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.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 8, 2019

Every new year and right after the ball drops, it’s time to go to work. Often entrepreneurs and business owners create their New Year’s Resolutions around their business. It could be more revenue, hiring clients or launching a new product or service, but every new year is an exciting time because it’s ripe with opportunity.

Entrepreneur 62

Entrepreneur Security SEO Community 62

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.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Berkonomics

APRIL 19, 2018

He observed that the process we follow to be humane in our handling of under-performing employees, manage the risk of future lawsuit, finally then move to separate the employee, define the open position, recruit the candidate, train the new hire and count the new hire as up to speed in the job can take all of eighteen months.

Asia 90

Asia Hiring Retention New York 90

The Next Web

JUNE 20, 2013

The company has a 98 percent voluntary retention rate (which doesn’t count terminated employees), and Miller attributes part of that success to not having to deal with the poaching that goes on in the Valley. The company has managed 95 percent retention of clients. We were essentially funded by our clients…in an indirect way.”

Cloud 118

Cloud Southern California Los Angeles New York City 118

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.

Community 67

Community New York Small Business New York City 67

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. It’s time for us to start thinking of every piece of content – books, blogs, albums, TV shows, movies, everything – as a new little startup.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 24, 2015

The Last Days Of Streit’s, New York’s Jewish Willy Wonka Factory bit.ly/1G0HYQ8. Why Revenue Isn’t the Most Important Financial Metric for Startups buff.ly/1DhyQo4. Three Donor Retention Strategies for Social Media bit.ly/1F7JNi7. 12 Buildings To See In New York Before You Die bit.ly/1DKgwLb.

Small Business 48

Small Business Design Social Media Startup 48

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

For that reason, Barefoot offered our employees bonuses for sales, cost reductions, customer retention, and more. Not so obvious, but equally true, is that these unworked hours won’t mean a loss of productivity and revenue. And production is what you really want, because that’s where profits come from. You deserve it.

Employee 245

Employee Hiring Cost Retention 245

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

1) It all starts from the Growth Hacking Funnel - in the early stages, startups should not just focus on top/bottom line metric like unique users and revenue. They should understand the different states of the user (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue) and focus on moving users from one state to the next. like/+1/follow?

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

When you account for competition for talent, the difficulty of retention, the cost of living and the difficulty of rising above the noise – there are many advantages of staying put. They have the same trade-off decisions that you do about packing up and moving to Silicon Valley vs. staying and building locally. It’s awesome.

Seattle 317

Seattle Silicon Valley Technical Review Los Angeles 317

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 7, 2017

When my Japanese husband died at a young age almost 16 years ago, I had been doing medical writing for a major New York Hospital and also helping him with his documentary films for Japanese and American public television. #2 – To Reinvent Myself After a Tragedy. Image Credit: Bess Heitner. I wish I had done this years ago.

Entrepreneur 91

Entrepreneur LLC Cofounder Green 91

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

Google realized that being the way to find the world’s information was a blitzscalable market, thanks to the network effects in its AdWords revenue engine. There is no such thing as a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue with a team of less than 10 people. The second is a lack of operational scalability.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

Berkonomics

JANUARY 17, 2011

He observed that the process we follow to be humane in our handling of underperforming employees, manage the risk of future lawsuit, finally then move to separate the employee, define the open position, recruit the candidate, train the new hire and count the new hire as up to speed in the job can take all of eighteen months.

Hiring 54

Hiring Retention New York Employee 54

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 29, 2018

Freemium and free-trial signups have one thing in common: Neither generates revenue. Those near-term sales, while enticing, may erode a brand and hurt retention. And, like bottom-up efforts, both were a slow burn that required tens of millions in funding to sustain the glut of free users that precedes revenue.

Customer 119

Customer Conversion Acquisition B2B 119

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

Outcomes: Revenue | Ideas Funded Behavior: Path Length | Cart Abandonment Rate Acquisition: Assisted Conversions | Share of Search. Every ecommerce site has to obsess about Revenue. There are multiple points of value from the Trailheads program (lower support costs, higher retention, faster time to value for clients etc.)

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

Duct Tape Marketing

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

This is where he is getting his revenue. I saw this headline in the New York Times that said the loneliest generation talking about our children and our teenagers and the pandemic didn't cause this. He's gone all in on this community. And this is one of the reasons I wrote the book. So let's start community.

Community 81

Community Marketing Audience Networking 81

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Now, Andrew’s excellent piece that I quoted from above correctly diagnoses two situations where consumer internet companies often get in trouble: They focus too much on short-term revenue, getting caught in a local maximum via constant optimization. Take the minimum viable product , for starters.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 3, 2016

To calculate your ROAS , simply divide revenue by spend , and you’re on your way to understanding how much each conversion is actually worth. Calculating your loan-to-value ratio (LTV) requires clear data, including revenue collected from a customer in a given period, profit margin, churn rate, and retention costs.

Metrics 100

Metrics Churn Rate New York City Marketing 100

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Product/Metrics (70%/30% time) * Get your product activation (sign-up + meaningful action) to 60% * then, Get your product retention to 20% weekly. I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. Has anyone found a referral program system that works great to generate new customers?

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Revenue is always my preferred measure, but you can use anything that is important to your business: retention, activation, viral invites, or even customer satisfaction in the form of something like net promoter score. If an optimization has an effect at the micro level that doesnt translate into the macro level - who cares?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Occam's Razor

JANUARY 8, 2018

In 2017, they've twice replaced the company's Chief Revenue Officer. They are pursuing a variety of digital experiments, and it remains unclear whether any of them will stick (unlike the New York Times, where new initiative such as "The Daily" podcast and T Brand Studio have proven overwhelmingly successful).

Analytics 133

Analytics Email Mobile Cost 133

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 15, 2017

#7- To prioritizes employee and client retention. The company that employed us began putting profits above people and new sales above client retention. The three of us had the exact opposite mentality and created a company that prioritizes employee and client retention. increase not only brand share but also revenue.

Entrepreneur 113

Entrepreneur Czech Republic Retention B2C 113

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 26, 2016

The environment you work in has a big effect on your staff and is one of the major factors contributing to employee retention or turnover , according to Abasyn Journal of Social Sciences. Despite being a bootstrapped company with little revenue, we over-invested in a central New York City office at a rate of 15% rent to revenue.

Software Review 100

Software Review New York City Salary Employee 100