Remove Customer Development Remove IPO Remove Networking Remove Product Development
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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

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.

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Innovation, Change and the Rest of Your Life

Steve Blank

When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. 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. We now have specific management tools to grow startups.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

What those sites have in common (despite their very different audiences) is that something is causing their customers to become addicted to their product, and so no matter how they acquire a new customer, they tend to keep them. For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. One last thought.

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Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what's changed since.

Startup Lessons Learned

When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. We still struggle to create Firm software that is defect-free, and it still requires customer insight (and maybe some customer development) to discover what will Delight.

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Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

Startup Lessons Learned

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Ive spoken in some detail about a specific pivot that we went through at IMVU , when we decided to abandon the instant messaging add-on concept, and switch to a standalone instant messaging network.