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.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

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. It outlines four major growth strategies: market penetration , market development , product development , and diversification. Product development. New customer segments.

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Marketing Framework Metrics Channel 115

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.

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Metrics Conversion Internet Acquisition 93

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 19, 2020

Similarly, customers are more knowledgeable, aware, and conscious to choose from the variety out there, which slows down the company’s revenue and growth. Most industries have touched their peak, matured, and there is little room to improve in the world of homogenous products, similar marketing, and standardized, efficient processes.

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Technical Review Forecast Analytics Social Media 158

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 2, 2016

Product managers should also understand the company’s goals. It is one of the most important processes in a product development lifecycle to deliver the product. The product itself can be ideal and work faultlessly, but what really matters is how it enters the market. necessary product. necessary product.

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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. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. For example, I’m a big believer in split-testing.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 20, 2015

If you don’t understand your key financial metrics, you have no way of monitoring your business’s health—and you risk mingling assets, incurring penalties for filing taxes late, overlooking expenses, and running into difficulties paying bills and employees, just to mention a few! Each article will give you: A brief definition of the metric.

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Metrics Burn Rate .Net Churn Rate 60

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 10, 2010

Today, brands are hiring social media specialists for customer support, crowdsourced product development, promotions and even leads generation. Internal resistance, non-standardized metrics, multiple (and confusing) platforms and lack of resources prove great obstacles to planning. The Proof Is In The Revenue.

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Social Media Media Programming Viral 134

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. Its really helped me articulate my thinking on this topic, and includes an entire chapter on the topic of reducing batch size.)

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Up and Running

MAY 15, 2014

As an entrepreneur raised in the era of analytics, I want to find metrics for everything. PopInShop’s progress retroactively validated my decision, as the metrics on overall growth supported my gut: after reverting to my status as a lone founder, the company made fast strides on product development and partnerships.

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ConversionXL

AUGUST 30, 2018

It slows product development. The key is to connect user research to an improved user experience and, in turn, an increase in customer retention, leads, or any other metric for which C-suite members are accountable. The finance team understands that content customers are less likely to churn and destabilize revenue flows.

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Design Framework Product Development Technical Review 111

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. This is a common mistake. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 11, 2015

If you know what those numbers (also called metrics) are, how to collect them, and how to evaluate what they mean, you will increase your understanding of what drives your customers. Develop products customers want. Figuring out what customers want and what they will purchase is one of the holy grails of product development.

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Analytics Customer Acquisition Metrics 100

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 20, 2019

On the other hand, if you arrive at a VC pitch without a comprehensive understanding of the industry you’re hoping to compete in, or without a clear path to profitability or a thoughtful product-development road map, you’ll likely leave empty-handed. You may be able to generate revenue, but VCs want exponential growth.

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Technical Review Due Diligence Early Stage Differentiation 140

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2016

Before you bring on partners, develop intellectual property, raise capital, or generate revenues, you need to establish an official business entity. Building your public image and presence should start even before product development, through your website, logo, and blogging. Set milestones and manage to those targets.

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Intellectual Property Startup Angel Groups Social Media 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. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? Is that a lot? Is that good?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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 long-term bets on the development of a new line of business, a new technology platform, or the creation of a new market.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. We just add up the revenue we've made in the past few months from Win98 users, and compare to the pain that Win98 has caused as identified in 5Ys. Leave your thoughts in a comment. I’ll do my best to help.)

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. And if you neglect maintenance, you may not have a business left at all.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

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

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Between January 2015 and January 2016, we grew our platform Slidebean from $1K to $20K in monthly recurring revenue. Getting the first tracks of revenue is one of the toughest processes of building a startup. 1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

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). This is the simplest ecosystem and simplest driver of growth.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

Foster product development and marketing which creates organic (or somewhat organic) user traction. Generate Real Revenue. Another approach to raise Series A is to drive meaningful revenue. For B2B startups especially, this is the best signal of product-market fit – a sign that the company is investable.

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Syndicate Syndication Seed Stage Startup 333

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

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. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

A year goes by, you miss your revenue plan, and you’ve burned through your first VP of Sales. Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. What happened?

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 7, 2022

There is no magic lever for growth, so several initiatives are required, with metrics to assess value returned. Resist the urge to delegate accounting decisions, under the assumption that incoming revenue takes the pressure off. Ask every employee to focus on sales. Personally optimize every cash flow transaction. Marty Zwilling.

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Startup Social Media Metrics Viral 335

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

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San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 9, 2020

There is no magic lever for growth, so several initiatives are required, with metrics to assess value returned. Resist the urge to delegate accounting decisions, under the assumption that incoming revenue takes the pressure off. Ask every employee to focus on sales. Personally optimize every cash flow transaction. Marty Zwilling.

Social Media 329

Social Media Metrics Viral Channel 329

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Alistair Croll will lead a session on Lean analytics for intrapreneurs —from introducing never-before-seen case studies to tracking a product through its entire development and demonstrating which data and metrics are useful in what kinds of situations. If there’s a problem in production, developers need to own it.

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Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

By the 1920’s, in the Age of the Automobile and Oil, large companies sought to control the new product development process. Corporations focused on financial metrics like Return On Net Assets and Internal Rate of Return to reap the benefits of the last technology cycle.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Venture Capital United States Technical Review 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Turns out, what customers really meant was "let me use IMVU with somebody I dont know" so they could get a feel for the social features of the product without incurring the social risk of recommending it to their friend. Luckily, the metrics helped us figure out the difference. Lets run a thought experiment.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

View from Seed

OCTOBER 15, 2014

A seed-stage mobile startup’s housekeeping section might look something like this: Section 3: Core Metrics. The goal isn’t to suddenly self-sustain and generate tens of millions in revenue immediately following a seed investment (though nobody would argue if that happened). The seed stage is all about traction.

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Genuine VC

MARCH 24, 2014

The five conditions for a Series A financing which he enumerated are: a core team ready to scale, demonstrable market size, repeatable cost effective customer acquisition, metric momentum, and plausible monetization. The strategy here is to foster product development and marketing which creates overall (semi-)organic user momentum.

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Seed Capital Metrics Cofounder Revenue 212