Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Its inspired by the classic OODA Loop and is really just a simplified version of that concept, applied specifically to creating a software product development team. There are three stages: We start with ideas about what our product could be. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

In the very early days, the trick is to find anyone at all who can understand you when you are talking about your product. In our first year at IMVU, we thought we were building a 3D avatar chat product. As product people, we thought of competition in terms of features. that we learned different.

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San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 1, 2008 Test-Driven Development as andon cord You cannot control what you cannot see, and the hardest part of managing software projects is that the final product is so intangible. This is equivalent of the andon cord in a Toyota production plant. Automated tests make defects visible.

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San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

A growing startup with a well-run product team will have a history of steady progress. For readers concerned about the chasm, I recommend reading Seth Godin's thoughts on "Being remarkable" and finding a unique edge/twist for your products and marketing (edgecraft). How do you plan for it?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

Ive been even more impressed by the various Greasemonkey compilers out there, that let you turn a Greasemonkey script into a full-blown Firefox extension, for easy distribution. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. Whats one thing a brand-new first-time CTO could learn from them? What made them exceptional?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. This can be hard news to accept, and its one of the major reasons not to split-test. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. First of all, why split-test?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

You can find out what it would take for them to adopt your product, and then follow up a week later and see if they did. Same with finding out what it would take to get them to recommend your product to a friend. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? You can even meet the friend.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

Usability testing is great for coming up with ideas about what to change in your product, but dont forget to split-test those ideas to make sure they work, too. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Life is so easy in the days before the "launch" - you just focus on building and polishing those new features. You have customers, they are using your product, and you are trying to help them. But youre also trying to build and polish new features. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. You can turn your entire application infrastructure investment into a pay-as-you-go variable cost, and bring new products to market at speeds an order of magnitude faster than just 10 years ago. yeah, its awesome.

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San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? SEM is a simple idea. In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

By now we all know that the largest part of the online spend has been SEM (search engine marketing) where people buy CPC (cost per click) links to display alongside the “organic&# search results in the search engine. The configuration of the team was: 1 CEO, 1 Product Lead and a tech team of 6 people.

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Advertising Las Vegas Affiliate RSS 284

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, September 18, 2008 How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of iPhone-related companies lately. The store determines which products sit on which shelves, and which yours sits next to. There are other models, in other distribution channels.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, October 7, 2008 The App Store after the gold rush I wrote earlier about the issue of distribution advantage on the iPhone. As the gold rush drives thousands of apps onto the platform, its getting harder and harder for new entrants to get oxygen. So what can you do?

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San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

. --> It’s one of the hardest steps in a startup, getting that first rube to part with their money over your barely-minimum barely-viable product. I was totally product focused for the last year and now it’s live, so I need to start thinking about finding some customers. What’s the answer? What’s the answer?

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Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason. So dont just kill the feature - iterate.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim. Spray files across cheap disks on your network.

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Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Question 1: When youre adding features to a product used by an existing user base, do you still do split testing to determine usage patterns? Sometimes, testing with existing customers is more complicated than with new customers. If youre worried it, either run the test against new customers or run it for longer than usual.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone How to Usability Test your Site for Free The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the tim. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I usually recommend a three-part board, where the left column is where the scrum-style "product backlog" is maintained in priority order, the middle represents tasks in progress, and the right column is for tasks recently finished. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 68