Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

This finally bit us after a four month stint of development blew through its testing schedule by a factor of four: two scheduled weeks turned into two months before the product reached stability. Software development is all about managing complexity and the bigger and more mature the codebase gets, the more complex it gets.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. Most normal customers – even among early adopters - do not pay attention to the trolls.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ The old paradigm works like this: Your company produces goods and services that help customers get a job done. In return, the customers pay you money. Facebook is the quintessential example.

Customer 168

Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. We now have specific management tools to grow startups.

Restful 243

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 243

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Once you have assembled the right core team, I recommend prioritizing as follows: First, meet with your portfolio company management. Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. The best thing about Rock Star customers is that they already exist.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

It is written using the information that the company voluntarily shared, and therefore reflects their current thinking and recollections. To shed some light, I talked with kaChing , a destination that enables individual investors to find outstanding money managers to manage their money. Do you find it helpful?

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody. Being a manager didnt sound fun - deep down, who really wants to be held accountable for other peoples actions? So I wound up learning the discipline of managing other people.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. The company had hired a leading management consulting firm that helped them select 15 critical areas of change the Tsunami Initiative was tasked to work on. After the end of the day people gathered around the firepit for informal conversations.

Framework 397

Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 397

ConversionXL

JULY 3, 2014

Think customer personas – those detailed representations of the different segments of your target audience. Fueled by data driven research that map out the who behind the buying decisions of your products or services, customer personas can help inform everything from more effective copy to product development.

Customer 133

Customer Analytics Conversion Lead Generation 133

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

Instead, buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, their social network, or just plain word-of-mouth or customer reviews. What makes this particularly significant, of course, is that 3M’s product developers are among the most innovative in the world.

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

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.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

And when you look at the tools that we use, I mean we’ve made so many technological advances, but really to manage a meeting there’s not a practical tool available. We use email; we use Word; we use task manager; we use a file sharing tool. And to combine all that information, it’s just not practical.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

During the course of implementing a design, new information will arise, which many times will change the original design. The kinds of "new information" in the quote above are implementation details. When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Want to know, for example, why Foursquare uses MongoDB to store check-in information? So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. Ask a question and get an answer - that is, after all, what all Q&A sites offer. This post is an accusation.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

To promote innovation inside the NGA, they’ve staffed an Enterprise Innovation Office (EIO) to coach, educate and advise the entire agency, from core leadership to the operational edges, with methods and concepts of validated learning through rapid experimentation and customer development. Lessons Learned.

Lean 182

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 182

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

To promote innovation inside the NGA, they’ve staffed an Enterprise Innovation Office (EIO) to coach, educate and advise the entire agency, from core leadership to the operational edges, with methods and concepts of validated learning through rapid experimentation and customer development. Lessons Learned.

Lean 182

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 182

Spencer Fry

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Many things surprise people about how differently we work at Podia , but one that comes up often is that we have absolutely zero product/project managers at our company of more than 30 people. Why shouldn’t the developers — or designers — be tasked to work through the problems, instead of being handed a set of solutions?

Product 72

Product Wiki Developer Hiring 72

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

It’s our hood alignment station,” the plant manager said proudly. One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager. the manager followed us still yelling. These damn models weren’t designed right so we’re fixing them on the line.”

Founder 310

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 310

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. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Those rates gave us a map that told us a lot about our customers; insights that proved stable even when the company grew orders of magnitude bigger. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing. Thanks so much for sharing this information.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

But I managed a few "good learning experiences" before throwing myself full-bore into IMVU. Your blogs are full of rational thoughts and has nuggets of information. It is encouraging to know someone with your reputation and connections is evangelizing truly valuable information for start-ups. So much for timing.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Recent economic events, technological change, and the rapid diffusion of information about the old models have combined to help us all realize just how important entrepreneurship is - and just how little we really know about it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Lean 146

Lean San Francisco Wiki Startup 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customer development?

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Sometime later, a guide would rattle off useful information, like the density of cars in the immediate vicinity, how that density compares to historical averages, the average mass and velocity of recent cars. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. It required two things.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2009

Before I close, let me quote just one additional bit of twitter feedback from one of the video beta-testers: bmeschke : @ ericries This is such GREAT information. Rory, just for you I managed to get Veoh to work: [link] [link] Do those links work? Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

Lean 115

Lean Video San Francisco Continuous Deployment 115

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When a customer tells you how they feel about your ideas, that doesnt tell you anything about your ideas. It tells you something about what that customer thinks and feels. Figuring out whether and how to incorporate that new information into your vision is your job. As Steve says, "That’s what we get paid to do."

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production.

San Francisco 122

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, June 5, 2009 It’s a startup, not a spreadsheet Some people, when they start to realize the power of using data to inform their decisions, become obsessed with optimization. Still, this manager is going to spend the company’s money, and needs to be held accountable. So far, so good.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

When I was a manager, I was once leading a cycle post-mortem. We were talking about what went right and wrong in the companys development process, when one (relatively new) employee said something like "I noticed that problem, but I couldnt do anything about it." Utopian theoretics make great blogs but not great managers.

Employee 146

Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

I have come to believe that there is a hierarchy of pitches, and that understanding where your pitch falls on this spectrum can assist in making decisions about what information to highlight. If you cant close the deal, maybe your company is at the wrong stage of its development, and its time to try a different tack.

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 128