Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. And like feedback on a simple microphone sound system, this would occasionally boil over into screeching.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Since the term “cloud computing” was coined in 1996—at least as we have come to understand its meaning—the software as a service industry has exploded. If you use software like LivePlan, you can create this initial “lean plan” in under an hour and then spend your time where it really matters—on validating your idea.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I used to give copies of Four Steps out to my employees, in the hopes that it would instantly indoctrinate them into the methodology of Customer Development. Instead of that naive approach, I wish Id had a book like this one, to help me figure out how to get started with customer development step-by-step.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

DataRails , the financial analysis and reporting software startup, has announced the hiring of David Rosenberg as the company’s new VP of customer success. Rosenberg comes fresh from managing the growth of Keyrus, a data consulting company, from 35 to 120 employees. CEO Perspective. DataRails has already raised $53.5

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Hiring Software Review Customer 134

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

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Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

No wait, I forgot, actually the question is: What happens when employee #2 makes off with your code and roadmap and marketing data and customer list, moves to Bolivia, and starts selling your stuff world-wide at one-tenth the price? But now she has the vision and ability to design her own software, capitalizing on modern trends (e.g.

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Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

It connects to the internet to automatically download the necessary codes. Heres a representative view from an actual Amazon customer review : We all know how to operate our own entertainment center, but what happens when you have to explain it to your babysitter, mother-in-law, or your wife? They want to do activities. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 3, 2009 Employees should be masters of their own time Every startup should have a culture of learning. The rule is simple: every employee is 100% responsible for how they spend their time. The suggestion is that you implement one single company-wide rule. I asked why.

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Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

This post will outline the entire process, giving code examples, data analysis examples, survey questions—the whole thing. The first, according to Dr. David Travis at UserFocus , was agile development : Dr. David Travis: “‘Development’ teams morphed into ‘design’ teams. Not everyone believes user personas to be valuable.

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Software Review Design Agile Analytics 115

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesnt blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look. Hes just as comfortable writing code as racking servers, debugging windows drivers, or devising new interview questions. He throws off volumes of code, and it works.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Part-Time VPE 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. If new employees are causing problems, that will be a routine topic.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

Getting features and fixes into hands of users was the greatest priority - a test environment would just get in the way and slow down the validation coming from having code running in production. We eventually discovered (via five whys ) that we also had to get each new employee acculturated to a fearless way of thinking.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

ConversionXL

MARCH 7, 2017

This post will outline the entire process, giving code examples, data analysis examples, survey questions – the whole thing. The first, according to Dr. David Travis at UserFocus , was agile development : Dr. David Travis: “‘Development’ teams morphed into ‘design’ teams. Instead, they wanted conversation starters.

Software Review 102

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. Over time, such teams either explode due to irreconcilable differences or dramatically slow down.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2018

Corporate Agility. Transparency correlates to agility (Does your CEO know how many tests you ran last month?). The goal is to empower EVERY employee at Airbnb to make data-informed decisions by providing data education that scales by role & team. Be agile, move at the speed of business, don’t hold up product development.

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Retention Artificial Inteligence Channel Email 106

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

I believe it is a full, company-wide turn through the OODA loop (for a software business, see especially Ideas-Code-Learn ). You need a process for systematically reviewing your costs and eliminating those that slow you down. Customer Development Engineering : techniques for accelerating your product development.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

bhargreaves.com

MARCH 7, 2010

The reasons why I am not a big fan of development shops are too numerous to go into here. In brief, startups succeed because there is strong alignment of interests among all parties, especially with the people who are actually building the product. 5 Points: You are developing software for government or major corporate clients.

Hiring 40

Hiring Technical Review Agile Software Review 40

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Maybe hire an employee for $30 per hour and re-bill them at $60. Suppose you hire an employee at $60,000/year. That changes the annual cost of your employee from $60,000 to $69,000 with an associated change in hourly cost: 20 WD/month, $36/hour. Oh sure, founders work 60-80-hour weeks, but not employees. What to do?

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America Employee Hiring HTML 330

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Insist on the incredibly high-IQ employees and hold them to incredibly high standards. Build a truly mainstream product. It never generated positive returns for its investors, and most of its employees walked away dejected. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Every change required a server restart.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

mashable.com

JUNE 11, 2013

You are small and agile, which means you have a high rate of innovation and growth, and with that comes work! At a small company, employees need to wear many hats, and they need to be prepared to wear many hats. If you dont manage this expectation upon hiring, you will be managing employee issues six months down the line.

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Cofounder Technical Review Startup Software Review 111

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

VC Cafe highlights everything you need to know from hosting your code in hackathons to open source legal docs. s the new way to code, and quite easy to learn. You can write back end code in javascript, one language conquers all! Code Igniter. Code Hosting and Version Control. code spaces (svn). WorkingPoint.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

In fact, I am convinced that if you could find some of IMVU’s earliest adopters, they would say something like this: “sure, those guys at IMVU HQ were helpful in writing code and stuff, but in the end they were just the hired help. It was really the community who built that product.&# peer review is NOT working.

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158