Ben's Blog

JULY 20, 2011

When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of the quarter.

Hockey Stick 78

Hockey Stick Management Employee Retention 78

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. This wasn’t very impressive, but we had two things going for us: A hockey stick shaped growth curve. People often forget the most important part of the hockey stick: the long flat part. Diagnosis is easy: they are exceptionally gifted salesmen.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 31, 2010

Other examples include creating events, speaking at conferences, social networking, search engine optimization and publicity stunts. For startups targeting consumers, "investors want to see 'hockey stick' adoption rates which imply consistent or increasing growth rates on a percentage basis," says Davis.

Hockey Stick 130

Hockey Stick Startup Curation Vertical 130

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. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. So, the customer acquisition is easy, because this person doesn’t need to pay money.

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. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. So, the customer acquisition is easy, because this person doesn’t need to pay money.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Up and Running

AUGUST 21, 2014

If you’re in a really crowded area, let’s pretend one of you is selling flowers and competing in the online flower market, it’s going to be really hard to rank in search engines. All that money that you spend in pay-per-click is going to go into your customer acquisition cost. Those keywords are very, very expensive.

Metrics 84

Metrics Startup Churn Rate Forecast 84

Up and Running

MARCH 11, 2015

That moves into the customer acquisition strategy. This includes again another acronym I’m going to share, CAC, the cost to acquire a customer, the customer acquisition cost. It’s rare that investors will invest in a company that’s all engineers, or all creative. Are you doing an acquisition? Think about that.

Technical Review 60

Technical Review Software Review Due Diligence Exit Strategy 60

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

recommendation engines, chatbots, automated suggestions for collaboration). Invites went up 50%; 35% lift in referral acquisition. The reality is that it’s hockey stick growth—you have to spend tons of money before you see any results (and then the results are exponential). Recruited a lead engineer and a designer.

Artificial Inteligence 114

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114