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. Talk about waste.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? Change who your product is for.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Once upon a time every great organization was a scrappy startup willing to take risks – new ideas, new methods, new customers, targets, and mission. If they were a commercial company, they figured out product/market fit; or if a government organization, it focused on solution/mission fit. Process Versus Product.

Government 317

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 317

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 23, 2009 Why vanity metrics are dangerous In a previous post, I defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics. In this post, Id like to talk about the perils of vanity metrics. My personal favorite vanity metrics is "hits."

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us?

Customer Development 230

Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. Frank Robinson of SyncDev has been helping companies figure out their minimum viable product and pivots since 1984, long before I even knew what it meant.

San Jose 257

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 257

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? Quite a few of the teams were building biotech, devices or digital health products. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Science and Industrial Policy , Teaching.

SBIR 316

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 316

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 Startups still need capital to scale once they find good product-market fit and a repeatable-scalable business model.).

Early Stage 287

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 287

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

The class was unique in that it was 1) team-based, 2) experiential, 3) lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). When we started this class, the concept of Lean (business models, customer development, agile, pivots, mvp’s) was new to everyone. Class Velocity/Depth.

Lean 251

Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 251

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

This means being really conservative with your cash burn early on until you have clearly found product/market fit. But the best founders I know almost always operate as though they have much less money in the bank, and won’t scale burn until they are super confident in their product/market fit. Experienced founders: B2B.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. We didnt think wed able to compete with that.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2010

I was having coffee with a former student who was complained that my idea of building a first product release with a minimum feature set was a bad idea. One of the principles of Customer Development is to get out of the building and understand the smallest feature-set customers will pay for in the first release.).

Customer Development 306

Customer Development Business Model Developer Search 306

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. The goal of iterative development is to give us guard rails so we dont veer off to either extreme.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Creators of new products in environments of extreme uncertainty, startups face enormous risks. Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. As a startup owner, what can you do to improve your chances?

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Lets start with what the product manager does.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

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. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter? End result?

Customer Development 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks. Cory Nelson will talk with Eric about how GE has applied the MVP method to its development of very large diesel engines.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

Before setting out on his own, Dan held various product, research, and operations roles at Salesforce , SurveyMonkey , Forrester Research , and The Ladders. Through that process, I lost a lot including some relationships with individuals, and I started to develop symptoms of acute anxiety. . If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Columbus 246

Columbus Entrepreneur Ohio Cofounder 246

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. It’s just that they are validated instead of made up.).

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. Gore , I’ve found two corporate strategy tools developed by other smart people helpful in bridging Lean Startups with Corporate Innovation.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

Vinod Khosla Founder Dave McClure Founding Partner Eric Ries Author Steve Blank Serial Entrepreneur & Professor Todd Park CTO Travis Kalanick CEO & Co-Founder Joe Zadeh Director of Product Sam Shank Co-Founder & CEO NEW! Seth Sternberg Co-Founder & CEO Scott Chacon CIO Kevin Hale Senior Product Manager NEW!

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. Its the ultimate high-engagement product. You can learn more about the event here.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

Founders that learn are more successful : Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups. Startup Genome Report. Some of their key findings : 1.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

We work in prototypically four-week iterations, with quality engineers and software developers working in close collaboration. During this period, the Palantir Gotham team grew from five developers to around 35. But we couldn''t have identified this without having clear metrics (that high bug count) to assess our development process.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. When I asked him if he actually had personally left the building and talked to these potential customers, or even had gotten them on the phone, he sounded confused. But what information to collect?

Metrics 240

Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 240

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. And we can offer investors metrics to play Moneyball – with the Investment Readiness Level. We think we can do better.

Oakland 327

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 327

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2014

Kauffman just launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies. 2:21: Accounting Metrics in a Large Company vs. Metrics that Matter in a Startup. 0:41: Don’t outsource Customer Discovery.

Founder 328

Founder Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 328

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

Founders of startups (and new ventures inside existing companies) are searching for product/market fit and a repeatable and scalable business model. An entrepreneur must start with the belief that all their assumptions are simply hypotheses that will undoubtedly be challenged by what they learn from customers. experiential.

Lean 435

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 435

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 1, 2008 Test-Driven Development as andon cord You cannot control what you cannot see, and the hardest part of managing software projects is that the final product is so intangible. This is equivalent of the andon cord in a Toyota production plant.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. Over the years marketers have found that using numbers to compare yourself to other products works well.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

Before setting out on his own, Dan held various product, research, and operations roles at Salesforce , SurveyMonkey , Forrester Research , and The Ladders. Through that process, I lost a lot including some relationships with individuals, and I started to develop symptoms of acute anxiety. . If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Columbus 120

Columbus Entrepreneur Ohio Cofounder 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

If you’re looking to dive deep on Lean Startup skills, our workshop sessions provide professional development at a serious bargain. In this workshop, Fraser, Founder/CEO of LUXr and Klein, Director of Product & UX at One Jackson will offer practical techniques for getting and using customer feedback.

Lean 154

Lean Cofounder Analytics Startup 154