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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

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."

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

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.

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Lessons Learned: Great open source scalability tools from Danga

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 5, 2008 Great open source scalability tools from Danga If you are trying to build a scalable LAMP service, its always best to start with the original and still quite relevant presentation, from Brad Fitzpatrick when he was at LiveJournal. You can find the 2005 version here.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

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. (So Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc.

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Lessons Learned: SEM on five dollars a day

Startup Lessons Learned

Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing. You mention "we had also built a simple cohort-based analytics system" Is tihs a commercial/open source systems. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time

Startup Lessons Learned

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?