Why vanity metrics are dangerous

When we rely on vanity metrics, a funny thing happens. When the numbers go up, I’ve personally witnessed everyone in the company naturally attributing that rise to whatever they were working on at the time. That’s not too bad, except for this correlate: when the numbers go down, we invariably blame someone else. Over time, this allows each person in the company to live in their own private reality. As these realities diverge, it becomes increasingly difficult for teams to reach consensus on what to do next.

Continuous Deployment

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup, none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment, a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. My previous startup, IMVU, has used this process to deploy new code as often as an average of fifty times a day.

Five Whys

Over time, here’s my experience with what happens. People get used to the rhythm of five whys, and it becomes completely normal to make incremental investments. Most of the time, you invest in things that otherwise would have taken tons of meetings to decide to do.

What Do You Get?

When you buy Eric Ries's Startup Lessons Learned, you get a professionally designed DRM-free PDF book containing every post from Eric at his Startup Lessons Learned blog. It's currently 630 pages, and it's growing since we're constantly updating the PDF.

You can read all those posts freely online right now; however, it's more pleasant to read as a PDF.

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Why Buy Startup Lessons Learned?

"Eric Ries's Startup Lessons Learned is in many senses the spiritual successor of Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters:
(1) Both Paul Graham and Eric Ries are technologists, successful entrepreneurs and compelling writers.
(2) Both books are collections of essays which were first published on the authors' respective blogs, and which are still freely available on their blog archives.
(3) Both collections of essays have been extensively read on the internet and have influenced many startup founders.
If you are doing a startup today you absolutely need to read Eric's book."
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Read Eric's Blog

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