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Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customerdevelopment? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.
Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.
I believe it is the best introduction to CustomerDevelopment you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of CustomerDevelopment and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customerdevelopment Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.
For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Eric Ries will interview him.
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.
I often get asked about finding cofounders and I usually give the standard list of characteristics of what I look for in a founder. And I emphasize the value of a founding team with complementary skills sets – i.e. the hacker/hustler/designer cofounder archetype for web/mobile apps. So I asked her to write a guest post.
He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. October 13, 2008 6:47 PM Luke G said. Eric, love the blog.
Finding Technical Cofounders Is Hard. Yesterday, Michael Pope posted an article titled Technical Cofounders Are a Myth. He begins by explaining how he arrived at his conclusion: I began the hunt to find a technical co-founder – a software engineer who works for no cash – to help me build my dream website.
When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.
Andy Mathieson, a founder and managing member at Fairview Capital , was particularly supportive. With 21 employees today, kaChing is devoted to recruiting professional managers and finding product/market fit , first for money managers, then for consumers. The response was surprisingly positive. Thus far the results are encouraging.
If you’re a technical startup founder, one of the painful lessons is that it’s not enough just to build a great product. You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). Clay Hebert , founder of Crowdfunding Hacks. Clay Hebert. I need to be my own boss. …
It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Get product into customers’ hands. More on that in a moment.
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. Instead, five whys kept leading to problems caused by an improperly trained new employee, and wed make a small adjustment. What is customerdevelopment?
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. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees.
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. I try to listen wherever I go. Evangelos : Yes.
They are the co-authors of The Lean Entrepreneur , and the co-founders of the Moves the Needle Group , which advises the innovation practices of Fortune 100 companies. You have to go find your own customers to experiment with, you have your own brand, so you have to think like a Lean Startup.
He started the Stanford Honors Co-op in 1954 which allowed companies in the valley to send their engineers to Stanford graduate engineering programs. Leo Beranek led the EAL and went on to co-found BBN. I ultimately answered that call, joining Sun Microsystems with a 3-digit employee number. Order Here.
I would add, though, a further question: Do new employees write code on their first day? So if an employee pushed code that broke the site, wed ask: why didnt our cluster immune system catch that? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Completely necessary.
We eventually discovered (via five whys ) that we also had to get each new employee acculturated to a fearless way of thinking. Because this was such a big cultural change for most new employees, we didnt leave them to sink or swim on their own. For one, it required us to keep our developer sandbox setup procedure simple and automated.
Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.
Founder Dialogues : Eric Paley plays talk show host on this recurring fireside chat style event that has featured Boston’s BEST founders. OnStartups: One of the largest online startup communities founded by HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah. Boston Hardware Startup Meetup – Meetup organized by the founders of BOLT.
They are leaders, visionaries, founders and managers having tremendous success. Not to be outdone, the technologists on the team had also brought their big guns, and the meeting was packed with employees of every level – from VP’s all the way down to me. Yet talent organized improperly can lead to failure.
There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.
The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.
We pitch to potential partners, vendors, publishers, conferences, employees, and even lawyers. who is the customer? Most important slide: about the founders In a pitch meeting, try to spend as much time as possible talking about the key questions for your pitch. is it a revolutionary and novel idea? is this team the one to back?
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customerdevelopment. I think Drucker said it best.
A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. The question was: what did the founders want to do? Will Harvey , Eric Ries and the other founders were unequivocal – “Screw the buy-out, we’re here to build a company. One founder quit and joined Google.) Go For Broke. The Scalable Startup.
The same has been true of an unfortunate number of startups, they manage to generate a lot of hype, raise a lot of money, and sometimes make some of their investors, employees, or founders rich. bigs : @ericries says Stealth dev is a (undesirable, failure-presaging) customer-free zone. Use some customerdevelopment to find out.
It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex customdevelopment project, usually costing a million dollars or more. As an old rule-of-thumb, startups realized that employees cost double the salaries paid, to cover office costs, health-care benefits, and workers compensation.
My co-author and business Partner Bob Dorf spends much of his time traveling the world teaching countries and companies how to run the Lean LaunchPad program. The program is funded by the Colombian government and modeled after the NSF Innovation-Corps program created and built by my partner and co-author Steve Blank.
My co-author and business Partner Bob Dorf spends much of his time traveling the world teaching countries and companies how to run the Lean LaunchPad program. The program is funded by the Colombian government and modeled after the NSF Innovation-Corps program created and built by my partner and co-author Steve Blank.
► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
► 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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
Thats all helpful for recruiting, retaining, and ramping-up a new employee. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? They have a certain amount of trust based on having been part of a common mission, and they share a passion for the projects goals.
It has to balance competing goals of establishing clear ownership, while avoiding talented employees getting stuck. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customerdevelopment? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Andy Cunningham , founder and CEO of Cunningham Collective. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were. Andy Cunningham.
“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.
Amsterdam-based startup accelerator Rockstart last year launched a program to find and support ten teams of startup founders in Europe. It recently announced the results of its incubator program – and the results look promising.
I believe that having the whole team work from a common task list, in priority order, lets everyone feel that "all hands on deck" sense that the founders experienced in the early days of the company. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
Our online media company is small, we have 6 employees, great proven leaders, great talent, great cashflow. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? I came out of the university at a relatively young age and I was recruited out of my lab by a startup.
Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. What are some of the unique benefits and constraints from the point of view of a founder? . Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development.
Its an amazing thing when you can hire an employee who knows more about your code base than you do, and this turned out to be a big source of advantage. In the end, I believe they co-created our product with us. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex customdevelopment project, usually costing a million dollars or more. As an old rule-of-thumb, startups realized that employees cost double the salaries paid, to cover office costs, health-care benefits, and workers compensation.
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