Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 25, 2023

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention, and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing.

Valuation 235

Valuation Revenue Viral Retention 235

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 21, 2020

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention, and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing.

Revenue 434

Revenue Valuation Viral Retention 434

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

Customer Acquisition. Measuring viral adoption is obviously important. The next step after measuring the customers you’re adding is to add the “cost to acquire” by channel. In the early phases if you can’t acquire customers cost effectively enough you’ll need to diagnose why and how to fix it. How many through SEM?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

ConversionXL

APRIL 4, 2017

Paid Acquisition. You’re undoubtedly familiar with paid acquisition, as it’s the digital equivalent of traditional advertising. Here are some resources to learn more about paid acquisition: Customer Acquisition Master Course (includes SEO). When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups?

Channel 118

Channel Marketing Viral SEO 118

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

In other words, you prove retention. With both growth and retention, you earn the right to build more. Every additional sales channel costs resources and increases scope. Social platforms use intentional virality; this occurs when users get a more fulfilling experience as more of their friends join the same platform.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

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. You’re not allocating enough costs to gross margin or the cost to acquire a customer. Priority depends on your goals (e.g.

Restful 202

Restful Founder Revenue Acquisition 202

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. You need to begin to “instrument” your customer acquisition process with analytics.

Cofounder 429

Cofounder Seed Stage Valuation Metrics 429

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 23, 2013

I know the argument: The pay-back period on sales, marketing, and up-start costs is long, but there’s a profitable result at the end of the tunnel. The mindset works like this: It costs a lot of money to land an enterprise customer. So these costs are amortized over the customers you do land. for every $1.00 Just wait!

Business Model 335

Business Model .Net Revenue IPO 335

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

” April, 2012 – Andrew Chen writes Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing , which goes viral (2.4K This means users love it, that there’s lots of retention and engagement, even at small numbers. Now, people begin defining growth hacking as a process, a systematic approach, a “viral loop”, etc.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

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 Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. This is essentially a version of the viral loop.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In a previous post , I covered the three main drivers of growth: Paid, Sticky, and Viral. A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer).

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 10, 2014

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing.

Revenue 246

Revenue Entrepreneur Valuation Viral 246

ConversionXL

APRIL 6, 2016

Example: “Do you know what a good night’s sleep costs you? Strategy & Testing: The a-ha moment is the tipping point for retention. Fix churn before acquisition – it will flatline growth. The a-ha moment is the tipping point for retention. Day 3 – Analytics, Personalization and Retention.

Retention 48

Retention Algorithm Software Review Conversion 48

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 26, 2016

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention, and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing.

Revenue 145

Revenue Valuation Startup Viral 145

David Teten

MAY 1, 2013

It will dramatically lower your marketing costs in the long run. My recommendation is to start your company with a free or very low-cost domain name, with a strong preference for dot-com. If it is impossible to acquire your desired domain name early on, we recommend registering a similar name (e.g.

Naming 114

Naming Semantic Venture Capital Startup 114

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). Ads can also be cost-per-click or cost-per-action ads.

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). Ads can also be cost-per-click or cost-per-action ads.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

abovethecrowd.com

JUNE 2, 2021

Paypal famously offered customers $5 to invite a friend, who would then also get $5 as part of a highly successful viral marketing campaign (they actually started at $20, and then reduced it to $10 and then ended at $5). Would that help retention and NPS (Net Promote Score)? With the 7% banker fee that is a 35% AVERAGE cost of capital.

IPO 82

IPO Customer Matching Silicon Valley 82

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JUNE 11, 2012

Development costs have gone up since 2009, as has production quality and game quality. Many of the circa 2009 social games were more focused on growth than retention, and in many cases more focused on “satisfaction” than fun. Paid acquisition. This has changed dramatically.

IP 113

IP Distribution Viral Mobile 113

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. Why do cable & satellite companies force us to take content “bundles&# that cost more than we want and have content we don’t watch. I use tools to invoke my creative self. If so, why?

Technical Review 356

Technical Review Framework Audience Media 356

andrewchenblog.com

JANUARY 28, 2010

To become profitable using a freemium business model, this simple equation must hold true: Lifetime value > Cost per acquisition + Cost of service (paying & free) Said in plain english, the lifetime value of your paying customers needs to be greater than the cost it took to acquire them, plus, the cost servicing all users (free or paying).

CPA 51

CPA Retention Viral Acquisition 51

ConversionXL

MARCH 15, 2016

And only a little over 25% of SaaS companies with less than 10K users spend money on user acquisition. It means that user retention becomes even more important. If users are not onboarded properly, the chances of retention are minimal. The same report found that less than 7% of SaaS companies achieve 10K users… ever.

Mobile 48

Mobile Retention Email Software Review 48

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

YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2019

Research in this field has identified many issues such as the viral nature of information, the unique realities of detecting bias or outright “fake news” in the digital world, cyberbullying, and other features of emergent digital life that are pivotal for the well-being of young people but also for the health of our societies as a whole.

China 113

China Global Framework Singapore 113

Venture Chronicles

DECEMBER 6, 2010

Social Media Monitoring evolved out of the explosion of non-traditional media channels developed in the last decade combined with the increased velocity of information flow as a consequence of viral information sharing. 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

Hippoland

OCTOBER 16, 2016

High infrastructure companies Traditionally, software investors have loved being in the software industry because the capital costs are low and also because you can get something into the market quickly. Do you have virality built into the product? You don’t see a lot of “self-taught” folks in this category. I mean REALLY HARD.

Startup 48

Startup Vertical Early Stage Bootstrapping 48

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

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. Products can find sources of validation with impressive stats along a number of dimensions, such as high engagement, viral coefficient, or long-term retention. involved before we go into production.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

The Startup Toolkit

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

It’s harder for people (including your own team) to intuit the implications of your retention rate. The lean startup book’s engines of growth is a great starting point for picking good metrics: Growing virally? Focus on retention. Focus on cost of acquisition versus lifetime value. Focus on referral.

Metrics 46

Metrics Retention Viral .Net 46

Ben's Blog

MAY 15, 2020

And if step one or two of the growth model start hitting a lot of friction, then of course it’s just going to get harder and harder, because each group of users is going to produce fewer and fewer users from an acquisition standpoint. Same thing for engagement, as well. Brian : There’s a couple things about this, though.

Founder 36

Founder Conversion Technical Review Cash Position 36