Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. 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. What’s going on?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

I believe it means were achieving product/market fit for a set of ideas. Tactics were discussed out of context, and there wasnt an overarching framework for figuring out what works for what kinds of companies, industries, and stages of growth. Ideas, products, and capital flow easily across borders. Congratulations. Not anymore.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Way back when the money was doled out, the team made a compelling pitch about the large market that was going to adopt their new innovative product or service. Safely because it is clear that the manager in question didnt do his homework.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

One of the topics that raised heated debate was whether I had conflated technical design with product design , because I made the admittedly counter-intuitive claim that sometimes good technical design actually leads to increased technical debt. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

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 customer development. The most common need is becoming more customer-centric.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here. At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

This workshop brings together leading thinkers from Lean Production and Lean software. It will probably be the first time Ill be able to take extensive Q&A on some of the new frameworks Ill be debuting at Web 2.0 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I usually recommend a three-part board, where the left column is where the scrum-style "product backlog" is maintained in priority order, the middle represents tasks in progress, and the right column is for tasks recently finished. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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www.subelsky.com

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

Heres a revised version of what I emailed in response, garnered while building OtherInbox and other Rails apps: First and foremost, I find Rails itself to be very useful for building a product for a lean startup; the expressiveness of Ruby and the conventions of Rails help developers more quickly build a minimum viable product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. And what causes them to choose one product over another?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Having had a number of years to try and answer this question at cocktail parties and social gatherings of all kinds, I thought Id try and expand on his framework a little, and then try and use these answers to help make suggestions for those who are trying to get people to buy virtual goods.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Heres the working definition Ive started using: A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Q: Does the Lean Startup framework work efficiently within a company of 2-3 people (think small)?" In a future post, Ill attempt to unpack this definition in detail.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. This has led to exponential growth.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. My normal answer is that I dont really think thats how Apple products are built. Thats what so many techniques that I advocate are all about: customer validation , minimum viable product , vision pivots , and even throwing away working code. It just wasnt great.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I’ve lived through the over-architecture failure – where attempting to prevent all kinds of problems wound up delaying the company from putting out any product at all. In this framework, we’ll tend to either invest in the proposed prevention or do nothing. There are just so many ways for a startup to fail.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

As Steve writes in the Four Steps to the Epiphany , we always seek to find a market for the product as currently specified , not conduct a focus group to tell us what the spec should be. It gave the whole company license to go heads-down building product as fast as possible during the development cycle, acting as a solution team should.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Product launch) In todays world, there is no reason you have to do these two things at the same time. Establish credibility with potential partners.

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SVPG

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

Much has been written about how to do product discovery in startups, by me and many other people. But one of the real advantages from a product point of view is that there’s no legacy to drag along, there’s no revenue to preserve, and there’s no reputation to safeguard. See Product Discovery with Live-Data Prototypes.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Add onto that the incredible amounts of infrastructure code that we reused, and we were able to bring our product to market months earlier. and Rails as a web framework. I certainly dont.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

(a guide for hackers) (This post was inspired by a conversation with Nivi from Venture Hacks , but is otherwise not his fault) There has been a proliferation of frameworks and metaphors lately that are designed to help startups avoid the all-too-common fatal mistake of failing to find a market. Is a market a set of paying customers?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Each experiment is like a little mystery, and if you can get into a mindset of open-mindedness about the answer, the answers will continually surprise and amaze you. A few days ago I open-sourced a framework for split-testing, A/B testing or continous optimization. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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