Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We spent weeks working on this new product, racing the clock so it would be done in time for the real presidential debates. We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Transformify

APRIL 12, 2020

It’s an extra cost for the employer and most companies stick to 2-3 overseas locations to simplify remote working arrangements. Some companies create remote jobs to save on employment costs and benefit from the much lower pay rate overseas. An asset, no cost in the P&L. USD 30 000 rent (cost). No revenue at all.

Bangladesh 98

Bangladesh Philippines Salary Cofounder 98

Jeff Hilimire

OCTOBER 8, 2014

My name is Richard Simms and, I am a Cofounder of Tech Talent South. Our mission at TTS is to develop more tech talent in the South through beginner-focused programs teaching web development and computer programming. We actually met taking some web development classes in Chicago. Who are you and what do you do?

Cofounder 68

Cofounder Charlotte Raleigh Atlanta 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes product development in the feedback loop with customers. 2008 09 06 Eric Ries Haas Columbia Customer Development Engineering View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. Startups are the lifeblood of our economy.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

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. Thats why we need continuous integration and test-driven development.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. 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.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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. One last thought.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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

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. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

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. We would pretty much bid on any phrase that was "[name of competitive product] chat" and variations like that.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

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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Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. Some of them are probably still cursing my name, because - lets face it - PHP can be pretty painful. As a language, its inelegant. Every change required a server restart.

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PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names&# in the meeting. 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. Why wasn’t it immediately obvious how to fix the problem?

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

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. Phases of product & company growth. This is a common mistake.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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. This is a version of the andon cord technique from lean manufacturing.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

The Next Web

FEBRUARY 3, 2014

The tactic is to place information with intended value (and a bit of brand name-dropping) in the stream. Newspapers with heavy Web presence, such as The New York Times , are in a unique position to move forward with increased sponsored content, (if they choose to do so). An ad by any other name.

Advertising 139

Advertising San Francisco New York Viral 139

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

incubators, e.g., the many options in New York. intrapreneurs, e.g., the employee of GE who is tasked with launching a new business. Ideally, the economics of a development investment look like those of a cash investment; typically, a seed investor will get no more than about 20% of a company for his capital.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. The problem should be familiar to anyone who plays Scrabble: not all letter are equally likely to be used as the first letter of someones name. Give each entity a name. For example, consider this simple scheme.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

If it costs $0.10 to acquire an early adopter, how much should it cost to acquire a mainstream customer? We're starting our new business, fanminder.com, to help small merchants instantly communicate with their customers, and I'm increasingly hearing your name and reading your keen insights. But $10.00?

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

When we finally did launch the company, even though our product had grown and changed significantly, Wired didnt cover it. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, the works. Who doesnt want to see their name in print? gave us two years of a beta product to build up the service and the brand awareness.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

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.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

SVASE or Founder Dating in Silicon Valley, First Tuesday in London and Hackers and Founders in New York all come to mind. Other cities like New York, Boston, Seattle, LA and Austin TX also have pretty strong startup communities. But at the end of the day, it is about a product being accepted. Same with Pets.com?

Cofounder 66

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 66

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? If you look around the United States it’s hard to avoid Sloan. There’s the Alfred P.

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 179

Up and Running

AUGUST 5, 2014

Make those tweaks before fully entering the market – and understand that, for most entrepreneurs, this is a process, not a single final product. Develop a Plan. As you develop a business plan and a roll-out plan, and think about each step along the way, and what you will need to take each step. Their slogan? ‘No No Peeking’.

Los Angeles 156

Los Angeles Guerilla Green CPA 156

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on split testing SSL certificates and the effect of domain names. Does having an expensive Verisign branded SSL and site logo gain higher conversion than the low-cost GoDaddy equivalent? For example, does an Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificate gain higher conversions than a standard SSL?

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 132

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. Flaming discussions usually end with name calling and a flame war.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

To wit: achieving product/market fit , getting customer validation , making something people want , things that matter , and of course the many excellent books on the topic, of which Ill mention just two of the best, Crossing the Chasm and The Innovators Dilemma. Resegmented market (low cost variety). Maybe I should try that."

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Why do Citizens of Humanity jeans cost $200 , when physically similar pants can be had for one-tenth the price? The same is true of brand-name products in almost every category (and it can be measured ). This is always true, because modern economies have become increasingly virtual over the years.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 102

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

what are the most crucial steps to be taken by a new tech startup when outsourcing major part of the tech to IT firms or outsourcing “product development” eg new social media website project? Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

Namely, that they agree to use it free of charge if we deliver it to them and it is capable of X, Y and Z. Namely, that they agree to use it free of charge if we deliver it to them and it is capable of X, Y and Z. We also solicited information as to how they were currently solving the problem and how much they paid for their solution.

San Francisco 144

San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144