Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? 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.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 28, 2009 Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications Having evangelized the concept of continuous deployment for the past few years, Ive come into contact with almost every conceivable question, objection, or concern that people have about it. Another release?

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuous deployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. At IMVU it’s a core part of our culture to ship.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

The Embrace infant warmer was developed - by getting out of the country -- and how Rob Emrich learned and scaled his non-profit, Road of Life. BetaBrand building apparel MVPs and testing them quickly with targeted customer communities. Brant and Patrick spend considerable time helping you think through your customer segments.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur San Francisco Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development 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 customer development methodology.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development 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.

Customer Development 166

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

I have contacted my customer service/community management team and prepped them with information about the new feature and asked them to get back to me if we start to see any significant new support requests. I have embedded a short survey or feedback link into the page and will gather qualitative data from my users that way.

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Metrics 40

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development 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.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

The Equity Kicker

OCTOBER 2, 2014

At that time he was talking about infrastructure monitoring, doing customer development work but had yet to start the company. They were coming out of Alfresco where they’d built a custom solution to monitor their infrastructure as they’d moved from an on premise software company to a cloud play.

Cofounder 95

Cofounder Continuous Deployment Seed Stage Cloud 95

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 16, 2009 Continuous deployment with downloads One of my goals in writing posts about topics like continuous deployment is the hope that people will take those ideas and apply them to new situations - and then share what they learn with the rest of us.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. They are gaining valuable customer data.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies. And this is true outside of games.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

It seems your cluster architecture is one of the key architectural constraints making continuous deployment possible. If you cant deploy to 5% of the nodes and check the results, then how would you accomplish continuous deployment? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Some startups avoid getting customer feedback for precisely this reason: they are afraid that if early reactions are negative, theyll be "forced" to abandon their vision. One such practice is to pivot from one vision to the next.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. For example, at a previous virtual world company , we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. Leverage product development with open source and third parties. How likely will customers ultimately use that feature?

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

Advisory Board 151

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. The report is set up to show you what happened to customers who registered in that period (a so-called cohort analysis ). This report is set up to tell you about new customers specifically. First of all, why split-test?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, heres my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesnt go out and ask customers what they want. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right. When a customer tells you how they feel about your ideas, that doesnt tell you anything about your ideas.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

If you havent seen it, Pascals recent presentation on continuous deployment is a must-see; slides are here. Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. We finally settled on a $1.99 Setup a simple website.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

But if you want to practice rapid deployment, you need to be able to deploy that build in one step as well. If you want to do continuous deployment, youd better be able to certify that build too, which brings us to. For more on continuous deployment, see Just-in-time Scalability. Can you make a build in one step?

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

And so Deming’s contribution was especially prescient, as he saw that “the customer is the most important part of the production line.&# This means that quality is defined in the eye of the customer, not necessarily by arbitrary standards loved by insiders to the production process. How will they define quality?

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

SVPG

JULY 31, 2013

While I am currently a passionate advocate of methodologies like Agile, Lean, Design Thinking, Customer Development and more, I try very hard not to get too attached to, or to be too closely associated with, any particular school of thought or technique. And especially of the techniques and methods that I advocate to others.

SCRUM 60

SCRUM Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

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. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. And they are cognizant that their funding is limited, and if they dont find out which features are absolutely critical for their customers soon, they wont be able to survive.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems. How upset will those customers be?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

When customers are affected, try to have someone who experienced the customer problem first-hand, like the customer service rep who took the calls from angry customers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Otherwise, key details are likely to be missed.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

Because the art team was considered an internal customer (and “friendly&# to boot), we didn’t waste a lot of time making the tools easy to use. Lets start holding people accountable solely for their contribution to the only thing that matters: validated learning about customers. Startups are companies.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics. Some caveats right off the bat.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

For a marketing job, for example, its reasonable to expect that a candidate will have done their homework and used your product (maybe even talked to your customers) before coming in. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

The law of large numbers (of customers) says you cant help but make at least some money - your valuation is determined by how well you monetize the tidal wave of growth. Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

In a truly new market, we face no meaningful competition, there are no tradeshows to present at, and customers are not clamoring for our product. Remember that startups operate by a different unit of progress: what I call validated learning about customers. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) That institution will touch many people in its life: customers, investors, employees, and everyone they touch as well. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155