Software By Rob

JANUARY 25, 2012

That I’ve had a few “exits” and instead of hunkering down and writing code for 6 months I opted to talk to a few of my buddies at the yacht club and purchase a primed and growing social network for somewhere in the mid-seven figures. But within 24 hours we were off and running, discussing a potential acquisition.

Acquisition 63

Acquisition Software Review Fresno Algorithm 63

venturedig.com

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

The business models within the social media realm are much different than traditional businesses. In social networking, they’re ever-changing, backed by eye-opening revenue and have very little documentation. The two major forms of this are CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per action or acquisition).

Social Network 55

Social Network Business Model Networking CPA 55

View from Seed

AUGUST 30, 2016

This is a guest post by Alignable CMO Dan Slagen about the missed opportunity the company has identified in social networking, and why they’ve chosen to build the business on the East Coast. What’s the ARPU of a business on a social network? Next-Gen Networking. 2029 Stierlin Court. 1 Hacker Way.

Social Media 185

Social Media B2B North America Media 185

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. How many adds came through organic SEO? How many through SEM?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

mashable.com

JULY 18, 2012

The search giant’s VP of Corporate Development, along with CEO Larry Page, signs off on the dozens of acquisitions and acqui-hires made every year, large and small. There’s YouTube , of course — well established in its own right, it rewrote the book on how an acquisition can be run delicately, as a company within a company.

San Francisco 104

San Francisco Acquisition Social Media Mobile 104

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 18, 2012

This trend is particularly true in markets that are highly susceptible to network effects, such as online auctions and social networks. Even beyond auctions and social networks, the web tends to prefer the category leader. This is true in most SaaS categories, including enterprise applications.

IP 163

IP Technical Review B2C Social Network 163

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). link] leehower. It was a pretty good valuation for the time. A lot has changed.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

The Next Web

AUGUST 19, 2013

Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC is how much money you can spend to get someone to become a customer. You can be the sales guy or gal with all the tools you need at your fingertips ­ email, phone, social networks, etc. Well, then you’ve got to go viral. Well, then you’ve got to go viral. Product virality is an art.

Belarus 137

Belarus Viral Channel Startup 137

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. Overall acquisition costs for both B2C and B2B have gone up by 50% in the past five years. Cohort analysis can be done for revenue, churn, viral word of mouth, support costs, or any other metric you care about.

Retention 126

Retention Analytics Campaign eCommerce 126

YoungUpstarts

JULY 4, 2019

In today’s digital world, negative feedback can quickly go viral, leading to potential disaster for even the biggest brands. Many prefer to voice their concerns publicly via social networks. Before long the brand had gone viral, for all the wrong reasons. Respected brands can make use of new opportunities.

Reputation 168

Reputation Management Australia Boston 168

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

The movie, “The Social Network” might have had more of an impact on creating future entrepreneurs than any other event of the past 5 years. The numbers of potential buyers had decreased dramatically both because large companies were shedding jobs and because many past buyers simply lacked resources to make acquisitions.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

crowdSPRING Blog

OCTOBER 14, 2010

Acquisitions: Pulling Back the Covers – [link]. What Startups Can Learn From Watching “The Social Network” – [link]. What is holding back social media investment? Social media critics keep getting it wrong – [link]. Future M Start-Up Marketing Boot Camp Recap – [link]. – [link].

Social Media 90

Social Media Small Business Design Media 90

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

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 26, 2022

TikTok has evolved from a platform known for viral dance moves to a place of rapid product discovery. In this article, you’ll learn how to gain traction on TikTok to grow awareness, traffic, and acquisition. In this article, you’ll learn how to gain traction on TikTok to grow awareness, traffic, and acquisition.

Sales 115

Sales Customer Viral Marketing 115

Version One Ventures

JULY 27, 2015

When a new user/member is added to the network, it increases the value of the product or service to all other users. This increased value can be in the form of cost reduction (in user acquisition as an example), higher liquidity (in a marketplace), stronger community or deeper relationships (in social networks), etc.

Networking 60

Networking Community Viral Social Network 60

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Your customer acquisition cost and lifetime value are the two magical numbers you need to calculate for each one of your campaigns. Cost of Acquisition (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a user through a given channel. Using this approach, we’ve been able to identify a number of profitable customer acquisition channels for Slidebean.

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Tech IPOs were a receding memory, and mergers and acquisitions became the only path to liquidity for startups. This next wave of web startups; Social Networks and Mobile Applications, now reached 100’s of millions of customers. Startup exits in the next three years will include IPO’s as well as acquisitions.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Sophia Perl of Wisdom

AUGUST 27, 2011

A notable site is FaceSmash which sold for $30k the week the movie Social Network came out. Even Perez Hilton blogged about Flippa because of its relationship to FaceSmash and Social Network. Since this was in other countries, their customer acquisition costs were much cheaper than the US.

EC2 53

EC2 Social Network Distribution Demand 53

The Next Web

JANUARY 26, 2014

Rely on cheaper forms of marketing : Blogging, email, viral tactics etc. Back when Facebook was still just for schools, some schools already had their own social networks. Instead of trying to market directly to students at those schools (“but we already have a social network!”) So what do startups do?

