Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 10, 2014

Some analysts argue that revenue drives growth, while others say user growth drives revenue. Both have worked.Google reached $1 billion in revenue within five years of incorporation, and now has a market capitalization of over $400 billion. Long-term stability requires revenue growth and profit.

Revenue 246

Revenue Entrepreneur Valuation Viral 246

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

We spend a lot of time trying to get people focused on building products that have viral components and why that has to be measured and constantly tested. I have seen many teams pour tons of money, time and effort into PR strategies without thinking about how product tweaks could drive more consumption, more retention and more referrals.

Technical Review 384

Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

In my daily work with ecommerce brands, I see two types of companies: The first type focuses on acquisition and conversion. The second relies on retention. Overall acquisition costs for both B2C and B2B have gone up by 50% in the past five years. A retention analysis of coupon codes reveals a lot about your customers.

Retention 126

Retention Analytics Campaign eCommerce 126

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

Customer Acquisition. Measuring viral adoption is obviously important. Those two things together would lower your acquisition costs nearly in half to $6.11. Ironically, there are times where it may actually pay to INCREASE your customer acquisition costs. Retention / Churn. Revenue Metrics. lowering $1.50

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 26, 2016

Some analysts argue that revenue drives growth, while others say user growth drives revenue. Google reached $1B in revenue within five years of incorporation, and now has a market capitalization of over $400B. Long-term stability requires revenue growth and profit. Both have worked. Traditionally, it was simple.

Revenue 145

Revenue Valuation Startup Viral 145

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

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

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. A reliable paid acquisition channel results in a somewhat stable business. Sales” is not a dirty word. Fix that now.

Restful 202

Restful Founder Revenue Acquisition 202

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 23, 2013

Marketo filed for IPO with impressive 80% year-over-year growth in 2012, with almost $60m in revenue. of revenue, force-feeding sales pipelines with an unprofitable product. SaaS companies earn their revenue over time. Even with a great retention rate (e.g. of revenue, $0.30 Except, they lost $35m. for every $1.00

Business Model 335

Business Model .Net Revenue IPO 335

VC Cafe

JULY 15, 2021

According to Statista, revenue generated from apps (paid downloads and in-app advertising) will reach $935 billion by 2023, and that doesn’t doesn’t include the many trillions of dollars transacted via apps in the last decade alone (think Amazon, Uber, games, etc). Worldwide mobile app revenues in 2014 to 2023 (in billion U.S.

Mobile 190

Mobile Social Media Distribution PR 190

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. Great stuff.

Metrics 225

Metrics Startup Retention Acquisition 225

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

In SaaS the main benchmarks being measured are revenue growth, sales efficiency (unit economics), churn and burn rate. Example of Baremetrics revenue per user benchmarks. cohort retention curves that flatten (stickiness) actives/reg > 25% (validates TAM). Software as a Service (Saas) benchmarks. Consumer apps and services.

B2C 141

B2C Technical Review Startup Retention 141

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. Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. This is obvious. Marketing first. Product second.

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. Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. This is obvious. Marketing first. Product second.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

ConversionXL

JANUARY 8, 2018

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest levers that a business can use within their acquisition strategy as part of their Growth goals. You’re likely familiar with the different Growth frameworks like AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue). It all start with Acquisition.

SEO 134

SEO Metrics Analytics Search 134

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

View from Seed

AUGUST 30, 2016

Acquisitions are happening more and more, while companies like PillPack, Actifio, CarGurus, OnShape, Acquia, Applause, and others continue to march forward. In addition, look at Facebook’s revenue per user growth globally over the past few quarters. What customer retention strategies are working best for other florists?

Social Media 185

Social Media B2B North America Media 185

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2018

mobile is ~50% of revenue, shorter form works better. Tara Robertson – How to 10x Growth by Optimizing Customer Marketing & Retention. Retention is the most important thing – if that’s poor, nothing else matters. Retention is the most important thing – if that’s poor, nothing else matters.

Retention 106

Retention Artificial Inteligence Channel Email 106

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

Growth Hacking isn’t viral marketing (although viral marketing is part of it). and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. like/+1/follow?

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

Hippoland

OCTOBER 16, 2016

As a result, for these kinds of businesses, investors often don’t expect that companies can earn revenue right out of the gate, because they may not legally be able to. Do you have virality built into the product? These are products that can and should generate revenue right out of the gates in both B2B and consumer ideas.

Startup 48

Startup Vertical Early Stage Bootstrapping 48

The Startup Toolkit

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

Folks who know nothing about your business will evaluate it based on the default metrics: traffic & revenue. 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?

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. ” At least at Reforge, a lot of our revenue comes from company education budgets.

Founder 36

Founder Conversion Technical Review Cash Position 36

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

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

There are two reasons to raise money: You have a killer idea that is only partially validated, that you think can get to $50M+ of revenue in 5 years with 80%+ gross margins (if margins are lower, you need a lot more revenue)and you need money to get to product-market fit, or. Not all startups need outside investment to grow.

Cofounder 429

Cofounder Seed Stage Valuation Metrics 429

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In a previous post , I covered the three main drivers of growth: Paid, Sticky, and Viral. Let’s look at a viral growth company, like Facebook. If you are building a large, viral, ad-support consumer internet property, you just want to go big! They’re off to cross the chasm. As soon as possible!&#

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

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. In fact, mobile app revenue for 2016 is estimated at $58 billion. via Inbound.org).

Mobile 48

Mobile Retention Email Software Review 48

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

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)? You guessed it — straight up free money. Would they be loyal?

IPO 82

IPO Customer Matching Silicon Valley 82

ConversionXL

APRIL 6, 2016

Underlines improve clickthrough on Bing for both algorithmic results and ads (so more revenue) and improve time to successful click (better UX). Revenue is usually a good metric to use to evaluate effectiveness of test. Strategy & Testing: The a-ha moment is the tipping point for retention. Why retention matters?

Retention 48

Retention Algorithm Software Review Conversion 48