Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 11, 2022

Every business needs revenue to provide investor returns and offset costs. Every entrepreneur needs to know and communicate the total costs associated with their solution or product, including cost of goods sold, customer acquisition costs, capital costs, operational expenses, and partner costs.

Business Model 334

Business Model Intellectual Property Angel Investor Channel 334

Up and Running

OCTOBER 7, 2019

A data-driven approach can help you make accurate and timely business decisions to meet market demands and improve cost-efficiency. Net Promoter Score (NPS): measures customer loyalty and satisfaction, which is essential for customer retention and referral marketing. “What gets measured gets done.” . Marketing KPIs. Sales KPIs.

Founder 71

Founder Retention Metrics Technical Review 71

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Sometimes that’s defensible distribution channels. 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.

Restful 202

Restful Founder Revenue Acquisition 202

Lightspeed Venture Partners

AUGUST 6, 2012

Recently, Eric Liaw sent us a very interesting May 2006 paper entitled “How to Project Customer Retention”, authored by marketing professors Peter Fader (Wharton) and Bruce Hardie (London Business School) and published in the Journal of Interactive Marketing in 2007. 3) Your innovative company achieves valuable unit economics.

Retention 133

Retention Customer eCommerce Distribution 133

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Learning could be about product features, customer needs, the right pricing and distribution channel, etc.) These hypotheses span the gamut from who’s the customer(s), to what’s the value proposition (product/service features), pricing, distribution channel, and demand creation (customer acquisition, activation, retention, etc.).

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 13, 2019

Every business needs revenue to provide investor returns and offset costs. Every entrepreneur needs to know and communicate the total costs associated with their solution or product, including cost of goods sold, customer acquisition costs, capital costs, operational expenses, and partner costs.

Intellectual Property 250

Intellectual Property Business Model Angel Investor Channel 250

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

In Netflix’s case this is their DVD distribution business. Equally, the streaming business has got to accelerate content acquisition, focus on customer retention, improve streaming technologies to make it better for users / worse for competitors, and they’ve got to continually improve the UI. No time soon.

Los Angeles 329

Los Angeles Revenue Retention Acquisition 329

Version One Ventures

DECEMBER 6, 2018

Focus on distribution and understanding your business. Next, figuring out distribution is generally the most important thing to solve between Series A and Series B. Retention rate: What percentage of users can you retain quarter over quarter? Between seed and Series A, a startup typically needs to focus on product-market fit.

Acquisition 150

Acquisition Distribution Metrics Retention 150

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 7, 2017

The CEO cut costs. That latter term is used to describe an initial offer that generates enough revenue to offset the cost of acquiring a customer. Marketing where you don’t have to is called a subsidy cost. It’s one of the biggest hidden costs for any business. That’s a rapid turnaround. Many factors contributed to it.

Bankruptcy 106

Bankruptcy Marketing Campaign Intellectual Property 106

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 2, 2023

A SaaS UX design that is intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable can significantly impact user satisfaction, retention, and overall success. Use load balancing: Load balancing is a technique for distributing traffic across multiple servers. Customer acquisition cost (CAC): CAC is the money a company spends to acquire a new customer.

Design 105

Design Product Churn Rate Architecture 105

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 8, 2009

In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models.

Metrics 225

Metrics Startup Retention Acquisition 225

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 9, 2017

Every business needs revenue to provide investor returns and offset costs. Every entrepreneur needs to know and communicate the total costs associated with their solution or product, including cost of goods sold, customer acquisition costs, capital costs, operational expenses, and partner costs.

Business Model 143

Business Model Intellectual Property Startup Angel Investor 143

Duct Tape Marketing

AUGUST 23, 2023

Lloyed explores the intricate art of harnessing the community’s strength as your ultimate acquisition channe l, brand differentiator, feedback source, retention lever, and catalyst for transformative change. It costs twice as much to generate the same results from the same marketing tactics. So that is the third thing.

Community 54

Community Kuwait Cofounder Bootstrapping 54

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

They work to improve top-of-funnel metrics like brand awareness and identify opportunities to improve customer activation, retention, and referral efforts. This is a broad goal, so you’ll need to uncover experiments that improve any metric influencing purchasing behavior and retention. a live stream with an influencer on social media).

Framework 102

Framework Marketing Acquisition Retention 102

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

If you hire 6 senior sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business 6 months. Is the revenue dependent on a concentrated set of distribution partners or platforms that put future revenue at risk? What did they actually do?

Stock Options 227

Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 16, 2011

Do you need the IPO for your acquisitions strategy? Of course, you’re going to have to perform well to make that stock useful in the acquisitions process. Do you need this for recruitment and retention? These can add millions to the cost of doing business. Then there is the formidable process of taking the company public.

IPO 223

IPO Social Media Media Exit Strategy 223

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 26, 2022

The vast majority of their customer acquisition is word of mouth. When you put those two things together, you get high-quality customers, high LTV, and acquisition at super low costs. And you know, a cost goes out with an acquisition, so whether it’s hiring a salesperson, commissions, or paying Google.

Partner 132

Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 7, 2009

SEO for Startups and Negative Customer Acquisition Costs ) and, of course, the product itself. In fact, if Ning cared about making a really powerful tool for distribution discussion, it would allow the discussion to range across all of the channels with each user controlling the flow of the messages.