Thailand 167

Thailand Social Network PPC Singapore 167

ConversionXL

JANUARY 18, 2022

Every social network has its own content specifications (e.g., Encourage sharing by tapping into network effects. Viral marketing is hard to replicate. Use this when ideating blog post topics and creative campaigns to create a message that resonates. Create awareness campaigns that work to the strengths of each platform.

Audience 122

Audience Technical Review Social Media Campaign 122

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2011

Twitter’s significance stems from the fact that it is a real time, open, asymmetric, social, viral referral network that is often location aware and provides both explicit and implicit interests and preferences. They know this because Twitter is social, open & asymmetric. Twitter is inherently viral.

Viral 307

Viral Las Vegas Tunisia Syndicate 307

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 13, 2011

Mercata was Groupon in the late 90’s before consumers were so comfortable with spending money online and social networking enabled inexpensive viral customer acquisition. Sometimes, technology changes and old ideas that were before their time can be successful.

Viral 110

Viral Social Network Startup Early Stage 110

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

Increased investment in Facebook as an engagement/acquisition channel has translated into requests from CEOs, CMOs and other CxOs about the return on that investment. Virality is also really interesting (again, actual human interaction), people who "create a story from your post" (share etc). Time to dive deeper.

Metrics 165

Metrics Advertising Marketing Social Media 165

BeyondVC

OCTOBER 6, 2006

I must admit that I have seen way too many social networking related plays that want to be the next MySpace of some niche market. In addition, who wants to sign up for multiple social networking platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and niche sites for politics, sports, etc.

Social Network 60

Social Network New Jersey Database Wiki 60

View from Seed

MARCH 8, 2016

If you’re building a product that can grow virally—a social network, for example—brand is almost certainly less important at launch than product. It adds value when it comes to customer acquisition, yes, but there are also a number of intangible benefits: hiring, partnerships, and even a higher valuation.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Conversion Startup PR 120

VC Cafe

JULY 25, 2017

“Take a moment think who would actually miss you if you deactivate all your social networking accounts, whatsapp, BBM etc”?—? Now bigger than social media, messaging apps are on practically every phone, and only growing in engagement. If you think about it, Messaging apps are the most viral. Anamika Mishra. In summary.

Social Network 74

Social Network Russia Mobile Japan 74

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

Leverage Existing Platforms or Third Party Products - you want to test your social network, grab Drupal and whip something together, or even just use a hosted service. Investors my tell you that, but what they can look at your product on paper and tell what it does and they will understand if it can be built.

Technical Cofounder 338

Technical Cofounder Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO 338

ConversionXL

JULY 7, 2020

And yet, Pinterest is the third-most popular social network, with over 322 million monthly active users, nearly 50% of whom are in the United States. The added benefit is that Pins are 100x more “viral” than tweets , so you continue to gain traffic months after someone pins your content. . Pinterest, for most, does not.

Marketing 114

Marketing Viral Campaign Search 114

betashop.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

It has been awesome, flattering, and humbling to see that post went viral and has been seen by so many thousands of people — mainly aspiring entrepreneurs — and has been translated into many languages. Before there was Fab there was fabulis, a social network meets places guide targeted to the gay community.

Technical Review 108

Technical Review Technology Software Review Valuation 108

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Boardex and Relationship Science make it easier to understand and map social networks into potential limited partners. The self-assessment methodology, pioneered by Village Capital, is called VIRAL, for “Venture Investment Readiness and Awareness Levels.” . This is a great example of why data businesses have substantial moats.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Genuine VC

APRIL 30, 2008

Now the new plan for distribution is facilitation through low-cost viral strategies via Facebook and other social media. In fact, Facebook literally published a playbook just over a week ago on marketing virally through their platform. But it goes beyond just widgets and social networks.

Distribution 103

Distribution Widget Viral Social Media 103

Genuine VC

APRIL 30, 2008

Now the new plan for distribution is facilitation through low-cost viral strategies via Facebook and other social media. In fact, Facebook literally published a playbook just over a week ago on marketing virally through their platform. But it goes beyond just widgets and social networks.

Distribution 100

Distribution Widget Viral Social Media 100

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. In its most pure form social media monitoring is both listening and responding to social channels.

Social Media 60

Social Media Media Viral Channel 60

Rob Go

JULY 11, 2013

As a vertical community, the business of GrabCAD was never going to look like that of a social network or social media company. Some products have what look like great viral loops, but aren’t very successful. Typically, I tend to notice two approaches to delivering product-oriented distribution wins.

Distribution 66

Distribution Vertical Viral B2B 66

Software By Rob

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

A better approach would be to create a few videos (about your site’s mission, a separate video telling each vendor’s story, etc…) and post them to YouTube, Facebook, and other viral video sites. Also, go with the social network route and start a Facebook group to get people involved.

Design 51

Design Software Review Marketing Software Developers 51

Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

You either luck out that your idea goes viral (which happens to maybe 1 out of 10,000 startups?) Facebook is a great example here – undisputed leader in social networking, but losing money and quite tiny in the financial scheme of things. #5 In these cases, the market doesn’t matter because luck trumps everything.

Marketing 50

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Startup 50

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. I think its helpful to think about two kinds of competition for distribution: acquisition competition and retention competition. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. So what can you do? Its like knowing the future.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68