A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

article thumbnail

Refutation: An acquisition is always a failure

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Jake Lodwick wrote an article on PandoDaily entitled “An acquisition is always a failure.” Sure not all acquisitions go that way. People love quoting (presumably made-up) stats about how most acquisitions are failures, but they forget to mention that most independent startups also fail.

article thumbnail

The Lindy Effect on startup potential

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

users; there aren’t 13B humans) or run out of marketing channels for acquisition (GoDaddy’s customer growth rate is 13%/yr since 2009 ; at that rate it will take 18 years for them to 10x, assuming market size and conditions would even allow them to sustain that). Indeed, at some point 10x is strictly impossible.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Because they’re good at it, they don’t waste time hang-wringing over whether or not to try an advertising campaign on the latest social media platform; they just do it.

Engineer 264
article thumbnail

WP Engine passes $100M in revenue and secures $250M investment from Silver Lake

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

We have never had the caliber of teams we do today, as evidenced by our award-winning 70+ NPS customer service, our historic-low cancellation rates, our security and uptime, our product and engineering initiatives, our global brand leadership, our customer acquisition through both marketing and sales, our hiring and employee experience teams, our finance, (..)

Engineer 152
article thumbnail

Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Instead, watch payback period for acquisition efficiency, watch retention for product/market fit, watch expansion revenue for long-term growth, and watch gross margin for long-term profitability. A reliable paid acquisition channel results in a somewhat stable business. Sales” is not a dirty word.

Restful 202
article thumbnail

The unprofitable SaaS business model trap

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

time to earn back the revenue to cover all your customer acquisition expenses) 75% annual retention. But for the few who do, they can maintain growth rates of X%/yr where X is much larger than cancellation, and do so with very little acquisition costs. Drastically reduce the cost of customer acquisition. year pay-back period.

article thumbnail

The right way to position against competition

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

However, whereas Microsoft can't afford to build this from scratch, if we show good growth and profits it would be an obvious acquisition target for them. We think there's a solid business to be made in this hundred-million-dollar market. Though it's different, our solution is very easy to describe and to use.