Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 21, 2012

As a rule, you need to review your burn rate every month, and manage it every day. For example, a web-based startup should be able to operate for a year if they raise $500,000 from the founders or angels. This will equate to 2 working founders (taking no salary), hiring a 5-person development team for a year.

Burn Rate 232

Burn Rate Startup Salary Equity 232

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 28, 2011

As a rule, you need to review your burn rate every month, and manage it every day. For example, a web-based startup should be able to operate for a year if they raise $500,000 from the founders or angels. This will equate to 2 working founders (taking no salary), hiring a 5-person development team for a year.

Burn Rate 231

Burn Rate Startup Salary Equity 231

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2010

So they create a task list of all the marketing activities an organization can do: press releases, web site updates, customer case studies, blog posts, daily Tweets, Facebook fan page, attending conferences, etc. If you don’t know WHY you’re adding features don’t do it just because you have a development team.

Development Team Review 323

Development Team Review SEM Channel Social Media 323

Up and Running

JULY 11, 2017

Meanwhile, Wendy’s poured marketing and operational resources to deliver on their “Hot and Juicy” promise and carved out a niche for customers who wanted fresh, larger burgers with customized condiments. Often, executing a flank attack involves developing new technology. Leading edge, not bleeding edge.

Technical Review 80

Technical Review Development Team Review Differentiation Leadership 80

ConversionXL

APRIL 1, 2019

Your knowledge, in other words, can become a curse—a barrier that keeps you from communicating what customers care about in language they understand. Blog posts by your development team explain the complexities of how the AI system works, highlight how you gather and parse training data, and list use cases befitting Fortune 500 clients.

Technical Review 133

Technical Review Marketing Software Review Audience 133

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

As a rule, you need to review your burn rate every month, and manage it every day. For example, a web-based startup should be able to operate for a year if they raise $500,000 from the founders or angels. This will equate to 2 working founders (taking no salary), hiring a 5-person development team for a year.

Burn Rate 120

Burn Rate Startup Salary Equity 120

ConversionXL

JULY 22, 2020

Sales and marketing misalignment reduces revenue, lowers the quality of customer service, and can even dampen company culture. Despite an increase in ad spend and marketing budget, customers aren’t engaging with your ads, content, and emails. Marketing collateral and educational resources go unused by your sales team.

Sales 90

Sales Cost Marketing Audience 90

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. Take the example of a design team prepping mock-ups for their development team. Give the dev team your very first sketches and let them get started. Today, I want to talk about the reasons smaller batches are better.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Duct Tape Marketing

FEBRUARY 19, 2020

So I helped, I was one of his first employees and wound up becoming the chief operating officer and running part of the firm and we grew at our peak to around 50 people or so. But a lot of the people that we hired in after me had organizational development backgrounds and PhDs in psychology, master’s in organizational behavior.

Leadership 73

Leadership Developer Curation Hiring 73

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. Imagine you are crossing the street.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

The second bullet, getting feedback from customers is most often not valid either. There are a few cases where you somewhat need to see the system operating to have a sense of the value. Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers Technology Roles in Startups Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?

Technical Cofounder 338

Technical Cofounder Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO 338

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

I met one recently that is working on a really innovative product, and the stories I heard from their development team made me want to cringe. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Labels: product development 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said. Nice write-up.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

thenetsetter.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

In most instances they still require some development, but it’s the kind that you can generally easily hire. Between the long traditions of forum and chat software and the rapidly growing areas of social networking services, you can build a significant community online without much in the way of hardcore development.

Web 40

Web Technical Review Developer Cofounder 40

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

My original post was directed at hiring managers. It said that I didn’t believe it was a good idea to hire job hoppers. My view still stands – for many hiring managers a large factor in looking through resumes of somebody who is 30+ and has never worked somewhere for more than 18 months will be the job hopping element.

Venture Capital 285

Venture Capital Hiring Software Review Stock Options 285

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers. Hes working harder than ever, and so is his team. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. So they insist on having the final say on when a feature is "done" enough to show to customers. Thats a bug.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

ConversionXL

APRIL 28, 2020

I got one of those in 2018, mere months after I started at data.world as their first growth marketing and demand generation hire. Since we had a sales development team of our own, we needed to factor in their efforts, too. This is the model my customers referenced when I was selling them demand-gen software in 2014.

Demand 101

Demand Revenue SQL B2B 101

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 29, 2008 The ABCDEFs of conducting a technical interview I am incredibly proud of the people I have hired over the course of my career. This second objective plays no small part in allowing you to hire the best. Hiring decisions are among the most difficult, and the most critical.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. percent utilization in the precourse surveys. What will this do?

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 7, 2022

Marcel is the CEO & Co-Founder of Parakeeto, a company dedicated to helping agencies measure and improve their profitability by streamlining their operations and reporting systems. Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please! I'm gonna lease you this, you know, cross-functional development team.

Cofounder 76

Cofounder Hosting Networking Software Review 76

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

Company UX leaders are happy to stink less by taking the sub-optimal path of responsive design, rather than create a mobile-unique experience (your customers tend to do different things on your desktop site than your mobile site!). The mobile custom report collects three key areas of analysis. So what else is going on?

Analytics 141

Analytics Metrics Mobile DC 141

konamoxt.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

January 21, 2009 Why Your Startup Can’t Afford To NOT Hire a CTO As I mentioned in my last post, one of the many things I do as an entrepreneur is to advise other start up companies. Unfortunately in many cases, the choice to hire a CTO is the worst choice a CEO or management team could make. This is critical! this story.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire CTO Hiring Engineer 40

Seeing Both Sides

SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

This post was co-authored with Omri Stern and originally appeared in Harvard Business Review. We selected this benchmark because it reflects the phase in which companies have proven product viability, achieved initial product/market fit, and are now expanding sales and growing more complex operations. American VCs are critical.

Cofounder 20

Cofounder Technical Review United States 20

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

Update: The end is near, Expensify is hiring a.NET programmer! As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. If you are a startup looking to hire really excellent people, take notice of.NET on a resume, and ask why it’s there. Expensify Blog. Expense Reports That Don't Suck. Checkout [link].net

Java 107

Java PHP Software Review Coder 107