Table of Contents
Preface; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Foreword; Lean Startup; Chapter 1: How We Fooled Ourselves into Delaying Our Startup’s Launch; 1.1 Why Didn’t We Release an Early Prototype?; 1.2 The Excuses We Came Up With; 1.3 The Excuse I Didn’t Admit; 1.4 Lastly; Chapter 2: How to Build It: Lean Prototyping Techniques for Hardware; 2.1 The Dollar Store; 2.2 Pen and Paper; 2.3 Computer Modeling; 2.4 2D Cutting; 2.5 Additive Manufacturing; 2.6 CNC; 2.7 Molding and Fiberglass; 2.8 Welding; 2.9 Arduino; 2.10 User Feedback; 2.11 Summary; 2.12 Acknowledgments; Chapter 3: How Many Metrics Do You Need to Run Your Startup?; 3.1 What’s Your OMTM?; Chapter 4: The Lean Stack MVP—A Different Approach; 4.1 The Lean Stack Flow; Chapter 5: Software Inventory; Chapter 6: How to Get Out of the Building with the Validation Board; 6.1 1. The Exploration Method; 6.2 2. The Pitch Method; 6.3 3. The Concierge Method; Business Models; Chapter 7: MBA Mondays: Revenue Models—Commerce; Chapter 8: Freemium Pricing for SaaS: Optimizing Paid Conversion Upgrades; Chapter 9: Why Churn Is So Critical to Success in SaaS; 9.1 The Impact of Negative Churn; 9.2 How Do You Achieve Negative Churn?; 9.3 Same Sales Force for Expansion/Up-sell/Cross-sell?; 9.4 How to Track the Different Factors That Make Up Bookings; 9.5 When to Focus on Negative Churn?; 9.6 Tactics to Help Reduce Churn; 9.7 Managing Churn Is Harder if You Are Selling to Small Businesses; 9.8 How Churn Affects Valuation; Chapter 10: Achieving the Network Effect: Solving the Chicken or the Egg; 10.1 Two Versions of the Chicken or the Egg; 10.2 Solving Platform and Marketplace Issues; 10.3 Solving Community and Social Network Issues; 10.4 Don’t Be Afraid of Brute Force; Chapter 11: Reverse Network Effects: Why Scale May Be the Biggest Threat Facing Today’s Social Networks; 11.1 Network Effects and Value; 11.2 Why Network Effects Work in Reverse; 11.3 In Conclusion; Chapter 12: Business Model Canvas for Puppies (Part I); 12.1 Puppies-as-a-Service; 12.2 Find a Wall; 12.3 Customer; 12.4 Value Proposition; 12.5 Relationship; 12.6 Channel; 12.7 Minimum Viable Product; 12.8 The End?; Customer Discovery and Validation; Chapter 13: All Customers Are Not Created Equal; 13.1 Part I; 13.2 Part II; Chapter 14: You Shouldn’t Use a Survey If...; Chapter 15: A Perfect Use for Personas; 15.1 The Business Person; 15.2 The Barfly; 15.3 The Group Luncher; 15.4 And the Rest...; 15.5 Postscript; Chapter 16: Fucking Ship It Already: Just Not to Everyone at Once; 16.1 The Interactive Mockup; 16.2 The Opt In; 16.3 The Opt Out; 16.4 The n% Rollout; 16.5 The New User Rollout; Chapter 17: Stop Validating Your Product; 17.1 Validate a Problem; 17.2 Solve a Problem for a Particular Market; 17.3 The Easiest Kind of Customer Development; Chapter 18: Using Surveys to Validate Key Startup Decisions; 18.1 Introduction; 18.2 Background; 18.3 So How Do You Get Quality Feedback?; 18.4 Using a Survey and a Targeted Audience to Make Smart Decisions; 18.5 Create a Great Survey—Turning Key Objectives into Great Questions; 18.6 Uncovering Critical Insights; 18.7 Putting Results into Action; 18.8 Conclusion; Marketing: Demand Generation and Optimization; Chapter 19: Very Basic Startup Marketing; 19.1 Marketing as a Funnel; 19.2 Marketing as Understanding; 19.3 Marketing as a Cycle; Chapter 20: The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing; 20.1 Foundation; 20.2 Social Media; 20.3 Startup PR; 20.4 Content Creation; 20.5 Test and Iterate; 20.6 Best Practices; 20.7 Conclusion; Chapter 21: What the Highest-Converting Websites Do Differently; 21.1 1. They Make Their Unique Value Proposition(s) Clear; 21.2 2. They Test Their Calls to Action; 21.3 3. They Test Their Headlines; 21.4 4. They Tend To Have Short Forms; Chapter 22: Understanding the Customer Buying Cycle and Triggers; 22.1 The Customer Buying Cycle; 22.2 How the Buying Cycle Impacts the Sales Approach Needed; 22.3 Understanding Buying Triggers; 22.4 Encountering a Customer Too Late in the Buying Cycle; 22.5 Conclusions; Chapter 23: Building It Is Not Enough: Five Practical Tips on User Acquisition; 23.1 If You Build It, They May Not Come; Chapter 24: Introduction to A/B Testing for Landing