Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 11, 2021

Photo by Vanna Phon on Unsplash Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of many startups from e-commerce to gaming to marketplace companies, among others. But if you ask anyone in the ecosystem of customer acquisition?—?founders, and you’ll hear the same thing: customer acquisition (CAC) is getting harder and more expensive.

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Founder Product Cofounder Acquisition 424

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Today, every government agency, service branch, and combatant command is adopting innovation activities (hackathons, design thinking classes, innovation workshops, et al.) Urgency and risk-taking in a startup are integral parts of the culture, felt by 100 percent of early-stage employees.

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Government Artificial Inteligence Silicon Valley North Korea 308

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

As an early-stage VC I love this phase. How long does it take me to pay back my original customer acquisition costs? Many companies don’t reach the next phase either because their leadership doesn’t adapt as an organization or because they don’t design processes that lead to scaled outcomes.

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Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit.

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Acquisition Cost Customer Entrepreneur 103

VC Cafe

AUGUST 2, 2022

As an early stage investor in the world of gaming and metaverse technology at Remagine Ventures, I find these companies have the potential to set the agenda, become the potential platforms for developers building in this space and future acquirers/consolidators of startups building the next generation of the Internet. Also, their $1.6

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IP Cofounder Valuation Acquisition 206

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

” Sean is somebody widely respected in Silicon Valley (although he now lives in SoCal) for having helped many early-stage companies go through major growth periods by quantitatively testing features with audiences to help diagnose what led to growth. I endorse the growth hacking culture on teams.

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Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

Mucker Lab

MAY 28, 2020

These lost startups land higher valuations, have larger teams, outsource more product development and spend more money on customer acquisition than their peers. Until you have product-market fit, hire builders: engineers, designers, and growth and product people. How do you know you have it? Honestly, we don’t know.”?

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Startup Cofounder Burn Rate Technical Review 78

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

You might hire a really amazing designer, and perhaps even charge companies for their service for cost recovery purposes. However, the designer is a non-scaleable service; you’ll have to hire more people like her as your portfolio grows. . John Maeda, formerly Design Partner, KPCB; formerly President of Rhode Island School of Design.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Women Entrepreneurs Can

SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

Business funding can help entrepreneurs tackle some of the financial problems at an early stage. A buyer persona is a fictional or imaginary character that represents a business’s potential customers, based on what you know about customer’s behaviors, and customer acquisition.

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Social Media Marketing Analytics Web Development 97

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 20, 2019

Over the years, the Truss team has worked with several early-stage startups, and noticed a consistency in inter-series problems (regardless of the industry). Everett was head of Customer Acquisition and Community for Linden Lab. . At Women 2.0 That app, called Tetherpad, was the original DNA of Truss.

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Technical Cofounder Burn Rate Seed Stage Cofounder 113

ConversionXL

MARCH 31, 2021

For example, if organic traffic is a priority for you, include a statement like this: From an SEO perspective, our primary goal in the early stages of this content strategy is to focus on low-volume, high-buyer intent keywords and queries related to specific pain points. This sets the intention for your early-stage priorities.

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Audience Non-Compete Distribution Channel 127

JANUARY 9, 2014

I recently developed a more human framework for early-stage startups to define their startup DNA and lay some foundations for a sustainable business. This helps to add some constraints to the design process as everyone has a clear idea of what the product isn’t. By focusing on the ‘why?’

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Early Stage Startup Cofounder Design 102

NZ Entrepreneur

SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

The culture in a startup is also about moving fast, making informed guesses, learning when things go wrong (which they often will), and iterating and reiterating the design of the product or service until you get it right. Generating liquidity usually entails either selling the venture or an IPO.

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Technical Review Software Review New Zealand Due Diligence 88

NZ Entrepreneur

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

Founded in 2015, Niesh provides an app designed to meet the challenges of the modern university student, and now offers both a suite of services for brands to connect with the youth market and deals to make every student’s life easier. It’s not always the right approach,” said Yoo.

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SoCal CTO

MARCH 20, 2007

I also read - The Difference Between Apple and Microsoft Marketing that tells us: Apples marketing is designed for Time Poor buyers, while Microsofts is designed for Time Rich buyers. I would agree that Apples product design would suggest that it aims at Time Poor buyers. Early Stage Marketing and Branding – Farida Fotouh.

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Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

ConversionXL

APRIL 28, 2021

Now, this new layout wasn’t how we would have designed the site—but as the data showed us, small changes can have a big impact on how users interact with the product. For example, one of our users told us that she’d prefer a different design on the back of the cards. Our bounce rate, for example, dropped a whopping 48%, from 17% to 9%.

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ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 9, 2010

Jacqueline and her partner Cortney are designing and manufacturing the line out of China and selling in the U.S. Jacqueline asked an important question: how do you mitigate your working capital challenges in an e-commerce company at the very early stages without raising financing? Well, there are multiple nuances to the answer.