Web 150

Web SMS HTML Distribution 150

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 15, 2016

The goals of these companies could be quite different depending on the desired quantity, quality, and cost of customers. Merritt Aho : “You tend to see this distributed model being used a lot in maybe SaaS companies, companies that have very large development teams. Identifying and optimizing the biggest acquisition expenses.

Conversion 48

Conversion Churn Rate Retention Metrics 48

Austin Startup

MARCH 26, 2019

25 questions that DTC entrepreneurs should ask themselves before scaling customer acquisition So you run a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand. You just spent a few thousand dollars on advertising and your paid customer acquisition cost (CAC) numbers tested well relative to your best guess for customer lifetime value (LTV).

Technical Review 49

Technical Review Software Review China Acquisition 49

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

#tearsofpain One way of removing silos and focusing on the entire business is to leverage Acquisition, Behavior and Outcome metrics. A small change I’ll make in this post is that when I recommend the metrics, I’ll follow the Outcomes | Behavior | Acquisition structure throughout this post. Hence that’s the macro-outcome.

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

ConversionXL

JUNE 16, 2022

This will improve customer lifetime value (CLTV), making customer acquisition costs (CAC) healthier. Each one leads with a benefit that starts with an action word: Generate leads with a free podcast; Monetize your podcast; Distribute your podcasts; Import your existing podcasts into Kajabi. Conclusion.

B2B 129

B2B Email Sales Acquisition 129

Transformify

AUGUST 1, 2022

The same is applicable to the minimum wage and the average market pay rate if you are planning on opening an office and hiring distributed workforce overseas. This can bring down operational or production costs permitting the companies to improve their profit margins. Allows you to offset the fluctuations in the existing local market.

Global 52

Global Merger Technical Review Singapore 52

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

The introductory stage is rarely profitable because of high distribution and promotion expenses but low sales. Use incentives to optimize customer retention and advocacy through gamification. While personalized content is based around customer satisfaction (i.e.

Product 102

Product Marketing Social Media Channel 102

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Because they have no presence in the market, they have to find distribution channels to bring in customers. They know how much it costs to bring in a customer and they know how much money they can expect to make on each one. Our cost to acquire a customer on AdWords was only a few cents. involved before we go into production.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

In some cases, this kind of debt can be incurred unknowingly, for example, your company might acquire a company that has accumulated significant technical debt that you don’t identify until after the acquisition. Each incremental menu item is not a big deal, and provides a lot of value downstream, but a slight incremental cost.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

This means users love it, that there’s lots of retention and engagement, even at small numbers. Peep Laja , ConversionXL : “I see growth hacking as traffic acquisition + conversion optimization.” Would they agree that growth hacking is essentially traffic acquisition plus CRO? They can be applied at every stage.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Venture Chronicles

DECEMBER 6, 2010

Owned are those sites and points of contact which are directly controlled by the brand and rely on distribution through Paid and Earned but also from viral. Influencing strategies also attempt to exploit brand loyalist behaviors for retention and promotion within the market.

Social Media 60

Social Media Media Viral Channel 60

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

They should understand the different states of the user (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue) and focus on moving users from one state to the next. In a nutshell: Acquisition - Get people to hear about your product from press, blogs and social channels. Distribution Hacks. like/+1/follow?

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

These elements of the business model– revenue (pricing, pricing strategy), distribution channel, How to Get/Keep/Grow customers, Key Activities, Resources and Costs – are other, critical parts your start up needs to understand and have in place. Retention and low attrition are good signs of customer validation.

Cofounder 429

Cofounder Seed Stage Valuation Metrics 429

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 28, 2017

As bad customer service is a massive long-term cost – and short-term pain –, it was decided that the company would undertake a serious re-training effort for all the customer service reps and with that problems would get solved faster. Too much emphasis was on Averages (remember averages suck, distributions are better ). Cost Per Lead.

Metrics 60

Metrics Analytics Acquisition Naming 60

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward. From left to right I wrote in boxes: talent discovery, content development, production, post-production, distribution, & marketing. I use tools to invoke my creative self. So I thought I would.

Technical Review 356

Technical Review Framework Audience Media 356

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

We’ve started to adjust our acquisition approach. And the departments have put out some very useful new guidance on how to approach software acquisition in a very different way than hardware acquisition. Rather just rewarding this rigorous, we only care about cost and schedule. And you have to incent that.

Technology 300

Technology China United States Government 300

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

They use different technologies of course, and different distribution mechanisms. The very first thing you'll see will be the distribution between desktop, mobile (smartphones) and tablets. The team at Google has done a great job of having the end-to-end view there across Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes. Thank you.

Analytics 141

Analytics Metrics Mobile DC 141

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JUNE 11, 2012

In 2009 I wrote a guest post at Industry Gamers about why social gaming is so attractive to investors , where I talked about the three key elements oin gaming: Development, Distribution and Discovery. But I think the framework of Development, Distribution and Discovery is still a useful lens to view the industry. Paid acquisition.

IP 113

IP Distribution Viral Mobile 113

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Product/Metrics (70%/30% time) * Get your product activation (sign-up + meaningful action) to 60% * then, Get your product retention to 20% weekly. Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost. Acquisition / Lifetime Value, etc. 9) Think big, HUGE!

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 11, 2015

Adobe’s recent acquisition of Comscore’s Digital Analytix business adds another product integration to their future roadmap. High Cost and barrier for entry means that a lot of people dismiss it without really understanding the true benefits of the tool. Great salemanship is to be expected at Adobe.

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Conversion 48