A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

But some decisions should not be made in haste, like a key executive hire , or how to price , or whether to raise money, or whether to invest millions of dollars in a new product line. At WP Engine we’re extremely collaborative across teams. Huge effort. Some things take less time to implement than to estimate or to debate.

Engineer 264

Engineer Framework Social Media Acquisition 264

Eric Friedman

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Why Shipping Is Important When Building Shipping defines software engineering in a magical way that is challenging to understand. It’s evident in the rise of companies like WhatsApp and Instagram that employed a mere 20+ people before their acquisition. Each is a demonstration of the critical role that shipping plays in building.

Engineer 78

Engineer United States Software Engineering Bootstrapping 78

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 20, 2019

For example, we worked with a company and observed that each release required eleven engineers. Series B: Hiring and Developing Managers. All startups find themselves struggle with hiring to meet growing demand, leaving most startups scrambling to onboard hires. Avoiding churn is also key in monitoring burn rate.

Technical Cofounder 113

Technical Cofounder Burn Rate Seed Stage Cofounder 113

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much as ten, you will probably not be able to use any kind of formula. For example, suppose you're just two founders and you want to hire an additional hacker who's so good you feel he'll increase the average outcome of the whole company by 20%. Manager or Junior Engineer 0.2 – 0.33

Early Stage 391

Early Stage Equity CTO Hire Sweat Equity 391

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 8, 2021

They want to snowball their customer acquisition, attracting thousands of new people to the brand, and reach diverse new audiences in new locations. You can hire more salespeople and practice social selling. . Growth is all about customer acquisition – the process of attracting new people to the brand. . Memorability.

Startup 127

Startup Retention Acquisition Agile 127

VC Cafe

AUGUST 2, 2022

On the infrastructure side, Epic owns ‘Unreal Engine’ the second most popular 3D graphic engine, and creator of MetaHumans, a digital twin rendering software that can be used to create hyper realistic characters to ‘populate’ the Metaverse. The largest and most popular 3D engine has big plans for the Metaverse.

IP 206

IP Cofounder Valuation Acquisition 206

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.

Acquisition 103

Acquisition Cost Customer Entrepreneur 103

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

Hire Strategically. Strategic hiring will be crucial for business growth in this and the upcoming year, especially for smaller businesses that might not be able to provide the benefits that larger businesses can. Research has shown that companies lost on average $14,900 on every bad hire. Partner Up with Micro-Influencers.

Social Media 128

Social Media Leadership Audience Video 128

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 26, 2016

Perhaps the most misused terms I see these days from entrepreneurs involve CAC (customer acquisition costs) and LTV (life time value) and a lack of understanding these critical components is driving many companies to premature failure. CAC is often measured incorrectly and doesn’t often doesn’t capture the true costs of acquisition.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

View from Seed

JUNE 5, 2018

Last week, we hosted our very first portfolio-only Hiring Bootcamp in NYC, led by NextView’s talent advisor Kristen Caldwell. The quest for building such hiring machine is universal across companies at various stages. Tracking your recruiting process provides you insights around the two most important aspects of hiring: Conversion.

Hiring 120

Hiring Portfolio Metrics B2C 120

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Finding the right engineer, UX designer or marketer can make all the difference for your start-up. This hiring challenge has pushed several startups to get creative and take an innovative approach to recruiting. This hiring challenge has pushed several startups to get creative and take an innovative approach to recruiting.

Canada 67

Canada Acquisition Vertical Hiring 67

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. Hire the wrong people. Bad hiring decisions are often a symptom of premature scaling. Bad hiring decisions are often a symptom of premature scaling.

Startup 78

Startup Cofounder Burn Rate Technical Review 78

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. In 2010 it got worse with an Act in parliament about the Monitoring of Foreigners’ Corporate Acquisitions. Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the fabulous logistics!) Lessons Learned.

Finland 324

Finland Naming Russia Government 324

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 11, 2018

After a couple of weeks, I had written to 500 people, talked to at least 20, and made a hire, after failing to do so for months. The other day, I was in a board meeting and we were talking about the need for a software engineer. The team already had a lead on board.

Software Engineering 106

Software Engineering Software Developers Software Development Software 106

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

and the subsequent acquisition sprees of companies like Google, Yahoo!, The COGS (costs of goods sold) tells me about how big your customer acquisition costs will be. How many people will you hire in the first 24 months and in which sequence. Don’t know the running rate for engineers? portfolios.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth. Dan McKinley will show the math he used to test new ideas as an engineer during the early days at Etsy. He’ll bring us real-world advice.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2020

Our families — and the families of the employees we eventually hire—come first. That doesn’t mean you need to be a software developer or an engineer — though that can be a big advantage, depending on your industry — but you must be comfortable with technology in general. Ask These 7 Questions appeared first on Young Upstarts.

Entrepreneur 205

Entrepreneur Venture Capital Silicon Valley Bandwidth 205

ConversionXL

JULY 3, 2020

Search engines are vital for discoverability. Google’s Public Search Liaison Danny Sullivan has openly pushed back against those who want subscription-only content flagged in search results: Our automated systems try to present the best information in relation to a search topic, as people expect us to do as a search engine. Metering.

SEO 122

SEO HTML Technical Review Caching 122

Up and Running

JUNE 12, 2019

Hiring the right team for digital marketing. Let’s imagine that you hire a marketer to help generate more leads, but you veer too niche by hiring a social media specialist. Let’s imagine that you hire a marketer to help generate more leads, but you veer too niche by hiring a social media specialist.

