Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Mass blasts of information are ineffective, because the broadcast channels are suffering from information overload (even in social media). There are too many products clamoring for attention. Test-marketing is now easier than ever before, thanks to leveraged distribution channels like AdWords and Facebook. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

She has a separate team, with its own culture and office, and a mandate straight from top management to innovate without regard to the company’s historic products, channels, or supply chain. She knows the internal politics are tricky, but she’s navigated them well. So far, so good.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

But instead of channeling all my energy towards building new features, I channel roughly 80% of it towards measuring and optimizing existing features. Alerts and monitoring I use nagios and ganglia to implement both system and application level monitoring and alerting on the overall health of the production cluster.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Early this year, SlideShare launched custom channels. Designed for large businesses, the channels let a company share several types of documents, brand the channel with their own design elements, and then include display advertising, contest promotions, blog aggregation, social media integration and metrics reporting.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

2gov.org automatically routes your tweet (aggregating it with everyone else whos expressed a similar point of view) to the right legislator or agency. In other words, the service transforms tweets into professional reports that are sent by snail mail, fax, and email - the channels that actually have attention paid to them.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Founder DC Washington 150

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In an ecosystem, each participant acts according to its own imperatives, but these selfish actions have an aggregate effect. A minimum viable product in this category must answer the question: does my media content or channel command the attention of a valuable audience? A successful startup strives for this latter case.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156