Version One Ventures

NOVEMBER 22, 2016

Josh was previously the principal designer at Twitter. Abstract is building a common infrastructure to support the modern design workflow. If you’re a digital designer, you’ve probably run into some or all of these challenges: Your assets are disorganized and scattered across several places. Inconsistencies creep into the work.

Design 60

Design Cofounder IP Vertical 60

VC Cafe

JULY 15, 2021

The reality for startups is that it’s not enough to build, design and ship a great looking app – marketing and distribution are critical to success. As Peter Yang puts it in “Why Community-Led Product Development Wins’: Announce your product early and invite interested customers to join an online community (e.g.,

Mobile 190

Mobile Social Media Distribution PR 190

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The goal is to have split-testing be a continuous part of our development process, so much so that it is considered a completely routine part of developing a new feature. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

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

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

vs. sustainable: Compare this to the renewable strategies, like viral marketing, SEO, widgets, and ads, which can scale into 10s of millions of users but are primarily centered around tough, non-user centric work. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Turns out, there was aboslutely no demand whatsoever for that particular product. Oops - there went several precious weeks of development effort down the drain. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? What is customer development? Eric -- This is a pretty interesting idea.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

There has never been a viral outbreak of such magnitude before. Additionally, “a startup is usually a company designed to effectively develop and validate a scalable business model. Many experts in this field have developed tried and trusted methods and mechanisms to succeed at an entrepreneurial venture.

Bootstrapping 85

Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

The Next Web

FEBRUARY 3, 2014

This is native advertising in real life, on a real website, acting as a key player in the race for the strongest, viral, engaging content. Native advertising evokes an organic experience – one that pays tribute to the design and UX which has and continues to advance the Web. Design & Dev Entrepreneur Insider Investigations'

Advertising 139

Advertising San Francisco New York Viral 139

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Just for reference, Slidebean is a SaaS presentation software where users can add content, and a finished presentation is designed automatically. 1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth. Nov-15: Graphic Designer (growth/product).

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

Hunter Walker

JANUARY 15, 2017

Practically speaking, the burning need was to begin hiring employees so that I could spend more of my day on product development, partnerships and driving sales. RL: At a high level, technology has created many ways to increase our productivity while also providing freedom to run the business from anywhere in the world.

Marketing 48

Marketing Design Acquisition Bootstrapping 48

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

If your product was developed to solve a real-world problem, your ideal customers already exist. You’ve completed customer research for your product development and positioning strategy. Obsessing over going viral. Creative agency founder Dan Kelsall has helped many of his clients go viral.

Demand 124

Demand B2B Distribution Channel 124

crowdSPRING Blog

JULY 13, 2016

Though most startups know the importance of brand identity, it can often take the back seat to more pressing matters such as product development or finances. It’s hard to argue against this; without a finished product or the money to make it, what does the brand identity matter anyways? Well, a lot. 1: Positioning Statement.

Marketing 48

Marketing Startup Differentiation Naming 48

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

Others would go even further and say it is better to launch half a product than a half-assed product. The Four Steps to the Epiphany (highly recommended book by Steve Blank) preaches for customer development before product development, advocating a quick launch with a minimal feature set rather than a full fledged product offering.

Lean 120

Lean Customer Development Audience Viral 120

crowdSPRING Blog

AUGUST 14, 2011

Establishing a strong brand position is an internal exercise that starts at product development and continues through rollout. Companies can easily fall ion the trap of working to build awareness of their product or brand without first positioning carefully. Establish your brand position first, build awareness second.

Small Business 96

Small Business Intellectual Property Differentiation Startup 96

mashable.com

MARCH 7, 2011

Mashable | The Social Media Guide Viral Topics Twitter YouTube Facebook iPhone Google Video About Mashable Company About Us Advertise Submit News Contact Us Announcements Resources Guidebooks Lists How To Trending Twitter List Directory Mashable Awards Subscriptions Partners W3 EDGE Rackspace Concentric Sky Dynect DNS Intridea Welcome to Mashable!

