Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Interesting post.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

infochachkie.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

For instance, many a BDC CEO has initiated a consultant to study cost cutting issues before announcing a significant layoff. For instance, if a consultant proposes to help you with public relations, pay them a commission equivalent to the greater of a flat fee per story placed or a percentage of revenue generated from the PR coverage.

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Equity Silicon Valley Cofounder PR 40

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

In practice, how developers respond to this dilemma is determined by their incentives, which are driven by the culture of their team. Who will ultimately bear the cost of their mistakes? It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately. How severely is failure punished?

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

K9 Ventures

OCTOBER 10, 2017

Yes, the infrastructure is cheap (to start), but the human costs have gone up dramatically. Seed is the new Series A. (~$2M used get for building product, establishing product-market fit and early revenue). 6M-$15M used to scale customer acquisition and revenue). Those times are long gone. By definition, yes.

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Seed Stage Finance Later Stage Equity 82

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? In other words, what is the minimum viable product ?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Customer Development by Vertical - Click to Enlarge (As a reminder, the Customer Development process says your business plan is just a series of untested hypothesis (unless you’re a domain expert.) You take your product vision and get out of your building to turn your hypothesis into facts. M&A, IPO? New/Disruptive?

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 29, 2018

Freemium and free-trial signups have one thing in common: Neither generates revenue. This post details the freemium and free-trial models and considers the key questions—about your business, your market, and your product—that guide you toward the best option. Why product-led strategies work for SaaS companies.

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Customer Conversion Acquisition B2B 119

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

With over $1 billion in revenue, 2000 employees and a market capitalization of over $6 billion, Akamai has become a role model for scalable start-ups. billion in revenue, over $1 billion in gross profit and $500 million in EBITDA. The first year of revenue (1999) was $4 million – a remarkable achievement. Gross Profit. $(60).

Distribution 49

Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. Here the key is for your free customers to get value from the site that is greater than the costs they perceive by the fact that youre selling access to them. Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower. Getting started with split-testing and the one-line split-test.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Ship more infrequently While this may decrease downtime (things break and you roll back), the cost on development time from work and rework will be large, and mistakes will continue to slip through. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. If a feature worked, wed keep it. But it worked.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution. Remember that the cost of the solutions is proportional to the problem caused. In fact, even the investigation itself is considered too much work.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs. Most executives, especially in startups, dont have the courage to hold their teams to a high standard for new products or features. Not even if its generating revenue. Will start to pay attention.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. We ran ad campaigns against every single product we could think of in an adjacent market space to ours. Since we were only paying per click, it didnt cost us anything to cast a wide net.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer). This is the simplest ecosystem and simplest driver of growth.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

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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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

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. Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. For life sciences it was the Genentech IPO in 1980 that proved to investors that life science startups could make them a ton of money. The founders. China has simply become the factory.

Restful 243

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 243

Seeing Both Sides

JANUARY 13, 2015

My boss and mentor from Open Market, Gary Eichhorn , made the entire management team read it in the 1990s to hammer home its important lessons as we stumbled through the chasm on our way to scaling from zero to nearly $100 million in revenue in a few years. Would an IPO be possible in the future if we can continue growing 50-100% per year?

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Mezzanine IPO Finance Business Model 20

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. In the end, we managed to repair the damage, but only after losing a lot of time and at significant opportunity cost. We were totally unprepared for the magnitude of what happened.

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158