Remove Acquisition Remove Cofounder Remove Continuous Deployment Remove Customer Development
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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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Paul Graham on fundraising

Startup Lessons Learned

Its to everyones advantage to let the world think the founders thought of everything. I say this as a founder: the contribution of founders is always overestimated. The danger here is that new founders, looking at existing founders, will think that theyre supermen that one couldnt possibly equal oneself.

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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Get product into customers’ hands. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167
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Not crossing the chasm

Startup Lessons Learned

In a subscription business, maybe your attrition starts matching your acquisition, balancing like magic. In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value.

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What is a startup?

Startup Lessons Learned

To see proof of this, simply observe the results of the large majorities of corporate acquisitions of startups. To see proof of this, simply observe the results of the large majorities of corporate acquisitions of startups. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ▼ June (3) What is a startup?

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Lessons Learned: The App Store after the gold rush

Startup Lessons Learned

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. I think its helpful to think about two kinds of competition for distribution: acquisition competition and retention competition. Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers. So what can you do? Then, if your retention is good enough, you can stay there.

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Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer 156