October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 33. Progress Equals Validated Learning
Eric Ries
Eric is the co-founder and CTO of IMVU and is the author of The Lean Startup Methodology.
Would you rather have $30,000 or $1,000,000 in revenues for your startup? Sounds like a no-brainer, but I'd like to try and convince you that it's not.
This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of charging customers for your product from Day One. I have counseled innumerable entrepreneurs to change their focus to revenue, and many companies that refuse this advice get themselves into trouble by running out of time. Yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. Focusing on it exclusively can lead to failure as surely as ignoring it altogether.
Consider a company that has a million dollars of revenue and is showing growth quarter after quarter. Yet their investors are frustrated. Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product definition fluctuates wildly—one month, it's a dessert topping; the next, it's a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products—but this effort is way behind schedule. In fact, this company hasn't shipped any new products in months. And yet their numbers continue to grow, month after month. What's going on?
The diagnosis is easy: The entrepreneurs are exceptionally gifted salesmen. This is an ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.