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Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. They needed to be sure that what they were building was what customers wanted and needed. It has to find product-market fit before running out of cash. The result?
Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup FounderDeveloper Gap ? What went wrong?
Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder September 7, 2010 | View Comments Steve Job's Technical Co-Founder “I’ve got this HUGE idea. I just need to find a technical co-founder.&# So, why should they pick you?
They couldn’t keep up with the fast productdevelopment times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the CustomerDevelopment process are you on?
Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customerdevelopment in them. Edwin: I know.
Should you co-found your company with a software development shop? I’ve talked with a number of software development shops who are eager to get into the business of cofounding companies, i.e., getting product revenue and equity instead of just consulting revenue. equity that belongs to departed cofounders)?
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.
It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customerdevelopment. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. If not your co-founders, someone outside the company.”.
So for this first post, here’s the best advice I can give you: join an awesome founding team and get your product out the door ASAP. One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Then, forget everything else, VCs included, and just build.
“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.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of ProductDevelopment Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of ProductDevelopment Flow: Second Generation Lean ProductDevelopment by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customerdevelopment? When we build products, we use a methodology. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit."
Bob and his co-author, Huggy Rao, are hosting a free online class this fall, Scaling Up Your Venture Without Screwing Up. For a lot of you, that means: Tell your friends co-workers about this one. What’s customerdevelopment?) Sarah is Lean Startup Conference co-host and CEO of Lean Startup Productions.
Alistair and Ben, co-authors of the book Lean Analytics, will help you sort it out in our next webcast, Lean Analytics for Non-tech Companies. LSC: Tell us about the customerdevelopment you did for your book: Alistair: We''ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders.
In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, " Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination? "). Customer discovery turns founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. This is a minimum viable product.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 CustomerDevelopment Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customerdevelopment methodology.
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.
Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their productdevelopment leverage. The biggest source of waste in new productdevelopment is building something that nobody wants. Leverage productdevelopment with open source and third parties.
am co-teaching a class at Harvard Business School on entrepreneurship called " Launching Technology Ventures " along with my friend and colleague, Professor Tom Eisenmann. Should they follow the Steve Blank, CustomerDevelopment Process school of productdevelopment or the Steve Jobs "vision" school?
One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in productdevelopment is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal.
I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customerdevelopment process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their productdevelopment process. Good luck, engineering manager. It was painful for a lot of people.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Productdevelopment leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in productdevelopment. Its a key lean startup concept.
It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.
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.
Each has its own iterative process: customerdevelopment and agile development respectively. Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Thats why its so essential to have a co-equal problem team.
The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in productdevelopment. See CustomerDevelopment Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the CustomerDevelopment process.
So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" Labels: productdevelopment 15comments: mukund said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?
For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Also SJ's obsession with better taste (positively) contributes to the overall productdevelopment process. Regardless, they must cull a lot of bad ideas for every one that we hear about.
There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. In fact, the curse of productdevelopment is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, productdevelopment teams encounter similar situations.
The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a productdevelopment team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. Still, a startup productdevelopment team is a service organization. Were there to serve customers direclty, as well as all of the other functions of the company.
I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software productdevelopment team. Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?
One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customerdevelopment is in order? Labels: customerdevelopment , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customerdevelopment?
Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of ProductDevelopment Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , productdevelopment 11comments: Peter Severin said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Interesting post.
But first I think we need to save the product manager from that special form of torture only a waterfall productdevelopment team can create. Labels: productdevelopment 8comments: Vincent van Wylick said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
Labels: five whys root cause analysis , productdevelopment 15comments: Anonymoussaid. Great article as always, Eric. ► 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? Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? But a Viral company who is focused there is probably going out of business. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific productdevelopment. I agree with the less is more productdevelopment approach, but for a different reason. Now that is fun.
Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in ProductDevelopment/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.
► 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? What is customerdevelopment?
Andy Mathieson, a founder and managing member at Fairview Capital , was particularly supportive. Andy Mathieson, a founder and managing member at Fairview Capital , was particularly supportive. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
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 productdevelopment , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customerdevelopment. I think Drucker said it best.
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