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Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."
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.
aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. Call it facts for hire. It would be a bit like the hired gun in the old west, but more suited for today’s times. What went wrong?
A Part-TimeCTO Technology. Depending on the level of complexity and difficulty, it might not be the most efficient use of your time. Access - Good developers are tough to find. Communication - Hiring a technical employee early on can sometimes result in a founder developer gap. In Plain English.
The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See CustomerDevelopment Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the CustomerDevelopment process.
And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings.
Since we were only paying per click, it didnt cost us anything to cast a wide net. And then we would use that simple analytics system I mentioned to monitor the conversion rates of customers from each campaign. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customerdevelopment to online marketing.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 2, 2008 Just-In-Time Scalability At my previous company, we pioneered an approach to building out our infrastructure that we called "Just-In-Time Scalability." After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes.
If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. It’s one of the subtle distinctions that at times gets lost in the process. Market Type But most startups aren’t in existing markets.
By pushing the envelope, we can challenge our assumptions about consequences and get better at what we fear at the same time. For people we hired from larger companies especially, this was challenging. where an initial bad impression affects a significantly larger percentage of potential customers. Interesting article, Eric.
Joel is focused on the fact that in many environments, programmers are considered "just the hired help" akin to manual labor, and not treated properly. Automated testing dramatically reduces the cost of certifying changes, because it removes all of the grunt work QA traditionally does in software.
[link] And - of course - going through [link] and reading up on the various different approaches different companies have (successfully) taken towards getting scalability at reasonably low cost. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? So, for reference, I am Adam, of [link].
” We were big practitioners of what we now call CustomerDevelopment, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. I remember being immediately struck by how different we designed and built technology, versus how our customers did. 6) Process. 9) Accountability. 10) Leadership.
So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well.
In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
Customerdevelopment would be reduced to a single person exercise that could be repeated in parallel dozens of times over, ultimately yielding 30+ companies a year. Development firms that advertise part equity and cash are simply not mature in defining their model, and thus they have no business taking stakes in others.
The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. Estimating Realistic Startup Costs.
Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I don’t know any developers. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like. I need money for the servers.
I have come to believe during my time as an operator, entrepreneur and investor that the balance of these skills is so important to the long-term health of a business that if balance is not achieved early then the impact later can be profound - sometimes terminal. Colin Hayhurst , CTO co-founder then CEO of start-up b.
" => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customerdevelopment whatsoever. However, I do spend a lot of time daydreaming. "Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?" "I am a creative guy with a startup idea."
Plus, with memory-resident code, its pretty easy to forget which version of the code is actually running at any given time. At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Every change required a server restart.
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