Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers? And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” They’re putting money into web services/business – most without early revenue. End of theory.&#

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

ReadWriteStart

JULY 18, 2011

The conversation at investment banks was 'why don't we have one of those?'. Every company has a forecast for how it will get to an arbitrary $100 million in revenue and they all hit it on year five. An investment banker sees it as a serial kill, conquest, get the fee and move on. Think about when LinkedIn went public.

Investment Bankers 153

Investment Bankers Technical Review Cofounder Due Diligence 153

A Crowded Space

AUGUST 20, 2011

One observation that I made recently is the discovery of the most incorrectly forecasted number. It’s not revenue, traffic, conversion rates or anything like that. The typical meeting goes through the plan and compares to actual and we all review where the company is ahead or behind plan. It’s headcount.

Forecast 60

Forecast Hiring Revenue Acquisition 60

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 30, 2018

As such, it often makes sense to start with an understanding of customer acquisition will work in a case. Why customer acquisition? Another reason is that focusing on customer acquisition will help you, and your investors, have a better understanding of what activities generate interest and ultimately drive conversion.

Entrepreneur 100

Entrepreneur Early Stage Acquisition Forecast 100

Up and Running

JULY 31, 2014

Don’t set a sales goal or a sales forecast with a hundred line items in there. You’ve got a three year forecast with your goals, monthly for the first 12 months, and then yearly for the next two years. Same month, last year, the full last year, look at your history because that will help inform your goal setting and you forecasting.

Software Review 74

Software Review Sales Acquisition Small Business 74

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

Online social networking is a concept still being evangelized even in Silicon Valley… Friendster is in private beta (wasn’t until Oct 2003 they received Google acquisition offer which they turned down for Kleiner/Benchmark round). Not long after the product launch we began the initial conversations with VCs for a Series A round.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

Tim Keane

JUNE 21, 2011

How to prepare a sales forecast for a business plan.  If the conversation goes in that direction it can be a bit of a problem.   Think about having the same discussion in a different way - by preparing your sales forecast by making your assumptions explicit. How to prepare a sales forecast for a business plan.

Forecast 68

Forecast Business Plan Sales Wisconsin 68

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

What’s more compelling than big talk is to show exactly how you will reach those millions—what information about your company do you have that’s made you forecast those kinds of sales ? percent average conversion rate. 160 is average revenue per user (ARPU). is our customer acquisition cost (CAC). Show your darn product!

Sweat Equity 122

Sweat Equity Churn Rate Elevator Pitch Forecast 122

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 14, 2020

by Andrew Sobel, author of “ It Starts With Clients: Your 100-Day Plan to Build Lifelong Relationships and Revenue “ You’re great at what you do. These should be very brief and conversational. Have a conversation and use a whiteboard or flipchart if appropriate. It causes tunnel vision.

Sales 147

Sales Conversion Forecast Framework 147

Up and Running

MAY 3, 2012

The signs to me are all too obvious from our conversations. They need to have a better understanding of the process rather than myopically focus on building something without any clear sense of the market size, the likely demand or their costs of customer acquisition.

Entrepreneur 82

Entrepreneur Technical Review Silicon Valley Lean 82

ConversionXL

MAY 14, 2014

Here’s something that won’t come as a shock to people who work for big companies: not everyone is on-board with the idea of conversion optimization and testing. You’re actively doing conversion testing. Iztok said, “We ensured the CEO that conversion optimization would increase sales.

Conversion 124

Conversion eCommerce Technical Review Software Review 124

Steve Blank

APRIL 1, 2020

Your revenue plans are no longer valid. What’s your monthly cash burn at your new low revenue level? Forecasted recovery date. Sales pipeline/forecast. The CEO should dial through as many of the largest existing customers to get a firsthand understanding of the magnitude of any revenue shortfall. Unemployment %.

South Korea 334

South Korea Salary Business Model China 334

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

Forecasting is sometimes done by dragging the mouse based on many assumptions, because it’s hard to predict the future. One question that keeps coming up when speaking with early stage entrepreneurs when it comes to funding, is what metrics the company needs to hit to raise seed/series A/B etc: What’s a good conversion rate?

B2C 141

B2C Technical Review Startup Retention 141

gigaom.com

JULY 10, 2012

Lingo licenses Watson’s core speech technology for its language servers (though that relationship will likely end after the Nuance acquisition closes), and Research in Motion’s QNX is working with Watson’s API to develop a conceptual connected car assistant. Join the conversation. Image courtesy Flickr user Lazurite.

API 50

API Technical Review Artificial Inteligence RSS 50

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

The company has just missed its quarterly revenue forecast. Lets take an example, and look at how they might do this: They will be able to tell you that revenue is composed of deals. To compute revenue, you multiply average deal size by number of deals. Good board members want to know two things: Why that happened?

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

Up and Running

JANUARY 24, 2014

What’s more compelling than big talk is to show exactly how you will reach those millions—what information about your company do you have that’s made you forecast those kinds of sales? 0.22% average conversion rate. 160 is average revenue per user (ARPU). is our customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Sweat Equity 138

Sweat Equity Churn Rate Forecast Business Model 138

ConversionXL

JUNE 11, 2018

Case in point: Forrester’s first marketing automation forecast predicts that spend on automation technology will grow from $11.4 Developing a cohesive strategy: think about opportunities before, during, and after conversion. 2 Turning captivation into a conversion. billion USD to $25.1 Especially in this new era of GDPR.

Developer 133

Developer Marketing Software Review Technical Review 133

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 2, 2020

This arrangement made it challenging to give a quick answer to basic questions on user conversions or to comment on traffic rates and MRR. Instead of measuring Awareness, Appeal, and Ask separately, we combined all marketing acquisition efforts under the Awareness stage, leaving Act to account for conversions in the form of sign-ups.

