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Lessons Learned: SEM on five dollars a day

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? SEM is a simple idea. Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing.

SEM 164
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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

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. For example, its always nice to have someone constantly optimizing your SEM accounts, driving down your CPA. But its not really viral growth, even when its exponential.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.

Lean 168
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Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Startup Lessons Learned

Dont worry about selecting particularly good keywords, if youre new to SEM. SEM only gets at one segment of users, and for a brand new product, you presumably need some skill at marketing in general and adsense in particular to get any useful info. Just put in your credit card. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. What about a hardware business with some long-lead-time components?

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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth." Expo SF (May.

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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