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

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 Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Software Review 74

Software Review San Francisco Design Continuous Deployment 74

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. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

Silicon Valley 264

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 264

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Each specialist takes up his part of the spec (UI, middleware, backend) and cranks out code. So the product manager winds up actually having to use the software, by hand, updating the spec and helping create a new test plan. In exchange, the team agrees to show each piece of working code to the product manager for his approval.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

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

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

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

APRIL 4, 2010

Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

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

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

But there is more to technical debt than just the interest payments that come due. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. In particular, try these three things: Invest in technical debts that may never come due.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 4, 2014

Reach out to your loyal customers and offer incentives for them to write reviews and rank services. If you run a business than offers higher priceditems, such as equipment vending, instead of requiring a 100% cash payment, leasing allows the customer to obtain the equipment they need for a manageable monthly payment.

Customer 168

Customer PPC Software Review Finance 168

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

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

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?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

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.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

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

crowdSPRING Blog

JUNE 6, 2014

The embedded presentation above is filled with valuable data on the state of the Internet and trends in technology around the world. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers presented the data at the recent Code Conference. Customer] Retention is King (good insights on measurement) – crowdspring.co/1haiyJt.

Social Media 94

Social Media Small Business Design Software Review 94

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 same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

This is exactly the reason I like people who present to me to start with their personal bios. When I first met the team in San Diego they had only been working on their software for 5 months. The exact same team had worked on 2 previous customer service startups (and 1 non-CS product). Another example.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

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

The Next Web

JANUARY 27, 2013

I guess, in a sense, I felt a lot like Neo, when presented the choice between a blue and red pill by Morpheus. I couldn’t write a single line of code, and I didn’t have any clue how to start a business. They told me it was impossible to pick up coding. Learn to code. Scared of throwing away my two precious uni degrees.

Netherlands 159

Netherlands Technical Review Software Review Cofounder 159

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. What is customer development? Dates are irrelevant.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

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

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. When I first encountered customer development , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs. Kent Beck is deservedly famous for his many contributions in the software industry. And then you can buy a t-shirt.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

And we presented the full company P&L every month, as soon as we got it from our controller. What about when you have to present bad news, doesnt that impair morale? At IMVU , these were quite common (after all, were shipping code 50 times a day). They are collected and reviewed after an appropriate interval (e.g.

Employee 146

Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

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

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? The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

ConversionXL

JUNE 14, 2021

The USP that communicates this is: “ConvertKit helps you find your audience, turn them into true fans, and earn a living as a creator with our audience building and email marketing software.”. Advocates are more likely to agree to an interview due to positive sentiment. However, it’s necessary due to the nature of the interaction.

Software Review 158

Software Review Audience Differentiation Framework 158

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

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding? We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. Can I send you a review copy?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Understanding the left-side of the mission model canvas ( activities, resources , partners , and costs) forces all teams to ask, “Are we building a product for a DOD/IC customer only or do we have a “dual-use” product that could be sold commercially and get funded by venture capital?”. Team Presentations: Weeks 8 and 9.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

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

ConversionXL

MAY 22, 2014

If you don’t have customers, our articles on customer development & writing compelling copy when you don’t have any customers , to help you to start getting people to buy. Recommended Reading: It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. website reviews, 5. free shipping 7.

Software Review 116

Software Review PPC Analytics Search 116

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Here at Palo Alto Software in 2007 and 2008, we embraced these planning concepts and moved towards a more agile planning process. ” Blank’s main innovation here is what he calls Customer Development, which is a methodology for learning and validating market needs through detailed customer communication and follow up.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

If you watch the video/audio below, youll get to see some of the questions I was asked after my presentation. And do your customer development. These quotes are, as is my custom, straight from twitter. Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. August 29, 2009 8:54 AM Ben Casnocha said.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

If you don’t have customers, our articles on customer development and how to write compelling copy without customers can help you get started. Considering that the “ad” was hidden in the source code of the page, it spoke exclusively to the target market—nobody else could see it! website reviews; 5.

Acquisition 111

Acquisition Software Review PPC Analytics 111