, and why founders can’t operate afford to operate in a vacuum were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. And not keep investors informed about changes to your business model can have serious consequences. There was a lot of interest.

Columbus 245

Columbus Entrepreneur Ohio Cofounder 245

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. And if they’re smart they’ll teach Horizon 1 teams to operate with mission and intent , not just process and procedure.). Fast forward to today.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

How to recognize when it’s time to pull the plug on your startup idea, and why founders can’t operate afford to operate in a vacuum were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. And not keep investors informed about changes to your business model can have serious consequences. There was a lot of interest.

Columbus 120

Columbus Entrepreneur Ohio Cofounder 120

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

Dave McClure’s conversion metrics visualize where different conversion optimization opportunities lie—including those for acquisition. If you don’t have customers, our articles on customer development and how to write compelling copy without customers can help you get started. Image source ).

Acquisition 111

Acquisition Software Review PPC Analytics 111

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

to maximize the long-term value of those shares through solid financials, healthy SaaS metrics, and growing as fast as possible (but not faster). Rather, focus on creating something that people will pay money for, today, and much more money than it costs to acquire or serve them. One final word of caution.

Cofounder 312

Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. No, not really.

Silicon Valley 141

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

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.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

As a consequence, corporations used metrics like return on net assets (RONA), return on capital deployed, and internal rate of return (IRR) to measure efficiency. These metrics make it difficult for a company that wants to invest in long-term innovation. On the low-end, they undercut cost structures, resulting in customer migration.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

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. She shares: “We now use metrics like cost-per-learning and validation velocity to show progress since traditional things like ROI weren’t applicable.” Here are some of our favorites: 1.

Lean 60

Lean United States Fractional CTO Startup 60

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Problems arise when companies isolate areas of the business in what Eric refers to as “functional silos”—independently operating teams (design, engineering, marketing, legal, etc.) You have to go find your own customers to experiment with, you have your own brand, so you have to think like a Lean Startup. Every single one.

Lean 167

Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. Today, only 2 percent of product developers measure queues.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

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.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

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.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

In our case, we’re local in over 200 countries with operations in basically every city on the planet. in developing these new models. We believe that using the customer development process to monetize these assets through new business models can create huge competitive advantage and more speed to market for us and other big companies.

Lean 326

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 326

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,

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. This approach is a the heart of breaking down the "time/quality/cost pick two" paradox , because these small investments cause the team to go faster over time.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. You get to call all the shots, including how you want to operate the business and who you want to be involved. Estimating Realistic Startup Costs. On the other hand, it’s a slow process.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. We were constantly creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on end-user purchases.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

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. That depends.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

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.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

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.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.). We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

ConversionXL

MAY 22, 2014

To guide the discussion, we’re going to be using Dave McClure’s Conversion Metrics as a framework to see where different conversion optimization opportunities lie. For Acquisition, we’re primarily asking how do first time visitors & potential customers find you? It got attention (and probably some clicks) but at what cost?

Software Review 116

Software Review PPC Analytics Search 116

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. Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue? Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries. Cost Structure is changed to Mission Cost/Budget. Customer Relationships is changed to Buy-in/Support. Changed Customer Segments to Beneficiaries.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

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.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

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. ” Historically, investing was a manual, artisan process.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Small batches reduce overhead. Small is beautiful.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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. How costly is a failure?

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

The idea was that these two people would operate as a unit, with the mentors job performance during this period evaluated by the performance of the new person. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? First, we can reduce fear by mitigating the consequences of failure.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

That is just currently a full personal money sucking process, as you're taxed on income and have no business breaks yet, besides supplies, the majority of costs to start up a business have no tax advantages to creating a start up. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

I now believe that the "pick two" concept is fundamentally flawed, and that lean startups can achieve all three simultaneously: quickly bring high-quality software to market at low cost. Thats why we need continuous integration and test-driven development. First of all, its a myth that cutting corners saves time.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

At the cost of a little extra indirection, you can organize your code around a series of long-lived objects, each of whom communicates with the other objects in simple, easy-to-understand ways. But I think debates about which language, which operating system, even which editor (emacs, vim, Visual Studio) can go on forever. Im curious.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166