Pages; 24.1 Improperly Segmenting Traffic; 24.2 Misunderstanding Randomness; 24.3 Mixing Experiment Factors; 24.4 Data Dredging; 24.5 Comparing the Results of Different and Unrelated Experiments; 24.6 Inconsistent or Unimportant Metrics; 24.7 Naïve Analysis of Results; 24.8 Substituting Testing for Creativity and Common Sense; 24.9 Make It Easy on Your Developers; Chapter 25: You Built It But They Didn’t Come: Eight Tricks for Marketing Your Mobile App; 25.1 Build a Great App; 25.2 Get Great Reviews; 25.3 Build in Social; 25.4 Pitch, Pitch, Pitch (and Then Pitch Some More); 25.5 SEO Your App Description; 25.6 Be Free, Freemium, Cheap...; 25.7 If All Else Fails, Advertise; 25.8 If All Else *Really* Fails, Buy Users to Get in the Top App Lists; Sales, Marketing, and PR Management; Chapter 26: At Times Not Losing Is as Important as Winning; 26.1 Customer Validation; 26.2 They Have a Problem and Know It; 26.3 A Match Made in Heaven; 26.4 The CIO; 26.5 The IT Revolt; 26.6 We’re Going to Lose; 26.7 The Third Way; 26.8 The “Take-Away” Gambit; 26.9 Lessons Learned; Chapter 27: Nine Ways to Make Your Startup Grow Virally; 27.1 ; 27.2 Conclusion; Chapter 28: Our PR Stinks: Here’s What Your Startup Can Learn from It; 28.1 The Familiar Doubt; 28.2 How Did We Solve the First Problem of Filling the Platform?; 28.3 Growth; 28.4 The Big Guys; 28.5 Our PR Still Stank; 28.6 How, Exactly, Did We Manage to Grow?; 28.7 What Were Our End Results with PR?; 28.8 What Were Our End Results with Content Marketing?; 28.9 At This Point in Time, Our PR Still Sucks; 28.10 The Fate of Your Brand; Chapter 29: Some Tips for Interacting with the Press; Chapter 30: Startup Branding: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs; 30.1 ; Product Management/Product Design; Chapter 31: Sometimes It’s Not the Change They Hate; 31.1 Did You Do Any Sort of User Testing Before Launch?; 31.2 Did You Test with Current Users or Just New Ones?; 31.3 Did You Add Something Useful to Users? Really?; 31.4 Do You Mind Losing a Portion of Your Users?; 31.5 Have You Honestly Listened to Your Users' Complaints?; 31.6 Have You "Fixed" the Problem by Letting Users Change Settings?; Chapter 32: What You Will/Won’t Learn from Usability Testing; Chapter 33: Product Marketing Contribution; 33.1 The Problem; 33.2 The Job; 33.3 Product Marketing Responsibilities; 33.4 What to Do?; Chapter 34: Time-Boxing Product Discovery; Chapter 35: Product Management Then and Now; 35.1 ; Chapter 36: Live-Data Prototypes Versus Production; Chapter 37: Continuous Discovery; Chapter 38: The Role of Product Managers; Chapter 39: Why Companies Should Have Product Editors, Not Product Managers; 39.1 Product Manager: One of the Toughest and Worst-Defined Jobs in Tech; 39.2 Bad Ideas Are Often Good Ideas That Don’t Fit; 39.3 Jack Dorsey in His Own Words; 39.4 Lead with Product; Chapter 40: Five Outsourcing Mistakes That Will Kill Your Startup; 40.1 Mistake #1: Outsourcing Something That Shouldn’t Be Outsourced; 40.2 Mistake #2: Not Sufficiently Vetting Your Staff; 40.3 Mistake #3: Hiring Based on Technical Skills Rather than English Proficiency; 40.4 Mistake #4: Insufficient Management; 40.5 Mistake #5: Failure to Award Responsibility and Reward Good Work; 40.6 Conclusion; Business Development and Scaling; Chapter 41: Who You Gonna Call? Partnering with Goliath: A Tale of Two Announcements; 41.1 Time to Find a Partner; 41.2 In Summary; Chapter 42: A Recipe for Growth: Adding Layers to the Cake; Funding Strategy; Chapter 43: Micro-VCs and Super Angels Two Years Later: Looking Back and Some Predictions for the Future; 43.1 The Dedicated Seed Strategy Continues to Have Strong Benefits; 43.2 Evolving and Converging Strategies; 43.3 A New Normal?; 43.4 A Few Predictions; Chapter 44: Why Do VCs Have Ownership Targets? And Why 20%?; Chapter 45: How to Evaluate Firms for a Seed VC Syndicate; Chapter 46: A Choir of Angel Investors Sing Different Parts; Chapter 47: Super Pro-Rata Rights Aren’t Super; Company Culture, Organizational Structure, Recruiting, and Other HR Issues; Chapter 48: Getting Promoted Too Quickly; Chapter 49: Recruiting Developers? Create an Awesome Candidate Experience; 49.1 Ideas for Creating an Awesome Candidate Experience (CX); Chapter 50: