Venture Hacks

This guest post is by Ash Maurya, a lean entrepreneur who runs a bootstrapped startup called CloudFire. If you like it, check out Ash’s blog and his tweets @ashmaurya. – Nivi

What you charge for your product is simultaneously one of the most complicated and most important things to get right. Not only does your pricing [...]

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Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML specification:
“The Web These Days · It’s like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years. Same for each subsequent release cycle. Teams are small. Progress is iterative. No oceans are boiled, no monster requirements documents written.
“And what [...]

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“Entrepreneurship in a lean startup is really a series of MVP’s”
– Eric Ries
“We kept to minimum feature spec. I think that is always very important. It is hard to determine what to do until you launch.”
– Immad Akhund
Do minimum viable products seem abstract? Here’s 10 examples:

“If Apple can launch a smartphone without Find or Cut-and-Paste, [...]

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“Lean startups are built from the ground up for learning about customers.”
– Eric Ries
I recently sat in on Eric Ries’ presentation on lean startups at Berkeley. The slides and audio are below. The presentation is about one hour long and it is gold.

Audio: The Lean Startup (mp3)

Slides: The Lean Startup (pdf)
The audience consisted of students [...]

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“[Recessions] can cause people to think more about the effective use of their assets. In the good times, you can get a bit careless or not focused as much on efficiency. In bad times, you’re forced to see if there is a technology [that will help].”
– Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel

Water hides the rocks at [...]

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Ed: This is a guest post by Kevin Meyer, the President of Factory Strategies Group, which operates Superfactory. He also writes an excellent blog called Evolving Excellence. In this post, Kevin describes how American Apparel unwittingly applies lean practices like short cycle times (concept-to-product in 8 days), integrated QA, cross-functional teams, and more.

American Apparel has [...]

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“We do use agile methodologies at Heroku—I developed my own (informal) style of agile at the last company I founded, and brought that forward to this venture.”
– Adam Wiggins, Founder, Heroku
I first learned about lean startups in an excellent book called Agile Software Development—learn more about it in our review.
The second step in my lean [...]

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I just finished reading Certain to Win. It’s about the warfare strategy of John Boyd, as applied to business. In war, you build your team and dismantle the enemy. In business, you build your team, delight the customer, and incidentally dismantle the enemy.
You might know John Boyd as the OODA Loop guy. I never really [...]

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“We can acquire knowledge from doing something incorrectly, but only if we can determine the cause of the error and correct it.”
– Russell Ackoff
Summary: It’s never too late to start applying five whys, even if you’re saddled with zillions of lines of legacy code. Just start asking why whenever you find a problem—you’ll automatically start [...]

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“For every dollar spent in failure, learn a dollar’s worth of lesson.”
– Jesse Robbins, Amazon’s former Master of Disaster
Summary: Get started with five whys by applying it to a specific team with a specific problem. Select a five whys master to conduct a post mortem with everyone who was involved in the problem. Email the [...]

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