Agile Networking Product Development SEM 
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 22, 2008
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. Expo SF (May.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 15, 2008
But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn.
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Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 7, 2008
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. Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 14, 2008
This was 2004, and we had never even heard of MySpace, let alone had any understanding of social networking. It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. But the early customers all compared it to MySpace. Expo SF (May.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 18, 2008
For companies in the early-adopter phase, you can play "the earlyvangelist game" whenever a customer turns out to be too mainstream for your product. Pick a similar product that they do use, and ask them "who was the first person you know who started using [social networking, mobile phones, plasma TV, instant messaging.]?
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 7, 2008
On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. For example, if any of the mobile ad networks gets major traction, they may become a dominant way that people discover new apps. Or if your lifetime value is high enough, you can just keep spending on SEM. The observation sounds strange.
Startup Lessons Learned
FEBRUARY 28, 2009
This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. We picked those numbers by counting up the numbers of friends, family, and relatives we thought we could cajole into buying our early product.
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