
How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year - sarvesh
http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup
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asmithmd1
It is a bit long at over an hour but it is great to hear a success story
coming after a couple initial failures to connect with who they thought their
customer would be. Anyone is allowed to run an A/B test at any time - he says
the difference in a product meeting where someone has actual data vs. typical
meetings where people are trying to sell their idea feels like breathing
oxygen. They ship code 50 times a day - and not just hacking, they have
automated regression testing to maintain reliability. All new engineering
hires ship code their first day.

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eries
Thanks for the kind words. Always love feedback and suggestions for how to
make the presentation better, esp. when giving it to a more technical audience
(the MBA's are a little easy ;).

If anyone knows folks that might be interested in hearing (and, more
importantly, ripping to shreds) a version of this talk, do let me know.

~~~
JabavuAdams
That was very interesting.

You could spin the part about having new hires ship on the first day off into
a talk on hiring.

The part about looking for engineers who've had a project cancelled really
resonated with me.

I get a sick feeling in the middle of a project when the management is asking
for extra effort, while at the same time making n00b project-management
mistakes. It's a feeling of "how dare they waste my effort."

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pclark
bet Atwood loves that. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481579>

~~~
far33d
Wow. I've always been a little frustrated by Atwood, but this comment just got
him removed from my feed reader.

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rgrieselhuber
One of the best talks I've listened to in quite awhile. In fact, the last
really good talk I listened to was by Steve Blank. No accident there, I'm
sure.

I'm in the B2B space and working on applying these lessons to Enterprise SaaS
applications. It has it's own challenges and involves a lot more face time
with customers but the key lessons - execute faster than everybody else -
seems to be spot on so far.

