Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

Signal is a fundraising tool for founders run by NFX Guild, which identifies the most relevant VCs for you. . HOF Capital is currently developing a proprietary sourcing tool to automatically filter for potential deal prospects that fit our criteria. Pitchbot.vc is an AI bot which helps companies refine their sales pitch to VCs.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. What is customer development?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. It turned out that, during the course of the decline, one customer segment was losing customers while another was gaining customers. The company struggled mightily with how to explain this bad news to their board.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

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. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 27, 2017

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I catch up with Brian and we just talk about a whole host of things. He is the CEO of Rainmaker Digital, founder of Copyblogger, host of unemployable and curator of further. We got to thousands of customers and millions in recurring revenue.

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Community SEO Technical Review Audience 38

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. Zack Being a co-founder of a young start-up company (all in our 20′s) and having a very tight budget to work with, it’s hard to imagine finding money to put towards this sort of thing, although I completely agree with its relevance.

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Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Equity 40

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

What is the right revenue model? Aside from the dramatically shorter development cycle that browser games enjoy, the split testing of features (which is intuitive to web application makers) is something that propelled Zynga's games and revenues to the top of the social games vertical.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. That is customer development. “But it never happened.&# [Alas, customers dont know what they want!

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

There are huge classes of bugs that "work as designed" but cause catastrophic changes in customer behavior. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. Most QA teams are organized around finding reproduction paths for bugs that affect customers. Better handling of intermittent bugs.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

We also cavalierly lampoon the “suits” that get brought in to run startups after the founders are fired by callous VC’s. They have the ultimate responsibility in a venture-backed company of deciding whether to fire the founders and bring in “professional management.” I also frequently see the reverse. (In

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. Over-communicate with employees, investors, customers. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. Offer equity instead of cash.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve talked with a number of software development shops who are eager to get into the business of cofounding companies, i.e., getting product revenue and equity instead of just consulting revenue. What are the terms of their relationship with the founder? They’re typically pursuing a foundry/studio model. The discounts?

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Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast. Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. So I have a question for you, Jason.

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Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

To answer that question, we hosted a webcast conversation earlier this week with Eric Ries, Brant Cooper, and Patrick Vlaskovits. They are the co-authors of The Lean Entrepreneur , and the co-founders of the Moves the Needle Group , which advises the innovation practices of Fortune 100 companies.

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Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). The key is to be able to refute as many major hypotheses as you can.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. In fact, I remember sending him and his obscure-to-me co-founder (aka Reid Hoffman ) a bug report early-on, instead of taking them up on their offer of an in-person meeting.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? A: yes, absolutely. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Not even if its generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money. And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. I first did it for the founder.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

When you read stories of successful startups in the popular and business press, you usually hear about how the founders anticipated several of these challenges in their initial vision. Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first? Unfortunately, startup success requires getting them all right.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

We just add up the revenue we've made in the past few months from Win98 users, and compare to the pain that Win98 has caused as identified in 5Ys. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? It's so old and so buggy that it's a real pain to ship 3D software on it.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, " Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination? "). Customer discovery turns founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. This is a minimum viable product.

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Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder 119

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

For an online service, just host the survey on a webpage with as little branding or decoration as possible. Because you want to be able to produce real-time graphs and results, this is one circumstance where I recommend you build the survey yourself, versus using an off-the-shelf hosted survey tool.

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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

Another thing they have in common: I find most high-tech startup founders are software engineers enamored with the idea of waking late, sidling up to a coffeeshop table, pecking away at an IDE, getting into the zone for hours at a stretch, and doing what they love – coding something of their own invention.

Cofounder 312

Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

The class was designed to teach educators (and the adjunct entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. He’s the Founder of Vision Creations & Founders Films. Take the Money First?

Delaware 303

Delaware Lean Entrepreneur Advisory Board 303

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

The class was designed to teach educators (and the adjunct entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. He’s the Founder of Vision Creations & Founders Films. Take the Money First?

Delaware 195

Delaware Lean Entrepreneur Advisory Board 195

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. Im in this exact position with my startup, industrialinterface.com.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79