Eric Ries

Good blogs that follow the 4 Steps Model are: Steve Blank (author of the book) - http://steveblank.com/ Eric Ries - http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/ - An advisee/investment of Steve Blank, started IMVU.com, Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins) His blog has become somewhat less useful lately though as he's been using it mostly to promote his "Lean Startup" classes. Sean Ellis - http://startup-marketing.com/ - Has applied 4 Steps model at many companies, consults on "Customer Development" with VC backed companies Also Venture Hacks is a great place to start. Check out the archives at http://venturehacks.com/archives/

It's hard to answer that question because so much depends on your specific circumstances but I'll try. I'm assuming you're able to do your own programming because $1000 won't get you very far if you need to hire developers. Find an area where you think you can provide something of value. It could be a hobby or a problem in your community. Figure out how to solve it and have a go. Get feedback early and keep an open mind try lots of things and understand what's working and why. If you don't already know patio11's Bingo Card Creator story, then probably the best advice you will find is on his website: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ Read the earlier ones on how to prioritize your time and validate your work (the more recent posts are more geared towards SEO and marketing). Also Eric Rees's blog about the Minimal Viable Product approach: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/ But you've been on HN for a while, so you probably already know all that?

Do you want to do this for fun or business? If purely for fun, then I don't see any major flaws in your current approach. Sure, you end up with unfinished projects but you're hopefully learning tons and having a blast. But if you're thinking about structuring things so you can better go from ideas to businesses, you need to reevaluate your entire approach. You need tools that can practically guide you through the stages of creating a software business, not just a general philosophy of getting things done. Currently in the startup world, there's an interesting convergence between customer development and lean as applied to tech startups. Customer development is described in Steven Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and Eric Ries' "The lean startup" is the book on lean startups. Both Blank and Ries have contributed to this convergence that I talk about at their respective sites [1] [2] but there's also overviews available [3] [4]. But why am I even recommending these two approaches? Because they cover business development from start to finish from as applied to software startups, so you know the advice is specific to our industry and very practical in nature. If you're serious about the business of software, customer development and lean startup will help you create a business with better certainty of execution and outcome. Together they provide a very potent combination of roadmap and compass, and principles and philosophy. [1] http://steveblank.com/ [2]…

I'm going to take a guess because I'm obviously not part of your core team so I have no inside knowledge to how or what your doing. As other have posted in classic purple cow speak [1], you build a better product and remember "your product is not THE product"[2]. Part of Ash's lean canvas[3] even has a spot for alternatives which may even include competitors. The focal point is you need to start testing everything so you can: create a customer feedback loop of _learning_[4][4b]. Ash's model is a variant of the original "Business Model Canvas" which is also very good. I would urge you and everyone to LOOK at the examples and iterations of these models on the main site[5]. Some of the questions you start asking in this exercise are: - What is the problem your solving, and what are the possible solutions? - How will you reach customers, who are the early adopters? Its never too late, and like I said actually the beginning of the exercise. Even if you 'know this already', I would urge you to re-test and re-focus on your previous lean canvases/models. Success is in the finer details. Remember, you never stop learning about the customer. You want a 'specific' customer? You develop a strategy - focused on the problem. So there you go, a 'teaser' on building a better product. Now go read Eric Ries's[6] book[7], Steve Blank's book[8] for overall strategy. See the business model generation book and site[9] (there is an ipad app!) for more finer details. There is also a…

http://highscalability.com/ is a great resource for building scalable sites - it has consolidated architectural details (culled from presentations, blog posts, interviews, and more) for many large-scale sites (YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc). As for testing environments, take a look into the principles of continuous integration (many resources available) and continuous deployment (especially Eric Ries's blog: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/). Some tools commonly used to this effect: Git/SVN for source control; Hudson/Cruise Control/Team City for builds; Selenium for testing. Finally, applying patches and updates to a server falls into the domain of systems administration, so I'd suggest looking for articles on patching/updating high-availability sites. Note, however, that cloud computing is a huge game-changer here. Whereas at many enterprises, applying patches is an arduous (and tedious) quarterly effort culminating in an late-night maintenance window with many hands on deck (all crossing their fingers), clouds afford their adopters the ability to simply fire up new, updated servers alongside the old ones, allowing them to be thoroughly tested in place before any traffic is redirected. -Mike (@mikebabineau)

