Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

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San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

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

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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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?

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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.

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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.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

At IMVU, we would occasionally hire someone from a more traditional organization who had a hard time letting go of their “best practices&# and habits. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? " Actually this process works really well in a financial company.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

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.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

It was still a year away from its IPO. We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. But first some background.) Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a.

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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

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.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

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

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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. Almost all of them got scooped up by pre-IPO Google this time. That year, right before the IPO, those months mattered a great deal in terms of financial outcomes.

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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. Expo (and a call for he.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

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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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

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. Not everything has to follow lean startup and customer development principles, and I write that as a devoted practitioner of both.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

" paragraph have the heading "Training New Hires", above the "Returning to the meeting itself." 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. It's just a thought.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first? For more on how to figure out which question applies in which context, see Business ecology and the four customer currencies.) And therein lies the most common source of confusion about whether startups should listen to customers.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

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

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

It took us months to realize what we had done, and to eventually apologize and win back the trust of those customers wed alienated. The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. In fact, it was the revenue trends that eventually alerted us to the magnitude of the problem.

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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

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. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

For life sciences it was the Genentech IPO in 1980 that proved to investors that life science startups could make them a ton of money. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. Continuous innovation was here to stay and only founders – not hired execs – could play and win.

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 243

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. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much. We couldn’t have been more wrong. REALLY NEEDS it IMHO.

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