www.informationarbitrage.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Home About Press IA Capital Partners Archives After 17 years in M&A, Derivatives and Trading, Im spending my time with young entrepreneurs in and around financial technology and digital media. Main February 23, 2010 Advice for CTO Founders: Dont Let Business Kill the Business Founding a technology company is an amazing thing.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Founder Cap Table Vesting 40

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world. It may be that all the doomsayers are right.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Up and Running

OCTOBER 8, 2015

But, we neglected to do our homework and really understand the market that we were heading into. We ended up with a product that was searching for a market instead of first spending the time to figure out who our ideal customer was and building a product specifically for them. First, what’s market research?

Marketing 60

Marketing CTO Hire Forecast Finder 60

Spencer Fry

DECEMBER 16, 2019

Throughout my career as an entrepreneur, I've gotten my hands dirty in every area of the business: product, marketing, support, community, success, and so on, but at 19 people, I just haven't had the time to be everywhere at all times. New hiring responsibilities. It's even difficult for me at times as the CEO.

CTO Hire 44

CTO Hire Wiki Product Development Matching 44

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

The law of large numbers (of customers) says you cant help but make at least some money - your valuation is determined by how well you monetize the tidal wave of growth. Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

The Next Web

DECEMBER 2, 2013

Therefore, if you want to bring an MVP ( Minimum Viable Product ) to market, Werdelin approximates that you’ll need $50,000 to $250,000 , depending on the skill sets of the developers and designers you hire. Werdelin equates building a successful product to building a nightclub. million to develop.”.

Cost 168

Cost San Francisco New York City Ruby 168

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

I have covered a couple of topics in this series, the first being hiring the best people and the second organizing for success based on the attributes of the people you are hiring. 3) It all starts with the product: Companies can overcome a great many challenges with band-aids, duct tape, and bailing wire.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

SVPG

MARCH 5, 2011

Organizationally, this role typically manages the product owners/product managers and the user experience designers, and generally reports to the CEO. With some exceptions, it it is important that this role be a peer to the CTO and the VP Marketing. Those that do succeed make a dramatic difference for their companies.

Product 82

Product CTO Hire Hiring Leadership 82

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

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.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Hippoland

OCTOBER 9, 2016

This is one of my favorite startup presentations of all time by Mike Cassidy on going fast. Demonstrate that you can pull the trigger on things quickly — whether it be getting customers, hiring / firing employees, or product development. And convey this in your pitch.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage CTO Hire Email Later Stage 48

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

In the early fall of 2009, as kaChing prepared for its marketplace launch, the management team showed the app—which included real time market data, SEC-grade accounting, analytics, compliance and customer management tools—to a number of investment pros to get feedback and endorsements. Which is a nice story.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. chatted five times?

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

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. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service. A description of your target market or the different market segments you’re targeting. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Scalable systems are no exception - if your assumptions about how many customers youll have, or how they will behave are just a little bit wrong, you can wind up with a massive amount of wasted code.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

This simple feedback loop has proven its worth to me time and again. Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be.

San Francisco 142

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

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. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

vs. sustainable: Compare this to the renewable strategies, like viral marketing, SEO, widgets, and ads, which can scale into 10s of millions of users but are primarily centered around tough, non-user centric work. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence. Your "startup-lessons-learned" are very valuable. Would love to get in touch.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Some startups avoid getting customer feedback for precisely this reason: they are afraid that if early reactions are negative, theyll be "forced" to abandon their vision. So how do you know its time to change direction?

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

Getting features and fixes into hands of users was the greatest priority - a test environment would just get in the way and slow down the validation coming from having code running in production. As the product matured, they were able to ratchet up the quality to prevent regression on features that had been truly embraced by their customers.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

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. The report is set up to show you what happened to customers who registered in that period (a so-called cohort analysis ). This report is set up to tell you about new customers specifically. One last note on reporting.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Open Source 107

Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

They’re well aware of the conventional VC bias against funding companies which externally develop their technology, but they do have relevant skills. Currently, I think the following points should be considered: The optimal structure is one that equalizes the contributions of the development shop and investors. What are the timelines?

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. 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? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Team Configuration 500 Startups Guerilla Marketing Organizations Entrepreneurship Startup Founders & Entrepreneurs Startups Startup Incubators and Seed Programs Seedcamp Y Combinator TechStars Lean Startups What is the perfect startup team? They are many more examples.

Technical Review 51

Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

But from a customer experience point of view, Im not yet sold. Even with only a few months of development, third parties have crammed every single category in the store full of apps. Not many customers ever browse the app directory or search for specific apps - they dont have to, they find out about apps by being invited by a friend.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

The opportunity isnt to give into temptation and figure out how to recklessly and expensively market the frontlist. It is to adopt a long and slow and ultimately profitable strategy of marketing your ever-growing backlist. I see startups struggle with this all the time. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

San Francisco 76

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Add onto that the incredible amounts of infrastructure code that we reused, and we were able to bring our product to market months earlier. At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. As always, Paul is right.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

You delight customers just like before. In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60