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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept.

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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. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Product launch) In todays world, there is no reason you have to do these two things at the same time. Do some Customer Development instead.

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Lessons Learned: Achieving a failure

Startup Lessons Learned

Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. Build the product in stealth mode to build buzz for the eventual launch. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc. Amazon PostRank

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How to Get Picked as a Speaker for The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

Oh, and your salespeople have to make sure bookstores will stock it, and your marketing and PR people will have to make sure readers know it exists. Last year, Janice Fraser on Laura Klein ran a workshop on tools that you can use to validate ideas. George Bilbrey gave insight on using the methods on a sales team.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

When we build products, we use a methodology. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. This is a common mistake. Amazon PostRank

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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. Later, I discovered you could get paid to program computers, and really never looked back. Thanks to the anonymity of the internet , I landed a few jobs, and did quite a bit of writing.