Startups: Stop Trying to Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers; Chapter 51: How to Hire Hackers: A Realistic Guide for Startups; 51.1 You’re a Startup—Have the Founders Make the First Contact; 51.2 Interviewing: It’s Not Just About the Role, It’s Also About Who They Will Have Lunch With; 51.3 Interviewing: Choose Carefully Which Opportunity to Pitch; 51.4 Signing: How to Make Candidates Sign an Employment Agreement More Quickly; Chapter 52: MBA Mondays: Best Hiring Practices; Chapter 53: How to Design a Successful Interview Process for Hiring Top Talent; 53.1 1. Reviewing Resumes; 53.2 2. Screening Candidates; 53.3 3. First In-Person Interview (with me); 53.4 4. Second In-Person Interview (with Fred); 53.5 5. Third In-Person Interview (with the team); 53.6 6. The Practical; 53.7 7. The Post-Practical; 53.8 Conclusions; Chapter 54: Snake-Oil Startup Recruiting; Chapter 55: Recruiting and Culture (MBA Mondays Guest Post); 55.1 Make Recruiting a Top Priority at the CEO Level; 55.2 Communicate the Company Vision Broadly and Directly; 55.3 Challenge Traditional Notions of Corporate Transparency; 55.4 Be Patient: "Slow Recruiting"; 55.5 Open-Source Your Culture: Generosity of Spirit; 55.6 Cultivate the Spirit of the Organization; Chapter 56: Firing; Chapter 57: MBA Mondays: Asking an Employee to Leave the Company; Chapter 58: The Board of Directors—Selecting, Electing, and Evolving; Startup Failure; Chapter 59: What Goes Wrong; 59.1 Determination; 59.2 Variety of Problems; 59.3 Cofounder Disputes; 59.4 Investors; 59.5 Distractions; 59.6 HR Acquisitions; 59.7 Making Something People Want Is Hard; 59.8 Roller Coaster; 59.9 Hard, But Not Impossible; Chapter 60: Why Startups Die; 60.1 Post Mortems; 60.2 How to Survive; Exiting by Selling Your Company; Chapter 61: The Economic Logic Behind Tech and Talent Acquisitions; Chapter 62: Knowing Where the Exits Are; 62.1 Taking the Exit; 62.2 “Your Best Exit May Be Behind You”; 62.3 Stepping Back from the Fray: November 2005; 62.4 Stepping Back from the Fray: February 2007; The Startup Mindset and Coping with Startup Pressures; Chapter 63: What It’s Like to Be the CEO: Revelations and Reflections; 63.1 What It Feels Like to Be the CEO of a Startup; 63.2 Epilogue; Chapter 64: How We Fight—Cofounders in Love and War; 64.1 Introduction; 64.2 How We Fight; Chapter 65: Vision Versus Hallucination—Founders and Pivots; 65.1 A Pivot a Week; 65.2 Pivot as an Excuse; 65.3 Sit on It for Awhile; 65.4 Change the Value Proposition Last; 65.5 Find a Brainstorm Buddy; 65.6 Lessons Learned; Chapter 66: 50 Startup Lessons Learned in 12 Months; Chapter 67: Advice I Wish I Could Have Given Myself Five Years Ago; Chapter 68: The Only Two Questions Founders Need to Answer; 68.1 Do You Need to Pass These Tests to Succeed?; 68.2 When I Passed These Tests and When I Failed; Chapter 69: Once You Take Money, the Clock Starts Ticking; Chapter 70: The Series A Crunch Survivor’s Guide; 70.1 1. Your Team Lacks a Track Record; 70.2 2. Your Product Execution Is Not Competitive with Other Products Investors Are Seeing; 70.3 3. You Lack Product Traction; 70.4 4. The Market You're Addressing Is Not Big or “Important” Enough; 70.5 5. You're Fishing in a Recently Poisoned Pond (e.g., the Deal Space Pioneered by Groupon); 70.6 6. Your Valuation Doesn't Match Reality; 70.7 7. Your Burn Is Unjustified, Scary, or Lacks Discipline; 70.8 8. You Lack Clients; Management and Career Advice; Chapter 71: Selling or Funding a Startup? Tips on Surviving Technical Due Diligence; 71.1 Be Better Prepared for Technical Due Diligence; 71.2 Vitality; 71.3 Scalability; 71.4 Maintainability; 71.5 Continuity; 71.6 In Conclusion; Chapter 72: Playbook for Incoming MBAs to Start a Company out of School; Chapter 73: Manage Your Tech Career; 73.1 How to Use the Tool; 73.2 Find the Right Company (or Pie); 73.3 Get What’s Fair, but Don’t Negotiate Too Much; 73.4 The Bottom Line; Chapter 74: Hey Entrepreneur—Please Get an MBA; 74.1 1. What You Actually Learn; 74.2 2. Tuition Costs; 74.3 3. Time Commitment; 74.4 4. The Wrong Network; 74.5 5. Many MBAs Choose Not to Start Businesses (and Who Gives a Shit?); 74.6 My Suggestion; Chapter 75: Why I Left Consulting and Joined a Startup; Colophon;