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

Startup Lessons Learned

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

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Lessons Learned: Don't launch

Startup Lessons Learned

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Even if you must launch to your customers, avoid the urge to also launch in extra places, just because your PR firm can do it at the same time. If you are having trouble raising money, sometimes a little PR can help. Help you raise money.

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Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review)

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 8, 2010 Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review) The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. Remember "metrics are people, too."

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Lessons Learned: Achieving a failure

Startup Lessons Learned

Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. As with many Silicon Valley failures, a flawless PR launch turned into a flawed customer acquisition strategy. Departments were built and were even metrics-driven. But there was no feedback loop to help the company find the right metrics to focus on.

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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Even if it shows improvement in some micro metric, does that invalidate the overall design? That was evident in the metrics and in the in-person usability tests. No one feature is to blame.

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Lessons Learned: About the author

Startup Lessons Learned

Thanks to Suns amazing PR blitz, there was tremendous demand for experts on Java, and I did my best to convince people that I was one of that mythical breed. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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The Superbowl ad test

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 13, 2010 The Superbowl ad test I am a firm believer in the danger of vanity metrics , numbers that give the illusion of progress but often mask the true relationship between cause and effect. Vanity metrics are generally bigger. Vanity metrics. The solution? Is that really news?