Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 23, 2009 Why vanity metrics are dangerous In a previous post, I defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics. In this post, Id like to talk about the perils of vanity metrics. My personal favorite vanity metrics is "hits."

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 19, 2012

For example, if you are trying to determine viral coefficient (see Startup Metrics ), then the focus should be around those aspects of the MVP. Customer Development Notes I'm assuming founders are having customer development conversations. Send across any graphic designs you currently have.

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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.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here: A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. Validate Your Hypotheses with Experiments.

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conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses. Website Analysis.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. Lean was designed to inform the founders’ vision while they operated frugally at speed. Some have labeled this period as irrational exuberance. The result?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Metrics are used to manage process rather than creation of new capabilities, outcomes and speed to deployment. At the same time, companies and government agencies typically adopt innovation activities (hackathons, design thinking classes, innovation workshops, et al.) that result in innovation theater.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customer development. Filed under: Customer Development.

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San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 261

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

Obviously there’s lots of bias built into the data – those who volunteered might be the better teams, the peer reviewers might be selecting for what we taught, funding is no metric for successful science let alone successful companies, etc. – but the difference in funding success is over 300%.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Here are just a few things you might look for: Reducing risk in young companies Bringing innovation to the enterprise Designing and running experiments Customer development strategies All conference passes are on sale right now, and you can compare them here.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. What good are these metrics if they dont help guide product or business decisions?

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. For each of these parts of the course design we needed to consider where on the spectrum of directed versus experiential each of the five parts of the class would fall.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. shoes in order to deduce possible competitors’ moves and anticipate customer needs. What do you think?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 221

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. The irony is that once you’ve gone through the lean cycle, you have all the information that goes in a business plan: customers, sales strategy, product features, and financial metrics. Seeing Is Believing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 30, 2008 Refactoring for TDD and interaction design In TDD , we follow a rhythm of “test-code-refactor.&# This basic pattern is useful in all aspects of product development. The same process works in Interaction Design. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

Dave McClure’s conversion metrics visualize where different conversion optimization opportunities lie—including those for acquisition. If you don’t have customers, our articles on customer development and how to write compelling copy without customers can help you get started. persuasive design).

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Acquisition Software Review PPC Analytics 111

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 10, 2024

Personalised Messaging: Utilise customer data stored in Salesforce to personalize SMS messages, addressing recipients by name and tailoring content to their preferences and behaviors for a more engaging experience. Track and Analyse Performance: Gain valuable insights into SMS campaign performance by tracking metrics such as delivery rates, open (..)

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SMS Customer Campaign Social Media 123

Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

To win in business you need to follow this process: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act. We are far too enamored with data collection and reporting the standard metrics we love because others love them because someone else said they were nice so many years ago. That metric is tied to a KPI.

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Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 157

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. After you’ve spent months on a painstaking new design, who wants to be told what color blue to use?

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

You’ll learn how to conduct the right kind of customer interviews, prioritize high-risk assumptions, design experiments, and measure the effectiveness of your product (not your marketing). In this workshop, Goto will take you through the application development process and shre behind-the-scenes techniques for rapid prototyping.

Lean 154

Lean Cofounder Startup Analytics 154

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

For instance, tracking ‘months-of-runway’ combined with the month-over-month change to that metric allows us to rapidly identify companies that may be distressed. You might hire a really amazing designer, and perhaps even charge companies for their service for cost recovery purposes. Customer Development. Advantages.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

But we couldn''t have identified this without having clear metrics (that high bug count) to assess our development process. So, depending on which team you are talking to at Shutterstock, we may be Lean Startup or Agile or Kanban or some other method depending on the type of problem that team is designed to solve.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The new design improved on the old one in several ways, but these improvements didnt translate all the way through the funnel. Usually, I think that means youve lost some good aspect of the old design. The designers might be telling you that the new design looks much better than the old one, and thats probably true.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

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. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design.

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Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

ConversionXL

JANUARY 31, 2014

note: If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use customer development questions for your page to resonate with future traffic). All of this is to inform a landing page design that’s in-line with your target market expectations which plays a huge role in reducing the amount of friction it takes for them to convert.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 127

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2018

We describe their efforts as “heroic” because all the established procedures and processes in a large company are primarily designed to execute and support the current business model. Some examples of innovation tools are Customer Development, Design Thinking, User-Centric Design, Business Model Canvas, Storytelling, etc.

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Programming Incubator Leadership Silicon Valley 326

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

for Harvard Business Review) Over at Harvard Business Review, Ive been building up a series designed to introduce the Lean Startup methodology to a business-focused audience. This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Labels: product development Speed up or slow down?

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

We talked about some simple design rules and I remember him thanking me for coming, saying we were the only chip company who cared enough to call on him (little did he know.) Long gone from Zilog I saw the picture of the original Macintosh design team. I thought nothing about the meeting until years later.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 144

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

When we looked at the color graphics board market, our competitors had defined the market as one measured by technical metrics: screen resolution, number of bits of color, screen refresh rates, acceleration, etc. Our company’s graphics boards were designed to speed up a key part of the Macintosh graphics operating system called QuickDraw.

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Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 159

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf. From grumbling skeptics, they all became packaging design converts. And for sure they were never going to win any design awards. So we not only sent everyone through packaging school, we also brought the packaging design in-house.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 8, 2010 Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review) The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. Remember "metrics are people, too."

Metrics 121

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 121

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. Entrepreneurs should always communicate their business’ very latest stage of customer development as part of their investor presentation.

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Sacramento Framework Lean Customer Development 314

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. For most companies it feels like innovation can only happen by exception and heroic efforts, not by design.

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