David Teten

JULY 25, 2017

the “TOPSCAN” framework from my research study on value creation by VCs ): T eam-Building – We aggregate openings across our portfolio on our jobs page. – Aggregation, ranking, and discounts from service providers. I’m very interested in additional ways to use technology to extend each of these! – OKRs for CEOs.

Portfolio 60

Portfolio Technical Review Private Equity Database 60

Occam's Razor

OCTOBER 21, 2013

As an analyst, I was upset that this change would hurt my ability to analyze the effectiveness of my beloved search engine optimization (SEO) efforts – which are really all about finding the right users using optimal content strategies. We are headed towards having zero referring keywords from Google and, perhaps, other search engines.

Search 154

Search SEO Analytics Engineer 154

ConversionXL

JUNE 26, 2019

While this is true for all SaaS companies, it’s especially critical for those that use their product—not traditional marketing or sales—as their growth engine. To stop a motorbike, you can use the front, back, or engine brake. In aggregate, even small wins can become big wins. How do you optimize that process? Conclusion.

Framework 121

Framework Churn Rate Metrics Revenue 121

Version One Ventures

JUNE 19, 2018

I have previously shared blog posts on the key takeaways from last year’s event (which was one of the best data science conferences I’d been to), including how to define a data scientist and the differences between data science and data engineering. If data is oil, then the model is the engine. What does it mean to be model-driven?

Aggregator 74

Aggregator Acquisition Engineer Cost 74

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 27, 2020

But every change has the potential to adjust tactics—even if that adjustment means having to do less “for search engines” because algorithms improve. In aggregate, long-tail queries can drive a ton of traffic. Not every change to search algorithms requires action. So it is with passage ranking, in a couple of ways. Image source ).

Algorithm 174

Algorithm Search Matching SEO 174

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2013

If you’re thinking about building an online video network today you need to think about: Producing your own content (not just aggregating). It is the world’s best customer acquisition for video consumers to get them to come to your O&O where you can make your $25 CPMs. But the best MCNs are so much more.

Networking 366

Networking Media Distribution Video 366

Genuine VC

MAY 5, 2015

One of my first mentors in venture capital explained to me that the key role of a VC is to “aggregate talent.” Below, I’ll quickly explain the genesis of this initiative and share a few more key details. To me, the whole VC job is about bringing together great people since, together, they will inevitably and collectively do something great.

Portfolio 100

Portfolio Startup Boston Seed Stage 100

Austin Startup

APRIL 25, 2017

Had Facebook not purchased Instagram, Facebook’s aggregate numbers likely would have dipped as millennials have largely abandoned Facebook for Instagram and Snapchat. Although the rendering engines and computer vision are rather mature, we’re still years away in terms of packaging all of this in a sleek glasses-like form factor.

Valuation 48

Valuation Technical Review Forecast Social Network 48

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 13, 2012

Others, like Def Jam, have been transformed through mergers and acquisitions. Sean Fanning developed Napster, one of the first aggregated and user-friendly peer-to-peer music file sharing platforms, when he was just a freshman at Boston’s Northeastern University.

Intellectual Property 118

Intellectual Property New York City Pennsylvania Cofounder 118

Agile VC

JUNE 24, 2013

I started jotting this down about a month ago but Google’s acquisition of Waze was a good prompt to finish off this post. With chips running large parts of cars came basic diagnostic tools like the “check engine” light to OBD ports. Also if driving wasn’t time-consuming or stressful (e.g.

Internet 153

Internet Caching Aggregator Audio 153

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 8, 2011

and partly because all they do is present data in the aggregate (a punishable criminal offence if there ever was one!). Search Engine Optimization is key. People type phrases into search engines – some of them write entire stories – and those phrases and stories account for an enormous amount of traffic to your site.

Customer 122

Customer Analytics Metrics SEO 122

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

By now we all know that the largest part of the online spend has been SEM (search engine marketing) where people buy CPC (cost per click) links to display alongside the “organic&# search results in the search engine. This no doubt led to the acquisition of AdMob by Google and Quattro by Apple.

