Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Deferred payments start with stretching the payables period but, more importantly, include giving employee equity in lieu of a higher salaries and negotiating vendor deferred payments out of future revenues. This could equate to two technical founders (with a minimal salary), funding two developers for a year.

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Burn Rate Hockey Stick Startup Salary 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

The entrepreneur who founded and grew the largest startup in the world to $10 billion in revenue and got fired is someone you have probably never heard of. If you’re following Tesla, you might be interested to know that Sloan wasn’t the founder of GM. The founder of what became General Motors was William (Billy) Durant.

Michigan 296

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 296

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Between January 2015 and January 2016, we grew our platform Slidebean from $1K to $20K in monthly recurring revenue. Getting the first tracks of revenue is one of the toughest processes of building a startup. 1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth.

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Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. We’re building the wrong product!” Some of the engineers figuring if the founder was declaring they were toast in 90 days were updating their resumes. But like all great founders some of these insights are simply hallucinations.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 321

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

While it sounds simple , the Build Measure Learn approach to product development is a radical improvement over the traditional Waterfall model used throughout the 20 th century to build and ship products. They are: value proposition, product/service the company offers (along with its benefits to customers).

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Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

ConversionXL

JANUARY 18, 2022

Both brand marketing and product marketing are important to a well-built marketing strategy. Product marketing informs strategic positioning and ensures alignment across the company. Product marketers own a variety of marketing responsibilities, which can be roughly divided into two broad categories: pre-launch and post-launch.

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Marketing Product Audience Equity 110

Up and Running

MAY 15, 2014

When I was going through the co-founder “dating” process, I’d found a potential partner through my network who seemed to be perfect. I knew that there were issues with my potential partner, but I also knew that the company would grow at a slower pace if I had to start the co-founder search from back at square one.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.

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Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Hippoland

OCTOBER 9, 2016

revenue / traction / setting up infrastructure / etc) This can set you apart, because the vast majority of businesses I see at the seed stage are just ideas with no action. Demonstrate that you can pull the trigger on things quickly — whether it be getting customers, hiring / firing employees, or product development.

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Seed Stage CTO Hire Email Later Stage 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

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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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Austin Startup

AUGUST 20, 2017

Kalanick, former investor BFF turned highly disappointed by founder behavior. Usually the founders duke it out among themselves as to titles and responsibilities and relative shareholdings. If you are the lead founder, if behooves you to sort all this out and get started with a clean organization. How about your Investors ?

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Technical Review Software Review Cap Table Securities and Exchange Commission 48

Hearpreneur

FEBRUARY 14, 2018

I blog about home and gardening topics and make money from product recommendations to my audience, mostly through Amazon associates program. I don’t feel comfortable sharing exact revenue numbers but it’s now making me more than $1,000 per month. I am the CEO of Venyou and the founder of Money Therapy, my side hustle.

Entrepreneur 74

Entrepreneur Technical Review SEO New York City 74

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And when we do make bets, they’re small bets on incremental products or acquisitions that simply add to the bottom line.”. Bob looked wistful, “Our founders built a company known for taking risks and moving fast. Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Lessons Learned.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2011

In a startup founders and the board need to do exact the opposite of a large company – failures need to be shared, discussed and dissected to extract “lessons learned” so a new direction can be set. The VP of an operating division had run into trouble in product development; the product was late and getting later.

Forecast 268

Forecast Agile Founder Revenue 268

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 7, 2012

A startup begins with the vision of its founders: a vision of a new product or service that solves a customer’s problems or needs and of how it will reach its many customers. 1 goal of customer discovery amounts to this: turning the founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. So the No.

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Startup Matching Acquisition Product Development 116

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Software By Rob

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Geoffrey Moore Author of Crossing the Chasm and four other books, Geoffrey Moore has been thinking about high-tech product development longer than most of have been doing anything on a computer. Simplicity is mostly a way to avoid looking like you’re releasing a product that lacks features. Subscribe via RSS On Twitter?

Software Review 47

Software Review Software San Francisco RSS 47

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

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. We bought Steve’s book , started product development and began reaching out to customers ins search of our first earlyvangelists. This meant we had a hard time focusing our development. The founders do.

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Customer Development Developer Customer California 231

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 7, 2021

However, on a more granular graph, the introduction phase would be preceded by a product development stage. This stage is used to determine the viability of your product and confirm when it should go to market. CXL founder, Peep Laja, explains the benefits of this in his post on identifying your online target audience : .

Product 142

Product Marketing Software Review Social Media 142

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

It means relying on your own savings and revenue to operate and expand.”. Eric Ries, the founder of theleanstartup.com , states that the lean startup philosophy“provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get the desired product to customers’ hands faster.”. Implement the “lean startup” philosophy.

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Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. Its likely that the new release will contain new bugs.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that. Lets see why.

Lean 260

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? In other words, what is the minimum viable product ? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Is that a lot? Is that good?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Up and Running

JULY 24, 2015

There are hundreds of resources online, but searching for worthwhile sites is time consuming and sometimes unsuccessful. Founders Workbench. The Founders Workbench has a variety of tools to help you get your startup off the ground. Product development. They can help with development and licensing, too.

Entrepreneur 60

Entrepreneur Small Business Administration SBA Pennsylvania 60

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. I call this process “Customer Development,” a sibling to “Product Development,” and each and every startup that succeeds recapitulates it, knowingly or not.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 133