Developer 93

Developer HTML API Ruby 93

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds. In order to maintain game play balance, game designers have to take into account the needs of customers who have an excess of four different assets: time , money , skill , and passion. Having a balanced ecosystem is what game designers strive for.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

At a high level, anything that drives virality should be free. To take your specific example about virality - why do we want to have more users sign up? Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea. Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life? " => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever. Rockstar v.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

Starting with Facebook s developer program, social networks are all jumping on the apps bandwagon. If you ask an expert in Facebook apps to come help build yours, youll usually hear the same advice: build your app for virality. Thats sensible advice; most people who have made a business on Facebook rely on the viral driver of growth.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Social Network Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. What do they get out of it?

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

The Next Web

AUGUST 26, 2012

For many start-ups, the central focus is developing a product that offers value to a target audience. For this reason you should find out as quickly as possible if the product is indeed offering real value to your customers by looking at real data. Develop a strong backbone. KPI’s are different for each start-up.

Bankruptcy 121

Bankruptcy Technical Review Intellectual Property Due Diligence 121

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. Some designers also hate optimizing (which is why the “41 shades of blue&# test is so famous – a famous designer claims to have quit over it ).

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Another great way to test your idea is to create a minimum viable product, or MVP. This is the simplest version of your product minus the frills and frosting. It’s a particularly popular strategy in the world of product development and is used to quickly and quantitatively test a product or a product feature.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. This is a common problem that results from viral-loop optimization.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

” April, 2012 – Andrew Chen writes Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing , which goes viral (2.4K Startups are designed for astronomical growth. Now, people begin defining growth hacking as a process, a systematic approach, a “viral loop”, etc. Conducted Customer Development.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Even with only a few months of development, third parties have crammed every single category in the store full of apps. All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. On Facebook, viral distribution has proved decisive. Figuring out which apps are going to be any good is almost impossible.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2018

Understand: funnel analyis to identify opportunities – 75K people / day werent able to login because of a bad login screen design. Virality: # of users that refer your product for you: exponential growth if your K factor is greater than 1. Dropbox: first achieved growth through virality. Increased engagement.

Retention 106

Retention Artificial Inteligence Channel Email 106

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

Take a look at The App Store after the gold rush - FierceDeveloper : According to a recent BusinessWeek feature , the flood of new games, productivity tools and related iPhone software is making it difficult for the vast majority of apps to crack the consumer consciousness. Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant. These are two other Extreme Programming practices that are explicitly designed to counteract the problems inherent in this situation.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

mashable.com

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

For example, my company decided early on to hire a UI designer, which has helped tremendously with our product development. Then we allocated the saved money into hiring the highest quality developers available — especially those who have experience working with a distributed team. Check) Stage 2: Develop App. (in

Startup 79

Startup Social Media RSS Social Network 79

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

(This is similar to the problem that viral loop companies have with the engagement loop : by making it too easy to join, they actually give away the positioning that allows for longer-term engagement.) Why was a team this smart, this disciplined, and this committed to waste-free product development creating so much waste?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

betashop.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

It has been awesome, flattering, and humbling to see that post went viral and has been seen by so many thousands of people — mainly aspiring entrepreneurs — and has been translated into many languages. Likewise, not a single designer gets approved to sell on Fab without Bradford’s input, review, and approval. Less is more.

Technical Review 108

Technical Review Technology Software Review Valuation 108

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. If the product needs to be tweaked just a little bit in order to convert users into customers, you want to figure that out before the launch. If the viral coefficient is 0.9, And if your product doesnt retain customers, whats the point of driving a bunch of them to use it?

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 11, 2018

Or look at MailChimp, a startup-turned-$400-million-revenue-machine that is always creating viral campaigns that set them above their competition, like this recent “Did You Mean Mailchimp” one. Recently, I designed a strategic marketing campaign for a company called Help Scout —a helpdesk software tool. Designing in real time.

Campaign 134

Campaign Marketing Design Differentiation 134

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? Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68