ReadWriteStart

JUNE 16, 2011

Freshdesk First, Girish Mathrubootham from Chennai, India, pitched Freshdesk , a SaaS company that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand customer support software that offers multi-channel social support. Freshdesk introduces itself as a kind of Salesforce.com for customer support so to speak.

India 123

India Bootstrapping Non-Compete Entrepreneur 123

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. But here’s where a truly great sales artist comes in.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Very simply, your cost to acquire a customer needs to be lower than the value of that customer (lifetime value). Sales cycles matter though.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Very simply, your cost to acquire a customer needs to be lower than the value of that customer (lifetime value). Sales cycles matter though.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 16, 2018

So unless your feature can increase that outcome – and not just incrementally by 20% but a serious differential like 10x – it’s unlikely that a current happy Mailchimp customer will want to switch to your product. Think about it – if you’re using MailChimp and make let’s say $100 in sales for every send.

Sales Cycle 54

Sales Cycle Differentiation Early Stage Bootstrapping 54

Hippoland

AUGUST 16, 2018

So unless your feature can increase that outcome – and not just incrementally by 20% but a serious differential like 10x – it’s unlikely that a current happy Mailchimp customer will want to switch to your product. Think about it – if you’re using MailChimp and make let’s say $100 in sales for every send.

Sales Cycle 48

Sales Cycle Differentiation Early Stage Bootstrapping 48

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

The big enterprise software companies almost all bootstrapped their way to profitability before they got their first external investors (typically via an IPO). In simple terms the customer's risk of doing nothing has to be higher than the risk of buying software from an unknown startup. Learn the rule of 3.

Software 127

Software Startup Architecture Bootstrapping 127