Advertising 284

Advertising Las Vegas Affiliate RSS 284

Occam's Razor

OCTOBER 14, 2014

Any big changes in your marketing/customer acquisition strategy over the last time period (more money doing Search, less money in Email, elimination Facebook as it does not work, etc., … You can see the wisdom of not just setting a 20% aggregate conversion rate, based on the above benchmarking data. or Weightwatchers.co.uk

Analytics 133

Analytics Vertical Metrics Web 133

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. First of all, it means that most aggregate measures of success, like total revenue, are not very useful. So heres the question that I pose to you - our startup helps software companies develop a scalable revenue engine in the form of software-specific hardware devices.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Austin Startup

JULY 5, 2017

Once you can call a self-driving Uber/Lyft, the cost of transportation will fall ~75% (current driver take-rate), and probably 85–90% in the long run as cars are re-engineered to be designed as taxis first. Internal combustion engines have somewhere on the order of 10,000 moving parts. In other words, it’s building the factory.

Nevada 66

Nevada Global eCommerce Engineer 66

Occam's Razor

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Search engine visits: 27,534. All numbers in aggregate are at best marginally useful, and that rule applies to this one too. Never ever never never never create a custom report without three critical elements: Acquisition, Behavior, Outcomes. All of the above is still kind of at an aggregate level. Google visits: 26,548.

Analytics 136

Analytics Metrics Search Aggregator 136

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

In fact I've gone so far as to say: "All data in aggregate is crap." " That's certainly a bit melodramatic, but beyond the most bare bones "ahh, I see something is happening" you are unable to get anywhere with aggregate data.

Analytics 145

Analytics Green Metrics Web 145

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

I use a more restrictive definition: A growth team is a product tech team that’s focused on acquisition instead of core product features. It other words, it’s a team of designers and engineers. We had a designer, a front-end engineer, and a data scientist. Two engineers keeps the whole team moving without downtime.

Conversion 133

Conversion Technical Review Channel Engineer 133

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Here are some example metrics that are important at this overall level: CAC – total cost to acquire a customer (see previous blog post Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition to understand why this is so important.) We practice it religiously in the engineering team at HubSpot and the insights are always there, highly valuable.

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

There’s no need to over-engineer it: Groove started sending out a simple email that asks users to reply with why they cancelled. It also aggregates all the data from the survey so you can see which cancellation reasons are most common, and which cost you the most revenue. So you can see exactly when and why each customer cancels.

Retention 83

Retention Email Customer Aggregator 83

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 27, 2016

You then add up all the numbers and you have an aggregate score. Maybe you’re at a startup whose acquisition engine is fueled primarily by SEO. It also makes the scale smaller: you can only score things 1 or 2, depending on whether you believe the opportunity is “high” or “low.” You make decisions off that number. Image Source.

Framework 48

Framework SEO Analytics Aggregator 48

ConversionXL

AUGUST 19, 2020

It’s the same for search engine marketing. If your cost per acquisition from PPC is well inside your target range, why wouldn’t you invest more if there’s room to grow? Even if it’s not perfect, it allows for trend analysis and comparison to other time periods and acquisition channels. SEO has a role. PPC has a role.

PPC 69

PPC SEO Channel Analytics 69

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 1, 2013

Internet analytics can be roughly broken down into two simple activities – customer acquisition and customer optimization. Nearly every Internet company on the planet has invested in some form of the first activity, customer acquisition. Customer acquisition efforts are pervasive in our industry.

Metrics 93

Metrics Conversion Internet Acquisition 93

K9 Ventures

OCTOBER 10, 2017

Typically, Pre-Seed rounds are less than $1M in aggregate capital raised. 6M-$15M used to scale customer acquisition and revenue). Engineering Capital. It is what Seed used to be from 2009-2013, until the Seed rounds got fat and bloated and the bar for raising a Seed round became a lot higher. Q: Is Pre-Seed a Thing?