Aren't these all vanity metrics? [1] Features are swell, and registered users are nice, in that it indicates somebody was at least curious. But how many of those 1,627,557 registered users are, say, active at least once a week for the last 3 months? What's the NPS of Mastodon users after 7, 30, and 90 days? I'd love to see them succeed. But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users. [1] This isn't a slam; it's a technical term from Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/12/why-vanity-metrics-are-da…

In theory you're always marketing. It's the level of marketing that you do that really ramps up "at the right time". More on this here: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/dont-launch.html "The right time" is when you have product-market fit. You saw you are in open beta - does that mean you (believe you) have achieved product-market fit? (Read this for help on figuring this out: http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/02/cloud-startup-product-market-fit/ If not, then perhaps the quibbling is about the wrong question to begin with. With respect to feature pushing: Read the 2-3 pages worth in this link (upto figure 13-3), which may help with your argument> https://www.inkling.com/read/running-lean-ash-maurya-2nd/chapter-13/do…

Here's a link Eric's "Don't be the Ice Cream Glove" blog post: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-cream-glove.h… (I remember it well. It was one of the articles I used to test on of the iterations of our book generator when we were first producing http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned. I must have read this 100 times :).

I think this can still be considered an intermediate MVP that can be tested. The goal of lean is to eliminate waste, so there is a risk that an MVP with working code has no demand whatsoever. One drawback to this approach is that it may give you false negatives. What if you landing page copy doesn't work or your AdWords copy is wrong? As with all lean/custdev hacks ymmv. Bottom line is you need to find customers to talk to, otherwise everything is an assumption. Some other articles that touch on this approach: http://startupbound.com/how-i-quickly-test-and-validate-startup-ideas/ http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/using-adwords-to-assess-d… http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/customer-development-interv…

Unfortunately MVP is one of those terms like "pivot" that got out of control. An MVP is "the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-product-gu… This is a great example of an MVP. If nobody signs up, he knows there is no demand for this product.

The problem is how similiar the users from these tool are like the ones of your product. Getting users from SEM hacks[1] might give better results. Don't know. Would actually love to see a comparison. [1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/sem-on-five-dollars-day.h…

In addition to the good advice elsewhere on this thread you might find the following links to be of use. http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/lean-hiring-tips.html http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-q… You might also find this link to be useful, but I wrote it myself so ymmv http://fragile.org.uk/2010/03/anatomy-of-a-technical-interview/

Godin is Seth Godin, who writes about online marketing and product development here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ Many of his articles are immediately applicable to your start up, and in my opinion, are extraordinarily valuable. Eric Ries writes about agile development and small start up culture/strategy here: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/ I have not read many of his articles, but my understanding is that he is making quite a name for himself as a start up guru. Trout escapes me as well, I have not heard of him.

You have been "working" on an idea for several months? I don't want to sound rude, but have you ever heard the saying "ideas are worth nothing" ? On the subject of giving up, depends how worthy your project is. If you're a good competitor, you can still beat them or sell your company a few years later. Otherwise, you can still... pivot: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump-to-new-vi…

I couldn't agree more; I've gone through the phase of accepting the 'excited' people's input as valid and can testify that you need to qualify your assumptions - derive facts by which to make decisions. Read more on these topics with Steve Blank (read his The Four Steps to the Epiphany!) and Eric Ries. http://steveblank.com/ http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/ You won't regret educating yourself based on the experiences of others. No matter what you think, you're not smarter than the market; you need to understand the market, and that means having the humility to prove your assumptions.

This is the best written post i have ever read with regards to launching. http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/dont-launch.html Summary: there are two types of launch - product and marketing launch. do the former ASAP, the latter when you have all your ducks in a row.