Churn Rate 78

Churn Rate Analytics Retention SQL 78

ConversionXL

JANUARY 8, 2018

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest levers that a business can use within their acquisition strategy as part of their Growth goals. You’re likely familiar with the different Growth frameworks like AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue). It all start with Acquisition.

SEO 134

SEO Metrics Analytics Search 134

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 3, 2011

Then Greg Snead, also from Tacoma, discussed Orbiter , an RFID venture that is moving along quite nicely, having clocked more than $700,000 in revenue last year. Orbiter expects to give its investors a 15 times return on investment based on their current pipeline and revenue forecast. Happy Grasshopper. Social Pulse.

San Jose 115

San Jose Entrepreneur United States Washington 115

Up and Running

AUGUST 21, 2014

What a lot of companies or startups don’t realize is when you put up forecast together, it’s difficult if you’re a startup. What a lot of companies or startups don’t realize is when you put up forecast together, it’s difficult if you’re a startup. Those things are all really hard to just get.

Metrics 84

Metrics Startup Churn Rate Forecast 84

Women Entrepreneurs Can

AUGUST 30, 2020

Generally, companies use artificial intelligence to cut costs or increase revenue. Because financial institutions are not able to invest that money, fraud also indirectly results in lost revenue. Thanks to the power of conversational AI, chatbots can guide customers and respond to their queries with natural language—immediately.

Artificial Inteligence 59

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Retention Aggregator 59

Occam's Razor

JANUARY 12, 2015

For eCommerce site X, Conversion Rate might be a KPI because their current objectives are tied to reversing key business trends. You can use the segmentation selector framework that outlines three broad buckets: Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes. A KPI is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.

Analytics 60

Analytics Metrics Web Leadership 60

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 14, 2017

Your revenues are declining or you don’t have any revenue at all! Revenues don’t appear overnight; even the greatest success stories had to work hard to start getting traction and growth. Yet if revenues start to decline, or after a few months customers are still leaving you for other solutions, then you may have an issue.

Technical Review 157

Technical Review Architecture Revenue Channel 157

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 30, 2019

Now try to think of the last time you experimented with something other than your acquisition strategy. Article after article, course after course, conference talk after conference talk addresses acquisition experimentation—getting more conversions at the top of the funnel. Every tip is acquisition-centric. Acquisition.

Retention 101

Retention Metrics Churn Rate Acquisition 101

Tim Keane

JUNE 13, 2006

In other words, if you are forecasting 100 orders in the next quarter, at $10,000 each, I’d ask how many potential orders there are in the market, whether there is any existing competitive experience, and how you derived your timing. In our first startup, my partners and I built a customer acquisition model and tested it.

Wisconsin 60

Wisconsin Entrepreneur Startup Angel Investor 60

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 30, 2019

Now try to think of the last time you experimented with something other than your acquisition strategy. Article after article, course after course, conference talk after conference talk addresses acquisition experimentation—getting more conversions at the top of the funnel. Every tip is acquisition-centric. Acquisition.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Churn Rate Acquisition 48

The Next Web

MAY 26, 2013

Unless you already have a stellar reputation, having a basic prototype and showing early success — user growth, engagement, retention or revenue — is critical to winning investor interest. Provide customer acquisition costs. Let the investor see the assumptions you’ve built into your financial forecast.

Software 151

Software Forecast Startup Exit Strategy 151

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

More detail on those techniques, and three more, are in this blog post: Multichannel Analytics: Tracking Offline Conversions. And if you came back again, in less than 29 mins on the keyword "Avinash is not awesome" and saw ten pages and converted then that kw will show zero visit, 10 pages and one conversion.

Analytics 94

Analytics Web Non-Compete Metrics 94

Occam's Razor

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

It's as if they have never seen a report with Visits & Conversions before. At the very minimum your notepad should contain answers to these two questions: What is the macro-conversion? What are two or three micro-conversions? Step #2: How good is the acquisition strategy? See how it looks. Traffic Sources Report.

Web 139

Web Analytics eCommerce Campaign 139

Up and Running

JULY 28, 2016

See Also: A Complete Guide to Forecasting Sales for Your Monthly Subscription (SaaS) Business. The makers of a help desk software by the same name, their blog focuses on their journey to $500,000 in monthly revenue. The third season varies slightly, looking at one startup per episode. Communities and networking. Growthhackers.

Startup 60

Startup Analytics Metrics Community 60

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 2, 2018

It’s the kind of environment where people may think that concepts like business forecasting or change management are all well and good, but really the province of big businesses – not more fledgling organizations. It happens because they often neglect the forecasting and planning that helps them prepare.

Cofounder 0

Cofounder Partner Forecast Founder 0

Ben's Blog

MAY 24, 2021

Small” IPOs — companies with less than $50m in annual revenue at the time of IPO – have declined from more than 50% of all IPOs in the 1980-2000 timeframe to about 25% of IPOs from 2001-2016; Companies are staying private much longer — the median time to IPO from founding hovered around 6.5 Performance has been more un-even.

SEC 36

SEC Accredited Investor IPO Technical Review 36

Up and Running

DECEMBER 9, 2014

What I did is I learned the art of a pro forma and the value of a pro forma which basically is a forecast. Two, revenue. If you don’t know what your cash flow forecast is, you don’t really understand your capital needs. You heard a little bit from others about that. What do you do? One, profit and loss statement.

Small Business 95

Small Business Finance Forecast Metrics 95

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

Add to that 400 old and new faces, plenty of conversations, live music, and more than a few beers. When setting up interviews , call them “chats,” not interviews—and treat them like chats; anticipate where the conversation could go and listen, listen, listen. What a rush—24 speakers over three days at a picturesque resort.

Artificial Inteligence 114

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114