Marketing 109

Marketing Social Media SEO Entrepreneur 109

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 7, 2018

SMBs no longer have to choose between hiring an in-house data science team or off the shelf enterprise analytics software. Predictive analytics help determine the most effective markets for adspend, suggesting areas where the product is being well-received and those where the cost of customer acquisition is unreasonably high.

Artificial Inteligence 164

Artificial Inteligence Analytics SCRUM Cofounder 164

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

Just ask Blue Apron, which has found itself in the news recently for its poor stock market performance and its widely criticized acquisition-focused growth strategy — not to mention CEO Brad Dickerson’s unwillingness to release its retention numbers. Blue Apron is hardly alone with its churn problem.

Customer 173

Customer Technical Review Retention Acquisition 173

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

At times I wanted the engineering team to produce features to support our sales efforts to I occasionally leaned on them a bit. Beyond that he (and thus engineering) could simply tell me, “No.” Here is where I see this really play out: Product Management. I did this. ” Those were the rules.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

ConversionXL

APRIL 13, 2017

Call it whatever you like, but when businesses are hiring for any of those titles they simply want somebody who can generate lots of quality leads for as little cash as possible.”. A growth team, however, is largely overlapped with product, engineering, and design as well. When you’re starting a growth team, who do you hire first?

Analytics 99

Analytics Engineer SEO Channel 99

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

Exactly three months after its $48 Million funding announcement, Smooth-Stone today detailed its company momentum, including significant new executive hires, new office space and renaming the company. The new name, Calxeda , pronounced “Cal-zeh-dah,” is a derivative of the Latin for “Smooth-Stone.” Naval Nuclear Power Program.

Naming 59

Naming Hiring Technical Review Virginia 59

View from Seed

MARCH 19, 2015

Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” Starting in 2009, Savoia began using an approach as an engineering director at Google that helped the tech giant know whether it was about to build the right product for the market … or a product that would flop. Why doesn’t everyone do this?”

Product 120

Product Technical Review Marketing Lean 120

Women Entrepreneurs Can

SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

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. But after figuring out the budget and scale of the business, owners might need to consider the option of hiring professional web developers.

Social Media 97

Social Media Marketing Analytics Web Development 97

Hunter Walker

MAY 13, 2023

per engineer.” Especially in the early days of mobile/iOS engineering, if you hired strong technical talent into your early stage company, you basically created an acquisition outcome floor. Those who do, often believe they can hire from the open market without the hassle of an acquisition.

Early Stage 117

Early Stage Cap Table Acquisition Sales 117

ConversionXL

APRIL 4, 2017

Paid Acquisition. You’re undoubtedly familiar with paid acquisition, as it’s the digital equivalent of traditional advertising. This is generally split into two areas, though they’re often used together to some varying proportion: Search Engine Marketing. When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups?

Channel 118

Channel Marketing Viral SEO 118

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 20, 2018

According to ProfitWell , customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased by over 55% in the last 5 years: At the same time, customer willingness to pay for features has dropped by 30% during that same period: So, on one hand, we have rising costs; on the other, we have a lower willingness to pay. customer acquisition process and channels).

Marketing 289

Marketing Sales Cycle Acquisition Sales 289

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 26, 2010

Our team includes 12 top-notch engineers from NVidia, Microsoft, Stanford, Berkeley and Cornell. On top of that throw in a bunch of web servers and SQL databases, cross-platform 3D graphics code and a highly scalable physics engine and you get the idea. We are also one of the stickiest sites on the internet.

San Francisco 92

San Francisco CTO Hire Developer EC2 92

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

He came to the United States in 2001 to study Software Engineering at Auburn University. By 2005 I had moved back to the US and we started hiring US employees (The first two employees we hired had both grown up in India! They wanted to employ our entire team post acquisition. Felipe grew up in Brazil. Irony, hey?).

Technical Review 282

Technical Review Canada Green South Carolina 282

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 19, 2010

First is that there are, perhaps, a thousand people in the world of entrepreneurship who know what they are doing when it comes to dealing with issues like financing, positioning, market sizing, customer validation, customer acquisition and other seemingly obvious topics that all entrepreneurs need to deal with.

Silicon Valley 114

Silicon Valley Technical Review Startup Early Stage 114

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. They will draw from their expert perspective and are capable of applying a broader spectrum of experience across many technologies as they help you plan your engineering process and culture.

Fractional CTO 54

Fractional CTO CTO Hire CTO Technical Review 54

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

This is why we actually have one of the lowest # of investments/partner among all institutional seed funds, and have invested in developing a platform of resources to support founders around team building, product, customers acquisition, and capital planning. Belief #3: Outlier Companies Can Be Built Anywhere.

North America 120

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 120

Austin Startup

AUGUST 13, 2018

Learn how acquisitions can usher in new eras of growth and hiring, how to nurture existing cultures, how to merge different ways of thinking when the acquiring company doesn’t have tech roots, and how to deploy strategies for future success. You don’t need rockstar engineers. You need a rockstar engineering organization.

Austin 48

Austin Technical Review Cofounder Texas 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

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. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 18, 2012

The startup will then look outwards in the region to expand into, either organically or via a partnership, joint venture or acquisition. Yes, most startups’ directions change but prior to spending your first dollar or make your first hire you do need to know where you are now and what path you are going to take. Consumer Facing B2C.

Singapore 178

Singapore Technical Cofounder Product Marketing 178