Seed Stage 82

Seed Stage Finance Later Stage Equity 82

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 9, 2016

We rarely hold people responsible for Traffic Acquisition accountable, we rarely hold people responsible for Site Design and Merchandizing accountable. Question time for your Acquisition, Design and Merchandizing team. The latter is particularly useful as an aggregated view for senior executives. A lousy 17%. See what I mean?

Analytics 60

Analytics Metrics eCommerce PPC 60

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

In aggregate trends can hide insights and hence "dirty" the data. million to help me with search engine optimization of my blog's URL stems was a genius investment! [QQ But if you are presenting in excel (or powerpoint) then consider annotating your data as you go along. 2: Segmentation to the rescue!

Analytics 68

Analytics Metrics Search Florida 68

Occam's Razor

APRIL 13, 2015

In that context, Real-Time reports are an impressive feat of engineering by the team at Google. You can simply click on either one of the two above and see the valuable-drilldown view… All the standard Acquisition, Behavior and Outcome metrics you are used to can be leveraged to identify valuable segments.

Analytics 60

Analytics Web eCommerce Metrics 60

Occam's Razor

MAY 20, 2013

Digital advertising and marketing is a key part of ZQI's multi-channel acquisition portfolio. As is common in these types of educational companies, aggregators rule the roost. How should you decide which one of these acquisition sources you should invest in more? The answer is simple: Aggregators. They do everything.

Analytics 139

Analytics Aggregator Channel B2B 139

ConversionXL

AUGUST 21, 2014

That’s why you need to be simultaneously feeding your growth engine , while monitoring churn and your other startup metrics. Using an aggregated set of over 15 billion actions analyzed by Mixpanel each month during August, September, and October 2013, they were able to establish new, industry specific benchmarks for retention.

Retention 106

Retention Churn Rate Metrics Software Review 106

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 12, 2013

And you are telling me that the Cost Per Acquisition for my display campaigns is not $201 but rather a lowly $155? One of my favorite exercises is to do the above analysis based on Cost Per Acquisition, rather than just conversions. You don't have to do attribution analysis for all your conversions in aggregate.

Channel 161

Channel Analytics Campaign Conversion 161

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

Oakland 326

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 326

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

If we can’t determine where the traffic comes from, we can neither attribute conversions to their original sources of traffic, nor can we find out the true cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS) for each marketing activity. Aggregate costs and results in a tool like Google Data Studio or BigQuery.

Analytics 118

Analytics Campaign Email Channel 118

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Some notable metrics are revenue growth rates, free cashflow, leverage ratios, historical financing amounts, returns on marketing spend, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value of customers, customer churn rates, and team social scores. ff Venture Capital hired two full-time engineers to build out Totem.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In an ecosystem, each participant acts according to its own imperatives, but these selfish actions have an aggregate effect. If you haven’t figured out the ecosystem, growth is useless – whether it is a acquisition-only viral loop, like Tagged, or an advertising blitz like countless dot-bombs.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

www.pakman.com

SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

” Users tend to aggregate around platforms and content they identify with (organized around demographics, topics like movies or restaurants, shopping, etc.) rather than aggregating on one common platform and hoping to wade through a morass of content to catch a piece that might be relevant to their own personal interests, etc.

Social Media 47

Social Media Vertical Advertising Distribution 47

Occam's Razor

MAY 18, 2010

I have said: All data in aggregate is "crap" Because it is. You can imagine then how absolutely heartbreaking it is for me to note that nearly all reporting that I see is data in aggregate. Tons of data "puking", all just aggregates. Acquisition. Segment Category #1: Acquisition. All visits.

Analytics 123

Analytics Web Acquisition Metrics 123

Occam's Razor

AUGUST 13, 2012

How can I e.g. determine the ROI of my mobile traffic acquisition, when people regularly convert on their laptops later… What would be the current best practice to move towards a proper cross-device attribution, while maintaining or improving on privacy standards at the same time?? That means: All of these metrics are off.

Analytics 124

Analytics Channel Metrics Web 124