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Quick summary: Be careful not to have too many co-founders. And you need to be careful about giving up control to cofounders as much as VCs. I don’t think VCs care as much about co-founders & economics as people think. it’s the most expensive dilution you’ll ever face. For the wrong reasons.
by Zain Jaffer, serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Zain Ventures. This is especially true for startups, which operate on the basis of customer traction to solidify expectations with investors or lending institutions. sales to productdevelopment), the problems will continue to exist.
by Nick Candito, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Progressly. Time and time again, there’s one critical component that hampers productivity and efficiency: We are wired to work within the confines of organizational silos. Contact centers are closely tied with marketing, sales, shipping and even productdevelopment.
Based on my experience, creating a new business is at least as difficult as creating an innovative solution, and it takes a knowledge of finance, operations, customers and the marketplace. If you don’t have all these interests and skills, even your most “disruptive” products will likely fail.
The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the ProductDevelopment Cycle. In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. Today startups build products differently.
The graphic below balances the risks cofounders take with their relative contributions to help answer this question. This covers one of the most common situations I encounter: For a pre-funding web startup whose team includes only a non-technical cofounder, how much equity should an incoming technical cofounder get?
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. Thoughts on scientific productdevelopment Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?
If you have a technical background and you are focused on productdevelopment, consider a co-founder with a sales and marketing background that can focus on selling your world class product. Don’t make everyone a founder. Having too many co-founders will only lead to your eventual dilution.
Guest post by Lisa Regan On August 20, Eric will sit down with developer and Hut8Labs co-founder Dan Milstein for a webcast you can join to discuss “Getting Engineers Into the Lean Startup Cycle.” He is interested in asking, given that environment: How can the team measure progress?
However, you could still build an Instagram-like product inexpensively, in the $100,000 to $300,000 range over a three-to-six-month period,” says Werdelin. Founder Kevin Systrom launched Instagram with 25,000 beta users on October 6, 2010; two years later, the app continues to see massive growth, recently reporting 150 million active users.
Customer development is a parallel process to productdevelopment, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in productdevelopment is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief.
This approach worked much better, but by this point one of the co-founders was frustrated with the customer dynamics (all business facing) and decided to leave to start a new consumer-facing business (he left on good terms, we are still good friends, and he’s much happier today). The last three months have been pleasantly insane.
This post was written by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference. For example, when your company adds ano ther blade to its disposal razors , the product’s technical development, marketing and sales will follow relatively predictable paths. Often, in very young organizations, those people are simply the founders.
Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of ProductDevelopment Flow. Small batches reduce overhead.
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 Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?
Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast productdevelopment times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.
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.
Another affinity-based co-working space? As a seed stage VC, I have a unique privilege of confidentially spending time with a number of entrepreneurs throughout their company formation and initial productdevelopment process. And it’s amazed me how many times I’ve seen two or more entirely separate groups of founders?—?without
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. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. Now, everyone is learning together - about your product, process, and team.
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.
Secondly, delegating operational tasks to capable team members frees up mental bandwidth for higher-level strategic thinking. I started using this technique, we hold standard off-site retreats free of daily operational distractions. Thanks to Moxin Reza, Investor Partner Group ! #4- Thanks to Jason Jones, ATX Epoxy Floors ! #19-
The fundamental objective and aim of seed investment is to assist a company in launching its operations successfully. It is necessary to cover the early stages of productdevelopment, thorough market research, and other processes during the initial step.
► 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 Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?
So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. Are we solving the right problem? We can do better by focusing on process instead of personality.
I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&# 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.
Enventys Partners was born when my company Command Partners, a digital marketing firm, vertically merged with Enventys, a productdevelopment firm. Our business name is a product of an online naming contest back when we were still starting. #9- A merger of two companies. Photo Credit: Roy Morejon. 10- From a naming contest.
The only thing that matters is how good your product is. At Fab, our virtual product is our website & apps, our physical products are the merchandise we sell, and our experience product is our operations and service. Getting all 3 parts of our product right is everything. All the rest is noise.
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.
However, this relatively simple principle is game changing for early-stage operations that often focus exclusively on the Big Hairy Audacious Goals of a decade ago. So, while world domination shouldn’t necessarily be your Day 1 objective, you CAN get there with the help of OKRs. Here’s how: 1. Kaplan and David P.
Paul is also a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management and the co-founder of Oceanworks. And that might be in a startup, it might be as a founder of a startup, it might be as an early employee, as a startup. It might also be in Big Co.
Today's roundtable was co-hosted with the Jacksonville Startup Weekend. MJ Charmani, founder of iStart Jax, a business accelerator, and one of the key organizers of the event, introduced today's session with additional reports on last weekend's event. 150 people came together, and 17 businesses were formed. Armex Zero Suit.
Eric, Any thoughts on how forum feedback fits into customer development and agile productdevelopment? Youve probably addressed this in the past, but I continue to be blown away by how fast Blizzard reacts to noise in their forums and rapidly makes fixes to the product. =) November 4, 2008 10:58 PM IMVU said.
Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on.
For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? Returning to our example of the beleaguered founder who still has the pager, before hiring an operations guy, try promoting someone from within to take on the job.
Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. Maybe operations has changed the OS configuration in production in a way that is incompatible with some developers change. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?
Then you set up a web app to co-ordinate volunteers who can wipe a hard drive and install Ubuntu. You can find out more at: manning.com/sande Many thanks in advance, Todd -- Todd Green Manning Publications Co. these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. Third, you market it far and wide.
RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance. For background, see Revenue-Based Investing: A New Option for Founders who Care About Control. Alternative Capital. “
One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.
► 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 Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?
The economics of these process trade-offs are discussed in the Principles of ProductDevelopment Flow.) Heres an excerpt: In a previous article, we called Toyota’s productdevelopment system the “second Toyota paradox.&# Labels: productdevelopment 5comments: new york web development company said.
Thor Ernstsson, Founder of Alpha UX ; previously, founder of Casual Corp , a venture studio, said, “Fundamentally and theoretically, this model works; practically and actually, it didn’t at all. […] The most important thing to consider is that launching a startup is usually a personal endeavor. Others think the model can work.
Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web. Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years. Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web. Read on to find out.
The idea was that these two people would operate as a unit, with the mentors job performance during this period evaluated by the performance of the new person. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.
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