Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Between webcasts and interviews, we’ve been gradually introducing some of the speakers who are appearing at this year’s Lean Startup Conference. So we spent some time iterating--leanly, we thought--on the revenue model. Lean validation.

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Lean Startup Metrics Silicon Valley 152

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 5, 2010

In the quest for optimization, A/B tests, metrics, and funnels, we're in danger of losing the fun and value of creative work. We're "lean" but we're not stirring hearts. Now by all of the usual arguments for Lean, Agile, and minimimalism, I should have used boogers too: Boogers were already semi-standardized.

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Software Review Metrics Lean Agile 226

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 6, 2010

Everyone has their own definition of momentum (user numbers, revenue, channel partners, biz dev deals, whatever). That might work for $50-100k but less likely for $3m unless you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, known to the VC, have some metrics that work in your favor or have built something the VC believes to be truly unique.

Early Stage 360

Early Stage Startup Venture Capital Seed Stage 360

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 16, 2023

He nails the current key startup parameters, including the following: Crafting a lean business plan as your road map. Before you bring on partners, develop intellectual property, raise capital, or generate revenues, you need to establish an official business entity. Incorporating a business entity early through online services.

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Intellectual Property Entrepreneur Angel Groups Social Media 261

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. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. for Harvard Business Revie.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 21, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment with a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. The Week 6 Lecture: Revenue Model. This week’s lecture covered the Revenue Model including questions like these: How does your company make money? What types of revenue streams are there? Two weeks to go.

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Channel Artificial Inteligence San Francisco Business Model 234

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

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.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. There was now a public market for companies with no revenue, no profit and big claims.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, April 7, 2010 Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem) Lean startups don’t optimize. At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. How can established companies benefit from implementing Lean Startup? Of course, you can also continue the conversation by attending The Lean Startup Conference. What can Lean Startup do about this? They’ll jump in to answer in the coming days. (Of

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Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. We were constantly creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on end-user purchases.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 13, 2011

Modern Lean Startup theory blares out from the red-tiled rooftops of Stanford: Seek the Data and Ye Shall Find! But as much as I respect and follow Lean Startup theory, objective measurements aren’t the only things that matter. I was embarrassed when referring you guys to friends.&#. But hold on. They were still customers.

Design 253

Design Lean Cofounder Database 253

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 24, 2017

Subscription business brings recurring revenue. This allows you to enjoy a constant source of incoming revenue, as long as you’re keeping the subscribers satisfied (that is of course essential). Through customer acquisition, you’ll work to grow the revenue and then, use that revenue to cover operational costs.

Churn Rate 149

Churn Rate eCommerce Business Model Bootstrapping 149

leananalyticsbook.com

AUGUST 19, 2012

Lean Analytics Book. The One Metric That Matters. One of the things Ben and I have been discussing a lot is the concept of the One Metric That Matters (OMTM) and how to focus on it. That doesn’t mean there’s only one metric you care about from the day you wake up with an idea to the day you sell your company.

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Metrics Clickthrough Lean Analytics 58

Up and Running

APRIL 10, 2013

This was the major theme behind a discussion my company hosted recently with “Lean Analytics” author Alistair Croll. Then once they learn what the market responds to (and what moves the needle on revenue, site traffic, clicks or another important performance metric), you can invest in fully building out the concept.

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Lean Analytics Technical Review Social Media 71

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

Dribbble is what I like to call a “boot up,” or “organic startup” – a company that lives and breathes on revenue. […] For us, getting cash flowing in sooner than later was critical to give us resources to respond to the site’s rapid growth. Stay lean for as long as possible. Be creative, and stay lean. Scale rapidly.

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Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

View from Seed

MARCH 19, 2015

He’s dubbed the approach “ pretotyping ,” and it shares many of the same principles as both its similar-sounding (if later-stage) cousin, prototyping, as well as the more well-known lean startup movement. NVV: Lots of entrepreneurs reading this will think about the lean startup movement when they hear about pretotyping.

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Product Technical Review Marketing Lean 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Despite all the energy invested in talking to authors about the size of their platform, very few gatekeepers have a rigorous set of metrics for measuring it. The problem is that there are no other metrics they can look at to judge the content of a book to know if it’s worth reviewing. What is the right revenue model?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer). These concepts have important implications for any lean startup.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

I hear similar things for pre-revenue startups that are on schedule, on time, and on budget - even though they are busy building something that nobody wants. (In Vanity metrics and success theater are in a moral grey area; they are masking the fact that some of our industry’s most “successful” ventures are actually value destroying.

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

In this article, you’ll learn how to build a marketing growth strategy to increase your market penetration, market share, and revenue. This philosophy comes from The Lean Startup methodology , which relies on testing hypotheses to better understand your customers’ pain points and goals. Growth marketing is about process over tactics.

Marketing 115

Marketing Framework Metrics Channel 115

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

No changes were made to the customer journey, and it had nothing to do with revenue lift. It isn’t about finding quick hacks to boost short-term revenue. Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. If your campaign works and your brand awareness metrics improve, you win.

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Framework Marketing Acquisition Retention 102

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for T he Lean Startup Conference. We’ve posted the full program for The Lean Startup Conference , and it includes more than three days of events for Gold pass holders and six days of events for VIP pass holders. On the evening of December 8, Ignite Lean Startup kicks off the conference.

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Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

The reason is that b2b fundraising is largely driven by data and metrics, and pre-seed dollars usually don’t get you to many meaningful data points. Some very early dollars may be required to assemble the early team, in which case I’d lean towards bringing on some angels who are willing to invest in a company at a very favorable price.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. Expo SF (May. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Behind this analysis is a spreadsheet model, complete with detailed metrics for a set of customer behaviors that show just how valuable the new product will be. They are on-schedule and on-budget, but their gross metrics are way off. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Expo SF (May.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

crowdSPRING Blog

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

Lean Marketing tips: business card as selling tool – [link]. Lean Marketing tips: business card as selling tool – [link]. Facebook redesign driven by ad revenue, says @benkunz(I agree) – [link]. Lean Marketing tips: business card as selling tool – [link].

Social Media 99

Social Media Small Business Design Media 99

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 1, 2019

Books such as Steve Blank’s The Startup Owner’s Manual and Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup do a great job of exploring the challenges of the go-to – product phase, and identifying the importance of reaching product/market fit with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). There are no seminal books and few insightful blogs for them to turn to.

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Cleveland Framework Marketing Early Stage 150

crowdSPRING Blog

MAY 4, 2011

Lean startups: Office space for the 21st Century (what to consider when leasing office space) – [link]. Lean Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses and Startups – [link]. Lean Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses and Startups – [link]. agency revenues – [link]. – [link]. Traditional?

Social Media 92

Social Media Small Business Design Media 92

Up and Running

OCTOBER 3, 2017

If you don’t have a specific immediate need to show a formal business plan to a banker or investor, then you are probably better off doing just a lean business plan , for your internal use only. Finally, you’ll want to outline the key metrics you’ll be tracking to make sure your business is headed in the right direction. Key Metrics.

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Business Plan Balance Sheet Forecast Lean 134

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Work in small batches.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

The Startup Toolkit

DECEMBER 12, 2012

Slides from “ Lean startup intro (with no buzzwords) ” by robfitz. Lean gets bogged down in tactics & tools. This presentation is about what are, in my opinion, the big principles behind lean startup. Lean begins from there and helps us make it better. A few tools from lean startup.

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Lean Startup Metrics Retention 54