Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

It became harder and harder to separate how the software is built from how the software is structured. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? If not, whos going to insist we switch to free and open source software? I dont think so.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

Instead, buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, their social network, or just plain word-of-mouth or customer reviews. He was building a better enterprise software product, and to get the word out, he organized ‘City Tour’ events and neighborhood ‘street teams.’

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. Then, pluck the low-hanging fruit: easy, low-cost, and highly scalable infrastructure. Customer Development.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

Sources like Crunchbase , Angel List , and Seed Invest even give this data away for free or very low cost. I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales. Furthermore, on Streak (our deal board), a due date of two business days is automatically set for us to review the opportunity.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 29, 2012

Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. By the time Sunday rolled around twelve teams were left to present what they had accomplished. Several of them came from other cities that don't have their own weekend code-a-thons.

St. Louis 135

St. Louis Kansas City Norway Kansas 135

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward. Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

The company was having a noticeable customer retention issue several years ago. SAS software was doing an excellent job of keeping up with customer needs. Unfortunately, the customers didn’t seem to realize this. However, they knew that defecting customers might listen to what other SAS customers had to say.

Customer 168

Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. And like feedback on a simple microphone sound system, this would occasionally boil over into screeching.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Since the term “cloud computing” was coined in 1996—at least as we have come to understand its meaning—the software as a service industry has exploded. If you use software like LivePlan, you can create this initial “lean plan” in under an hour and then spend your time where it really matters—on validating your idea.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. Another great article is from Joel on Software called Duct Tape Programmer.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

So let’s turn our attention from what may happen in the future to what is definitely happening in the present. As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. 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. These are probably the two sites where I've posted the most reviews.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! why did that code get written? 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. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. It happens whenever youre writing code on your own machine, or you have a team working on a branch. It also happens whenever you have code that is checked-in, but not yet deployed anywhere.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

The reason feedback - specifically from actual customers - is usually chosen is because it is more on the science side than the art side, but I surely cant knock those people and teams that can deliver product excellence due to vision, luck or art. -- arrel 215 days ago | link. The article and HN are concerned with software.

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our code pushes take another six minutes. Since these two steps are pipelined that means at peak we’re pushing a new revision of the code to the website every nine minutes. On average we deploy new code fifty times a day. Code reviews and pairing Great practices. That’s 6 deploys an hour.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesnt blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look. Hes just as comfortable writing code as racking servers, debugging windows drivers, or devising new interview questions. He throws off volumes of code, and it works.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Part-Time VPE 94

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. Thanks for sharing the lessons you’ve learned, especially the ones where the cost is measured in years.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

Getting features and fixes into hands of users was the greatest priority - a test environment would just get in the way and slow down the validation coming from having code running in production. As the product matured, they were able to ratchet up the quality to prevent regression on features that had been truly embraced by their customers.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Without further ado, the video: Slides are below: Minimum Viable Product View more presentations from Eric Ries. My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases. Your presentation was something that I needed right now. Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time? How upset will those customers be? But there is another way.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. Then we could render the whole site with much less latency, bandwidth usage, and server cost.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

ConversionXL

JUNE 12, 2014

For a software company whose success hinges on whether customers actually use the product , not having those 6 words severs the personal connection with the experience, and makes it feel like you’re using just another piece of software. That being said…. But don’t think these changes were arbitrary.

Conversion 112

Conversion eCommerce Software Review Green 112

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. Most of the ability to create a radio industry in the 1920s was due to the accident of ionospheric radio propagation. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.

Silicon Valley 303

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 303

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower. What counts as an iteration?

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

ConversionXL

JUNE 12, 2014

For a software company whose success hinges on whether customers actually use the product , not having those 6 words severs the personal connection with the experience, and makes it feel like you’re using just another piece of software. That being said…. But don’t think these changes were arbitrary.

Conversion 105

Conversion eCommerce Software Review Green 105

ConversionXL

JUNE 12, 2014

For a software company whose success hinges on whether customers actually use the product , not having those 6 words severs the personal connection with the experience, and makes it feel like you’re using just another piece of software. That being said…. But don’t think these changes were arbitrary.

Conversion 101

Conversion eCommerce Software Review Green 101

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. My delusions of coding grandeur quickly subsided and realized that I was not going to hack it. The Alchemist Series: Customer Development and Metrics.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

ConversionXL

JUNE 12, 2014

For a software company whose success hinges on whether customers actually use the product , not having those 6 words severs the personal connection with the experience, and makes it feel like you’re using just another piece of software. That being said…. But don’t think these changes were arbitrary.

Conversion 84

Conversion eCommerce Software Review Green 84

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost. I think quick, do something, then review what I’ve learned. Build something.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? Not enough people understand the emotional cost of being a start-up founder. What is your advice to someone who has financial strain due to a startup?

Entrepreneur 296

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 296