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View from Seed

DECEMBER 8, 2015

We have a bias towards very early stage investing for a bunch of reasons, but it’s not easy. It’s often a good idea for founders to find a way to build something and get some early market validation before raising outside capital. I think this stage, more than others, is very dependent on the individual investor.

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Product Startup Early Stage Seed Capital 120

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). You can sometimes attract capital from farther away but typically harder to do at early stage.

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Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Just for reference, Slidebean is a SaaS presentation software where users can add content, and a finished presentation is designed automatically. Nov-15: Graphic Designer (growth/product). Your customer acquisition cost and lifetime value are the two magical numbers you need to calculate for each one of your campaigns.

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Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

ConversionXL

JANUARY 18, 2022

Bellroy has designed a range of slimline wallets to solve this challenge. Use the following design-thinking process to craft stories for your brand while keeping your customers’ pain points and values in mind: Empathize (What is your audience feeling?); In the early stages: Use product marketing to execute the GTM strategy.

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Marketing Product Audience Equity 110

View from Seed

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

And the ultimate uncertainties for a seed stage company are around talent and customer demand. Although this seems obvious, you’d be surprised how many early stage companies immediately invest too much time and energy to build a product that doesn’t really prove anything.

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Seed Stage Bootstrapping Demand Early Stage 180

View from Seed

MARCH 3, 2015

EM: When you’re at an early stage, you don’t know what that buyer path looks like yet, so you should be trying all different strategies to get data and figure out the playbook. Some startups are in stealth mode and maybe branding and beautiful design is important. Where do you land on that spectrum?

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Marketing Sales Cycle Startup CTO Hire 120

VC Cafe

JULY 15, 2021

The reality for startups is that it’s not enough to build, design and ship a great looking app – marketing and distribution are critical to success. So while ads can be an effective way to grow, spending on user acquisition before figuring out monetisation is a sure way to shorten runway for early stage startups.

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Mobile Social Media Distribution PR 190

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. In this post I hope to help show how to figure out which metrics matter the most, and how to design them in such a way as to drive behavior that will lead to the results that you want.

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Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

Cracking the Code

JANUARY 14, 2014

It has been a while since my last blog post but with the new year comes new resolutions and a new design layout for Cracking-the-code. This is the most standard CAC ratio for early stage SaaS businesses. I think it depends on the stage of the company. Happy new year 2014! the lack of!

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Cost Acquisition Customer .Net 97

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. Personally, I think that customer acquisition, brand, reputation, etc.,

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

ReadWriteStart

SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

Then Kristen Becker presented Kir Devries , an e-commerce site that offers a well-edited collection of unique goods for practical everyday living that have been sourced due to their impeccable craftsmanship, unique design and style, and their "good factor" in the moderate price range.

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Cloud Silicon Valley Incubator Finance 115

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

What should an early-stage startup founder focus on if they want to implement PLG? But for early stage founders, I think there are two particular scenarios where PLG can be really helpful. What's the best way to do design? So for early-stage founders, those are the two scenarios where PLG might be a great fit.

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Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 12, 2013

One of his biggest accomplishments there was championing the acquisition of StubHub. ” After PayPal, StubHub is widely seen as eBay’s second most profitable acquisition. I made some reference calls. They were effusive. Especially from those that had worked with Greg over his many years at eBay. He was stubborn.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 5, 2012

If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, fishing for money is a waste of time for both of you. For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts.

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Investment Bankers Venture Capital Startup Initial Public Offering 241

YoungUpstarts

MAY 16, 2016

The good news is that there are also a ton of online resources that can help you get started and (hopefully) steer clear of common early-stage missteps. Pamela Webber is Chief Marketing Officer at 99designs where heads up the global marketing team responsible for driving customer acquisition and increasing lifetime value of customers.

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Entrepreneur Early Stage Social Network Acquisition 124

The Equity Kicker

OCTOBER 1, 2013

The most common arguments among ecommerce bears are that the sector is over-invested and that late-stage valuations do not map to public company comps and realistic acquisition values. Moreover, as an early stage investor the late stage valuation issues don’t directly effect us. Operational excellence.

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Silicon Valley eCommerce Deal Flow Valuation 92

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? Since were offering a complete solution, which involves the development of a new product, there is design, prototyping, etc.,

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2010

The importance of the conference is that it assembles most of the top privately held early-to-mid-stage technology companies in the country (and some globally) as well as most VC’s, growth equity funds and corporate development departments from large industry players looking at technology acquisitions. total funding $1.7

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IPO Venture Capital Private Placement Cofounder 242

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 13, 2010

If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, the courting is a waste of time for both of you. For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts.

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Investment Bankers Venture Capital Startup Initial Public Offering 231

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 1, 2012

Many more die that way than die because the product sucks or doesn’t have enough features or because they don’t have a staff designer. For example, the average cost of customer acquisition diminishes. You spend less on marketing/advertising/acquisition. Less time training customers.

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