The cardinal sin of community management

Yet none of that mattered, because we violated the cardinal rule. We didn’t listen. More accurately, we made our customers feel like we weren’t listening. And until we could make that right, we kept on hemorrhaging business.

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 for mission-critical applications

I want to directly challenge the belief that continuous deployment leads to lower quality software. I just don’t believe it. Continuous deployment offers three significant advantages over large batch development systems. Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment...

What Do You Get?

When you buy Eric Ries's Startup Lessons Learned: Season Two, you get a professionally designed, 150+ page, DRM-free PDF book containing every post from Eric's second year of blogging (from September 2009 to present) at his Startup Lessons Learned blog. You can read all those posts freely online right now; however, it's more pleasant to read as a PDF.

New PDF versions will be produced every month, and previous purchasers will automatically be sent download links when the book is updated...

Why Buy Startup Lessons Learned, Season Two?

"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."
-Peter Armstrong, Author, Flexible Rails and Hello! Flex 4

Read Eric's Blog

Eric Ries's blog is Startup Lessons Learned. This book is the posts from his blog from September 2009 to now. For the newest posts, go there and subscribe now...