Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 16, 2009 What is Lean about the Lean Startup? The first step in a lean transformation is learning to tell the difference between value-added activities and waste. I was giving my first-ever webcast on the lean startup. Eric Names matter. Not so with Kent Beck.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference The Lean Startup Conference is next week--and now that we can step back and see all the speakers and mentors, we have to say: Wow. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks.

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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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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

To fill this gap I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany , a book about the Customer Development process and how it changes the way startups are built. The techniques invented in what has become the Lean Startup movement are now more than ever applicable to reinventing the modern corporation.

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ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

This is a customer development problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. Would you mind if you could share to us the name your competitor who stole your ideas ?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. I was delighted to be asked to give a brief talk about the MVP at the inaugural meetup of the lean startup circle here in San Francisco. Thanks Eric.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. You never heard of them because their work was secret.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

So, if youre interested in helping avoid mistakes like that, here are the steps: Get a domain name. It doesnt have to be the worlds catchiest name, just pick something reasonably descriptive. If youre concerned about sullying your eventual brand name, dont use your "really good" name, pick a code name.

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Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. Fundamentally, lean startups do more with less, because they systematically find and eliminate waste that slows down value creation. Another terrific post, Eric.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 22, 2009 Pivot, dont jump to a new vision In a lean startup , instead of being organized around traditional functional departments, we use a cross-functional problem team and solution team. Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

One of the most common questions I get about the lean startup methodology is, "but what about Steve Jobs ?" When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, heres my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesnt go out and ask customers what they want. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Looking forward for your future posts.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 2, 2009 How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis In the lean startup workshops , we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. My intention is to describe a full working process, similar to what I’ve seen at IMVU and other lean startups. Expo SF (May. .

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action. In fact, we know so much that we already know what they will care enough about (namely, the product’s quality – as opposed to, say, missing features). Even better, this is a falsifiable hypothesis.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Lean vs. debt In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it. A similar relationship applies to technical debt.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. I already advocate cross-functional teams as part of the lean startup methodology. I already advocate cross-functional teams as part of the lean startup methodology.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” – word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

But we were cutting corners in the development methodology as well as in the code, in the name of increased speed. I now believe that the "pick two" concept is fundamentally flawed, and that lean startups can achieve all three simultaneously: quickly bring high-quality software to market at low cost. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

We would pretty much bid on any phrase that was "[name of competitive product] chat" and variations like that. And then we would use that simple analytics system I mentioned to monitor the conversion rates of customers from each campaign. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Silence.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. This post, which is divided in two parts, is the story of the first time it happened to me. You created it and own it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 30, 2009 Techstars brings The Lean Startup to Boulder Im very excited to announce a pair of events that will kick off a very busy fall speaking tour. The event will include a talk from Eric on The Lean Startup over dinner, followed by moderated table discussion and then final Q&A with Eric.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. Now, in some situations, this over-selling would lead to a secondary problem, namely, that customers would realize they had been duped and refuse to re-subscribe.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

You may know it by its final name. Filed under: Customer Development , Marketing , SuperMac , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , SuperMac « Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions Gravity Will be Turned Off » 17 Responses EricS , on May 11, 2009 at 11:05 am Said: I loved my Spigot.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards. So when he saw the browser it instantly dawned on him that this would be the greatest customer development tool ever. Shopping.com. The Wedding Channel. Commission Junction.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect. Discovering that your worldview is wrong or mistaken can be a life-changing event.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I worked at Multiflow, a name you’d recognize, ending up running the OS group. Reply Karma in the Lean Startup Era , on January 28, 2010 at 5:26 pm Said: [.] He was my role model at Convergent, mentor at Ardent and partner at E.piphany. Future posts will have some Ben stories.

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