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.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

On social conventions: Two years ago I was in New York and I called the little brother of one of my wife’s best friends from Wharton. We couldn’t cut product development (we had 23 people!) because we had made product commitments to a large customer who was about to agree to a nationwide rollout.

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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?)

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In recent years, weve also got great new options all up and down the stack, in particular things like Amazon EC2 and RightScale (none of which would be possible without the free software movement). The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development.

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Austin Startup

JANUARY 25, 2020

I remember enjoying reading his book “ Delivering Happiness ,” the story behind how he led Zappos and drove it to a billion dollars in revenue before Amazon bought it. That’s when I began to think of New York. After confirming it in prayer, I was off to New York City. After that, we had something much better?—?it

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Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 24, 2017

I’m no stranger to startups, having launched my digital marketing agency Creative Click Media from the ground up in 2011, but tackling an ecommerce yoga business was a completely new entrepreneurial adventure for me. 24- Double-digit revenue and national partnership. I only wish we had thought of this ten years ago!!

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 21, 2014

Events for enthusiasts, called Maker Faires, now stretch far outside California to places such as Detroit, New York and even Shenzhen, China. In today’s fast moving market, the basic product development cost and time are critical to survival. Place to build skills and become familiar with new tools.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. Its really helped me articulate my thinking on this topic, and includes an entire chapter on the topic of reducing batch size.)

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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. Thanks to Cynthia Brown, Only Top Reviews ! It’s been a fabulous experience.

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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.

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Gust

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

If we zoom into the US, we find California is the leading state across all stages, which includes products in concept, development, fully ready, and revenue. 28% of California startups have a product fully ready and 25% are in revenue stage.

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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. Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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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. Usually, that will be about finding new segments of customers that the company can profitably serve. And if you neglect maintenance, you may not have a business left at all.

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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. This is a common mistake. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Naturally, they had just raised money, and their new investors were understandably pissed. The company struggled mightily with how to explain this bad news to their board. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Because this is a new skunkworks-type project, everyone involved is savvy enough to understand that the initial ROI is likely to be low, much lower than projects that are powered by sustaining innovation. And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target.

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The Next Web

FEBRUARY 3, 2014

The company, known for viral social content, is predicted to bring in $100 million in revenue in 2014 from native advertising on 150 million unique visitors a month, according to a 2013 Forbes article. The good news is that native advertising is quiet, in all of its various forms. A link to sponsored content on the Buzzfeed homepage.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Or follow all of the New York Times columnists equally? This is good news for everyone except those who have huge legacy investments in large-batch distribution. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Its likely that the new release will contain new bugs. 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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately.

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

Governor Cuomo, governor of New York State, USA, highlighted the quintessential issue with the coronavirus pandemic in his conversation with Howard Stern on 13 April 2020. It means relying on your own savings and revenue to operate and expand.”. Product development also occurs in small iterations or changes.

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Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 27, 2022

Prior to joining Facebook, he was the president of Digital, News, Business, and Sports Properties at Time Inc. John also spent several years at The New York Times Company at NYTimes.com running strategy, marketing, and operations. One is, you know, potentially revenue. John Jantsch (02:08): Yeah. Very early on.

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The Next Web

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

Nick Kishfy is the CEO of MojoTech , a design and development agency with offices in Providence, RI and New York, NY. If you’ve ever looked for a design and development agency to build your product, you know that lack of options is not a problem in this industry. In fact, for your own protection, you shouldn’t.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

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YoungUpstarts

JUNE 18, 2019

Earlier this month, the New York Times published an opinion piece titled “ It’s Time To Break Up Facebook “ The title itself is not necessarily provocative — voices have been calling for the disbandment of the social media conglomerate in greater and greater numbers — but the by-line is.

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Up and Running

JULY 24, 2015

Product development. If you need a little help with your product development and getting it on store shelves, you can check out Edison Nation. They can help with development and licensing, too. For example, there’s a Business Breakfast Club in Queens, New York. Business news sites.

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Duct Tape Marketing

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. Expo New York New York, NY Nov 19 The Lean Startup at MIT Boston, MA Nov 20 Lunch workshop at Dogpatch Labs Boston, MA Dec 17 Lean Startup Cohort program begins San Francisco, CA KISSmetrics KISSmetrics is loading.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 29, 2018

Freemium and free-trial signups have one thing in common: Neither generates revenue. This post details the freemium and free-trial models and considers the key questions—about your business, your market, and your product—that guide you toward the best option. To generate that financial support, a SaaS product needs mass appeal.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Realizing it had taken a wrong turn, SlideShare rethought its approach to premium accounts and ultimately performed what we’d call a value capture pivot , one where the company changes the way it collects revenue from customers. The process started with a few moving parts. The process started with a few moving parts.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. If you look around the United States it’s hard to avoid Sloan. There’s the Alfred P. Sloan’s book My Years with General Motors written 40 years ago is still a business classic.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. This development philosophy created a culture around rapid prototyping of features, followed by testing them against large numbers of actual customers. It would be hard to argue against this product development strategy, in general.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. Maybe, but the thought never even entered our minds. You can even see the humiliating evidence of my smug incompetence in this absurd article from 1999.) Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. We just add up the revenue we've made in the past few months from Win98 users, and compare to the pain that Win98 has caused as identified in 5Ys. Leave your thoughts in a comment. I’ll do my best to help.)

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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. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations. I mean, here we are, paying them to be there, and they won’t use the product!

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

I covered a few of them on twitter already: Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that youve launched but dont movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" And then theres some questions that came up during the webcast that we didnt have time to discuss. A: yes, absolutely. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late.

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