Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

So we tried to craft a strategy that would give us the product development leverage we needed to serve all customers. We combined three tactics: extensive use of free software, an open platform for user-generated content, and leveraged distribution channels. Leveraged distribution channels.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 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 get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. Do it regularly.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Customer development. This speeds up the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The report is set up to show you what happened to customers who registered in that period (a so-called cohort analysis ). I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. They just ask "which hypothesis should I show?"

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

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 get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim.

San Francisco 142

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Do the engineers understand what they are building? 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. Can they tell a good release from a bad one?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Our open source counterparts who did solve the scale problem, had some serious hardware costs to deal with. So did I when I finally found myself building an app with real scalability, a few years later, but a combination of our just-in-time scalability technique and great open source scaling tools, made it manageable.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

In almost all Agile Development systems, thousands of automated tests are run against every change to the software. These tests are written by the engineers themselves, and they must all pass every time. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Daily builds are giving way to true continuous integration, in which every checkin to the source control system is automatically run against the full battery of automated tests. At IMVU , our engineering team accumulated thousands upon thousands of tests, and we had a build cluster (using BuildBot ) that ran them.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

Ive been even more impressed by the various Greasemonkey compilers out there, that let you turn a Greasemonkey script into a full-blown Firefox extension, for easy distribution. 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 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

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 get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

"In a phase change the things that made you successful before don't work anymore" It's tough to cross the chasm without "being remarkable" The distribution and word-of-mouth or word-of-mail that results from being remarkable can sometimes be the difference between crossing the chasm, or falling in and never getting out.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 16, 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 get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

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 get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim.

San Francisco 76

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

They wanted to get their look just right before they showed it to anyone else - they would even pay money to do it. at IMVU, we expected feature A to be high value, ran split testing, results were X, showing that.). The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? How annoying!)

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 133

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 260

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, September 18, 2008 How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of iPhone-related companies lately. There are other models, in other distribution channels. On Facebook, viral distribution has proved decisive. I havent found any yet.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 5, 2008 Great open source scalability tools from Danga If you are trying to build a scalable LAMP service, its always best to start with the original and still quite relevant presentation, from Brad Fitzpatrick when he was at LiveJournal. MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system.

Open Source 107

Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

You show this by giving completely generic arguments to one line sentences from his post. His friends at General Electric said he was wasting his time on the gas combustion engine because the world was going electric. -- ErrantX 215 days ago | link. The story of the v-8 engine is a bit different. From "Think and Grow Rich".

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

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. SEM is a simple idea.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. I first spent time trying to build it myself leveraging open source tools, applying my skills from a single CS class, and trying to be an autodidactic coder.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

The entrepreneurship progarms of the business, engineering, and undergraduate schools are all tackling the subject this semester, and Im honored to be part of it. hitchens - theyre not open to the public as far as I know, but if you have an affiliation with Stanford engineering, undergrad, or GSB, its possible you could come audit.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lots of engineers are busy checking in and deploying their work. Meanwhile, a dozen other engineers are getting annoyed, because this constant bouncing is making it harder for them to work (they cant deploy changes while tests or the cluster are in red-alert mode). How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

On the other hand, we provide a management dashboard showing peoples expectations of success for different projects along with explaination for why something will or wont work. 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 Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Most engineers are terrible visual designers, but if the designer on their team is struggling, maybe they can help out with an icon or two. 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?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 68

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. is it really that the only people who can build great startups are engineers? Engineers don’t always have the best business ideas.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

We can take advantage of the many open source libraries out there that dont scale especially well, and write as much non-scalable code as we want. This is great for something like a huge DHT or a distributed work queue. A quick Google seems to show it as a term coming from someone who worked at Flickr. using replicas?

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. 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. January 16, 2009 6:11 PM Anonymoussaid.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

You can argue that the DNA created by Microsoft's over emphasis on distribution (Steve) and development (Bill), has ultimately cost it $50bn or more in lost revenue, market share and market capitalization. Developers have worn the crown for the last 30 or more years in the technology industry - rightly.

Technical Review 51

Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51