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This book has a chapter about Eric and the struggles he went through to get it developed. It's a great read!
IIRC the real hero of the story was his girlfriend who totally supported them both the entire period of several years while he obsessively tweaked and added new features with no clear end in sight. She worked two jobs to keep them afloat while he stayed in the house working on the game day in day out with no other steady income. It sounds like they're still together so I'm sure she's thrilled that she trusted him to pull it off now that all that hard, obsessive work has made him worth $34 million.
Almost halfway trough "The Infinite Machine". Great book ...a must read for every ETH fan.
Get this book !!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X8HS2WC/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_48QdFb4WVNMKG
(not an aff.. link)
It is interesting to read about Ensemble Studios' experience as a Microsoft Developer in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, I reccomend it if you are interested in the topic.
There's a great chapter on Dragon Age Inquisition in "Blood, Sweat and Pixels" that covers this a bit. Probably sources from what you're talking about.
You need to do customer development, check out books like "The Mom Test" and "Lean Customer Development". But before your prospective customers will want to talk to you you need to get some credibility. Try to create some content that solves problems that they are aware of, then you'll be able to talk with them.
There's quite a few details you're missing. There's also nuance with mergers and acquisitions. They're not the same.
I read this book a few years back, which was really interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KVI76ZS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_9FFT0N90169W1V3VGEKK
All the cofounders put a lot of work into getting it off the ground - that includes musk.
It's not like PayPal was a successful business before the merger.
This book is based on studies/evidence:
There is some sad truth behind your question: Our industry is based on gut feeling. We do tons of things, even after the evidence tells us that it does not work. Software estimation comes to mind.
You might try The Infinite Machine
https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Machine-Crypto-hackers-Building-Internet-ebook/dp/B07X8HS2WC
For a grisly dive into what happened to BTC itself long ago-
https://www.removeddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/informative_btc_vs_bch_articles/
He has written a book about game development, and it is a damn good book: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent-ebook/dp/B01NAKSWW1/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1VIU92YP70RVK&dchild=1&keywords=blood+tear+and+pixels&qid=1610889119&sprefix=blood+tears+pi%2Caps%2C243&sr=8-1
That's not quite the case. I would recommend you give "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" a read, it has a chapter on Destiny and if that book is to be believed then it was mostly just a mess of Bungie's own making.
Keep it simple as you can. My suggestion is star to talk with your customer following the The Mom Test rules.
The Mom Test in a nutshell is:
- Talk with your customers about their life instead of your idea
- Ask them about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
- Talk less and listen more
It’s called The Mom Test because it leads to questions that even your mom can’t lie to you about.
Book some videocalls with 5-10 of your customers and ask them about how they use your product in their life or if they use it for a specific use case ask questions around the use case. For example if the use case is: saving money for my next vacations, some questions could be:
- How was you last vacations?
- How did you decide where to go?
- Did you define a budget for it?
- Did you saving for it?
- How did you saving for it?
- What were the implications of that?
While you are talking with them you star to notice patterns and identify needs or pains, it is a good staring point to level up your product discovery to specific topics.
Product discovery is apply a lot of differents technies and tools to discover how to build the right product, but in the end all of them look to give you an undestanding of your customer, so talk with them is the basic for that.
IMO focus on the supply side first is great. To approach the sellers I would choose 1 or 2 platforms as sources of possible users, maybe FB Marketplace and Heyauto.
Then I would search for around 100 sellers on the platforms to contact them. For example, I would contact sellers by FB Messenger with the excuse of learning more about the business of selling used cars with a cold message like this: Hey Bob, i have seen you have a lot of expertise in selling used car and I want to learn more about it for my [insert any excuse here(podcast, homework, etc)]. Could we chat a few minutes about it?
You will need to reach 100 sellers to get 25 calls (a great conversion rate) and try not to sell anything, remember your goal is learn.
Learn more about the types of questions you should ask in the book, The Mom Test
With regards to bugs, there are 3 types.
- Bugs found by the dev while they are coding. No-one else sees it. The dev writes a unit test to cover and it stays their dirty little secret.
- Bugs found by the QA during the sprint. No big deal. Create a bug report, inform the team, get the PO to triage (is this bug something that should block us from releasing to the customer?). Fix the bugs on the story, close the story, declare victory. Discuss bug metric (how many bugs did QA find on stories this sprint) and countermeasures in the sprint.
- Bugs found by the customer. Gross. Tie it in to your team-level metrics (see accelerate. Put it in your backlog to prioritize against other bugs and user stories. Pull into the sprint as normal. Discuss during retro.
I recommend against story pointing anything except user stories. Ultimately what you want to forecast for planning is "amount of user value" (velocity). Teams naturally start estimating bugs or tasks, but all that overhead is actually already measured just by the user stories. If bugs and tasks take up more time, then the Velocity goes down. It is key here to measure output for the customer NOT amount of work done by the team.
