Venture Hacks

I really wanted to be a cool cat and make a list of the most popular outgoing links for 2009 —a top 10 list of other people’s posts. But it wasn’t meant to be — we don’t have the Javascript installed to track those clicks.

And so, we present our 10 most popular posts of 2009:

1. How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year. A talk by Eric Ries.
2. What is the minimum viable product? An interview with Eric Ries.
3. The Startup MBA. Links to the best startup blogs.
4. My visit to American Apparel. How American Apparel gets lean.
5. How to pick a co-founder. Also see the accompanying interview.
6. Sell it before you build it. Fliggo’s minimum viable product in action.
7. We don’t pay you to work here. A review of the book Hidden Value — you can find it in our bookstore.
8. Customer Development: How to develop your customers like you develop your product. Videos and slides from Steve Blank, king of customer development.
9. It’s very easy to underprice your product. A short talk by Steve Blank.
10. How to bring a product to market. A very rare interview with Sean Ellis.

Use this list to catch up on great posts you missed.

When we started Venture Hacks in 2007, we were all about hacking term sheets. In 2008, we continued to write about raising money and expanded to general startup advice — for example, see our posts on job offers. Looking at the top 10 list above, 2009 was clearly the year of customer development. It was also the year of monetization, as we created more free and paid products — here’s a list of them.

What’s coming in 2010? Wait and see…