Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 22, 2023

In other parts of the world, innovators often need to develop both the ultimate product or service, as well as the enabling infrastructure that underpins it. With today’s pervasive Internet, the best ideas traverse continents and improve with successive waves of adaptation, through diversity in experience, culture, and worldview.

Global 345

Global Silicon Valley Marketing Indonesia 345

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Consider licensing your product or intellectual property, and “white labeling.”

Intellectual Property 341

Intellectual Property Technical Review Startup Incubator 341

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 6, 2019

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Consider licensing your product or intellectual property, and “white labeling.”

Finance 320

Finance Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 320

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 1, 2020

In other parts of the world, innovators often need to develop both the ultimate product or service, as well as the enabling infrastructure that underpins it. With today’s pervasive Internet, the best ideas traverse continents and improve with successive waves of adaptation, through diversity in experience, culture, and worldview.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Indonesia Venture Capital Global 312

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 28, 2020

Building a minimum viable product, with customer validation. Minimum viable products (MVPs) are recommended for validating the market, with iterative enhancement to quickly meet market feedback. Building your public image and presence should start even before product development, through your website, logo, and blogging.

Intellectual Property 404

Intellectual Property Startup Angel Groups Social Media 404

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

If this is your attitude, your conception of tech support is completely backwards and you're missing out on important channels for marketing, product development, and sales. Yes, I'm flagrantly paraphrasing the legendary Kathy Sierra , but the idea applies as much to tech support as to product development.).

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2013

Almost all new business owners will have to make an initial investment in the technological aspect of production and everyday business activities. Cell phones, laptops for traveling employees and website development will have to be included among the technological costs, as well. Product Development and Marketing.

Cost 183

Cost Startup Web Development Finance 183

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. I believe all this advice is wrong. It’s akin to putting lipstick on a pig.

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 270

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

are all expensive and potentially fatal distractions if done before you have found product/market fit and a repeatable sales model. Therefore when money is hard to come by, entrepreneurs (and their investors) look for ways to reduce cash burn rate and increase the chance of finding product/market fit before waste you bunch of money.

Lean 263

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 263

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 16, 2023

Building a minimum viable product, with customer validation. Minimum viable products (MVPs) are recommended for validating the market, with iterative enhancement to quickly meet market feedback. Building your public image and presence should start even before product development, through your website, logo, and blogging.

Intellectual Property 261

Intellectual Property Entrepreneur Angel Groups Social Media 261

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. (See

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 24, 2018

As a startup advisor and angel investor, I tend to focus on the much longer list of ways your startup can fail, based on my own experience and inside knowledge from peers who you will never see highlighted on the Internet. If you don’t have all these interests and skills, even your most “disruptive” products will likely fail.

Angel Investor 249

Angel Investor Cofounder Finance Operations 249

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 30, 2011

74% of high growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling. Inconsistent startup outsource 4-5 times as much of their product development than consistent startups. In discovery phase 60% of inconsistent startups focus on validating a product and 80% of consistent startups focus on discovering a problem space.

Silicon Valley 189

Silicon Valley Software Review Startup Cofounder 189

Gust

APRIL 27, 2014

This will include the first version of many critical processes that can be split out later, including market opportunity, requirements, product definition, business model, sales process, and organization. Product development process. If you are contracting or outsourcing, this is even more important. Funding process.

Startup 187

Startup Institutional Investors Angel Investor Bootstrapping 187

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2010

That is when no customers wanted to work with Internet startups because we as an industry had burned so many customers. I learned how to better run a product management process. I learned how to integrate customers into our product development process. The things you learn in tough environments. We were family.

Venture Capital 285

Venture Capital Hiring Software Review Stock Options 285

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

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. This is precisely the dilemma that the doctrine of minimum viable product is designed to solve.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 1, 2013

Over 13 years ago, in March of 2000, I wrote a blog post titled “ The Most Powerful Internet Metric of All. ” The key thesis was this: if an Internet company could obsess about only one metric, it should be conversion. As such, it is time to pound the table again – conversion is by far the most powerful Internet metric of all.

Metrics 93

Metrics Conversion Internet Acquisition 93

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

This preference isn’t necessarily due to market size, but rather the structure of the market: are there only a few dozen customers that might buy your product or are there thousands, or even tens of thousands of potential customers? Why Internet Companies Don’t Buy From The Enterprise Kings (techcrunch.com). Related articles.

Fractional CTO 154

Fractional CTO Software Review Viral Sales Cycle 154

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

You get increasing growth by optimizing the viral loop , and you get revenue as a side-effect, assuming you have even the most anemic monetization scheme baked into your product. Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. He wrote it in 2000, and as far as I know has never updated it.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. Have you worked with or for a great CTO?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 4, 2010

By Ernst Gemassmer With the pervasiveness of the Internet, the world is smaller. In my experience, there are many considerations which are critical to the productivity and success of this effort. In addition this person should report, dotted line, to product development or engineering.

Software 200

Software Distribution Europe Database 200

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes product development in the feedback loop with customers. 2008 09 06 Eric Ries Haas Columbia Customer Development Engineering View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." Whats wrong with this picture?

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

by Steve Owens, Founder and CTO of Finish Line Product Development Services. Poor Product – 17%. Poor Product – 17%. Product Mis-Timed – 13%. There is no product, processes or history to guide decisions. The technology you choose for your product will change your Go To Market strategy.

Startup 133

Startup Product Development Revenue Distribution 133

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. 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

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. First of all, why split-test? One last note on reporting.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Nothing made any difference.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Global e-commerce entrepreneur and investor Richard Burry followed a unique path to the pinnacle of Internet success. By the time businesses began to take notice of the unfolding promise of Internet technologies, he was perfectly positioned to take the leap into this exciting new industry. You must sell the most product.

Portugal 147

Portugal Entrepreneur Internet Advertising 147

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT; it was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the internet. So much for timing.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

He doesnt put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. My normal answer is that I dont really think thats how Apple products are built. Thats what so many techniques that I advocate are all about: customer validation , minimum viable product , vision pivots , and even throwing away working code. It just wasnt great.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 12, 2018

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Consider licensing your product or intellectual property, and “white labeling.”

Intellectual Property 134

Intellectual Property Technical Review Startup Incubator 134