Read through this blog and you'll be up to speed: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

I wish I had time to write a longer post, but I have to catch my train. Suffice it to say the stealth startup is a relic. It's like waterfall methodology is to agile development. It had its day and its uses, but now there are better ways to create a startup. Here is a fantastic essay on this very topic: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/achieving-failure.html

Good read, thanks. Here's similar : http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/using-adwords-to-ass… http://blog.stevebarsh.com/barsh_bits/2009/01/5-surprising-ways-to-der… http://blog.stevebarsh.com/barsh_bits/2009/01/5-surprising-ways-to-der… http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/how-to-do-research-on-a-n…

I wanted to share this blog post from a friend and entrepreneur, who was new to the idea of Lean Startups (you should read Eric Ries's blog Startup Lessons Learned here: http://startuplessonslearned.com). He attended the Paris simulcast of the Startup Lessons Learned conference ten days ago, and this very detailed and personal blog post is his first take on these ideas. I think some of use are very familiar with this new frame of mind now, and may have forgotten how powerful such ideas felt when we encountered them for the first time. It's very, very exciting to see the potential of the lean approach through his own eyes, and I wanted to share it with YC. Do you think the impact of such ideas will be felt at the scale of the whole startup industry, or even beyond? I wonder what the impact of this movement will be on management science as a whole?

Sounds like continuous integration to me -- http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html Which is how I prefer to code. Edit: "Work in Small Batches" is another great post on the subject by Eric Ries http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/02/work-in-small-batches.htm…

I think this is pretty typical of developers scratching their own itch, but I would launch now: 1) You may not be scratching the itch you think you are. Users may love your software or they may hate it, but both might occur for reasons you never even thought about, because your users are different from you and may use it completely differently. 2) Don't launch. Seriously, a big launch event with PR and hype is overrated. Put it out there, get feedback, iterate based on that feedback, and do marketing and PR later. Here's a much better post on the subject: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/dont-launch.html

What is the functionality of your app? Get the MAIN functionality finished and release, don't worry about the "other functionality" right now. Release in small iterations, in amounts that a single person can handle. Follow this process and continually release features and improvements based on user suggestions. It's ultimately up to how you feel with taking a risk, no one can tell you what to do. If you believe in the product, other people believe in it and you feel comfortable then go for it. More resources on MVP: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/search/label/minimum%20viable%20p… http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product-examples

You can and should start marketing and selling the product even before you ship an "alpha" version. http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-customer-developm… Learning to write code is certainly worthwhile, but it's a lot easier if you're doing it for a particular purpose. Start honing the tools you'll need for sales and marketing: Write a blog, buy and sell Adwords/Adsense ads, create sales presentations, mock up interface designs, and develop product web sites. You (and the hacker you're working with) will quickly find things you do that can and should be automated, and then you can figure out which skills are useful for you to learn or buy.

If you haven't, read up on Lean Startup/Eric Reis(http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/) and also Sean Ellis(http://startup-marketing.com/). I particularly like the free survey tool provided by Sean Ellis at http://survey.io. Basically it gives you an idea whether you have a service that you can charge for. Bottomline: (1) don't assume your product will sell(be open to changing almost every aspect of it) (2) test, modify, test more whether your product can sell (3) don't scale marketing until you know from a smaller data sample that there is demand for your product. Simply put, don't scale till for every dollar of marketing spend, you can make more than a dollar. Ignoring that last piece will lead you to having no money in the bank in little time(cough last bubble).

This is the same guy who tried to get people to sign up for a $3K/month discussion circle about how to be lean: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/introducing-lean-startup-… Off the top of my head, one excellent strategy for avoiding distractions and process bloat is to avoid this kind of navel-gazing and just work on your project. You can PayPal me the $3k at your convenience.

I wanted to write the same advice. Read that blog, from the beginning! And stop writing a business plan! You don't need one (at least as long it is not a task from one of your professors). I would suggest these sources, too: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/ <- how to make your customers pay, before you build a product? http://steveblank.com/ <- stop doing "business" stuff. Go out of the door and talk to your customers. They pay your bills! http://www.avc.com/ <- one other guy, who likes to pay big bills on risky investments, and how he sees the world.

Eric Ries talks about this at length, for consumer internet companies. Check out the archives at http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/ In short: you can release a landing page before building, with a signup form for interested peeps, and you can release early and often.

What are you trying to build and who is your target customer? It looks like an online db but why a calendar? Read everything on http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com That will help you flush the product more clearly.

Twas very good. Slides will be made available on his blog, http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com: http://twitter.com/ericries/status/1671711849