People wonder why Elon is so hell-bent on acquiring Twitter. He told us during the shareholder meeting that it would advance his plans by 3 years.
This is consistent with what is known about how he calculates things:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KVI76ZS/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
Page 188:
"Sometimes he [Elon] wouldn't let you buy a part for $2,000 because he expected you to find it cheaper or invent something cheaper. Other times, he wouldn't flinch at renting a plane for $90,000 to get something to Kwaj [Island] because it saved an entire workday, so it was worth it. He would place this urgency that he expected the revenue in 10 years to be 10 million dollars a day, and that every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that money." - Kevin Brogan, early SpaceX Employee
If you’re technical:
If you’re after the story and history:
https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Machine-Crypto-hackers-Building-Internet-ebook/dp/B07X8HS2WC
Unless you start digging through PC gamer archives or something like that, I don't think there's going to be much out there. There wasn't that kind of journalism back then.
Not BG related, but a good book in that area: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
This is something of an oversimplification; in <u>Accelerate</u>, which goes into the DORA metrics more in depth, they go more into their methodology and explain how the metrics correlate with better business outcomes and higher employee satisfaction. (In other words, like any metrics, these can be gamed or can fail to take important measures into account - but there's also solid evidence and reasoning behind them, and they're not just measuring how easy the changes are.)
Speaking about your business/niche specifically, you will learn more through experience than you ever will through reading or watching YouTube or taking online courses.
That said, there are a lot of skills you need as a business owner that don't have anything to do with the product or service you are selling. The one thing most new entrepreneurs don't realize is that you won't actually be spending all that much of your time doing the technical aspects of your business - or at least you shouldn't. As a business owner you also have to do the legal parts (setting up the business entity, getting insurance, navigating hiring/firing employees, etc), financial parts (setting up bank accounts, bookkeeping, reviewing financial reports, etc), advertising & marketing, customer service, even cleaning the toilets.
If you really want to change your mindset and start thinking more like an entrepreneur and less like an employee, read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. On the financial side of things, read Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs.
Without knowing more about what type of business you want to start, I really can't offer much more advice than just get started.
I really enjoyed the book Traction by DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg. He identified 19 traction (marketing) channel strategies, and a methodology for identifying the most promising channel for your company. Mainly startup focus.
https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer-ebook/dp/B00TY3ZOMS
Nope. The authors of the definitive study included that possibility in the study. https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations-ebook/dp/B07B9F83WM
Pre-existing teams which adopted a faster cadence of releases saw their number of features released go up and their number of defects (total and per release) go down.
Releasing faster means you release better software, on net.
I can give you some tips to start. :)
From an idea to a viable business, you need to focus on refining your idea with good feedback. Asking the right question is key. If you read "The Mom Test" you will know what I'm talking about.
Your job, in the beginning, should be generating good conversation and identifying your ideal customers. This way you have enough information to help you refine your idea into something that people want/need.
If you are worried about people copying your idea which seems to be an issue I see a lot. Make your product unique to your own experience/expertise or give yourself a time frame (ex. 3 months) so you can move fast with a plan in place.
Please let me know if this is helpful.
I read this one which is considered to be the biography of Elon right now. What did I say that was wrong?
Its not clear to me if you just want to do an experiment and have fun or you really want to make a successfull app/business.
If it is the latter, Eric Ries "Lean Startup" was an eye opening for me and the development of my product. Stop what you are doing and go to read that book first, or at least watch some of his talks.
I recommend to you The Phoenix Project, a book that's written about IT but as a "thriller" novel if you can believe that lol. It's an informative read (or listen if you do the audio book) about that aspect of a business. Many older ones don't think they are a tech company when they in fact are one and are losing ground as a consequence of not seeing it from that perspective (i.e., seeing IT as a "cost center" when your business can't survive without it and you can't ship new ideas and products without developing code is an old school mentality holding many back).
Tbh Fiverr wouldn't be where I start looking for tech talent. Try Indeed, pony up the registration fees and use Indeed Prime. Don't get overly fixated on "tech interviews" of candidates especially if your business has nothing to do with inverting a binary tree type of nonsense.
There are A developers - you won't get those, they go to FAANG+M. B developers go to top start-ups and other big notable but non-FAANG+M companies. C developers work for huge corporates that think they are non tech but are really tech (think Home Depot, Walmart, etc).
You are looking for a B developer to drive this full time and maybe a C developer to grind out some work to free up the other guy to innovate and lead.
>Straubel was already a cto before joining tsla
Which only proves my point further. Mr. Straubel was at Rosen Motors, a hybrid vehicle company, in 2002, just 4 years after college (according to chapter 7 of Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk). He was hired as CTO just 4 years out of undergrad.
A person's capabilities and judgment are what matters, not their age or seniority.
Check out Lean Startup
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004J4XGN6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Super helpful book that breaks it down. I think you can get it for free on Academia.