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. time to earn back the revenue to cover all your customer acquisition expenses) 75% annual retention.

Business Model 335

Business Model .Net Revenue IPO 335

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 12, 2010

In retrospect we say that Google transformed how people find information, and further, how advertising works on the Internet. billion market cap), mid-sized (NetBotz with millions in revenue and funding), and small (sub-$1m operations like us). Their technology proved superior, but "a better search engine" was hardly a new idea.

Technical Review 243

Technical Review Software Review Engineer Search 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 13, 2015

and 5%” or “cost to acquire a customer between $50 and $500″ or “average monthly revenue per customer between $20 and $200.” So they’ll need 1666 customers to achieve their revenue target. (We So already our estimation is showing that standard advertising might not be a plausible strategy.

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 18, 2016

What if Facebook can make $20b/yr in advertising, but since the teens and social media elite have left, it will never make $200b/yr? Nevermind that Microsoft created more cash profit in 2015 than Facebook made in revenue. What if OpenTable is the perfect reservation system but nothing else?

API 120

API Social Media Revenue Advertising 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 21, 2017

Revenue multiples, profit multiples, premium over the previous financing — these are metrics used by sellers to help determine a minimum acceptable price. Even for startups, it takes years for a new product to become good enough to demand many millions of dollars in revenue.). Yet mobile advertising revenues were paltry.

Balance Sheet 242

Balance Sheet Vertical Acquisition Revenue 242

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 1, 2012

Sacha demonstrated the benefits of selling many copies of an eBook at a low price, while Jarrod pointed out the advantages of higher prices, bringing in more revenue with 1/6th the number of units sold. In that case, A can’t keep growing forever, so its revenue is limited, which is a bad spot. maximizing per-unit profitability).

Customer 320

Customer Revenue Acquisition Cofounder 320

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 19, 2010

Time to learn: "Cash-Basis" accounting means you only count revenue and expenses that you actually have. Accural-Basis" accounting means you count pledged revenue and expenses. Revenue-versus-expenses is important for every business at every stage of its life; no duh. Never heard of either of these?

Revenue 232

Revenue Startup Forecast Finance 232

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 3, 2011

If we know a typical customer pays us $50/mo and stays with us for 30 months, that’s $1500 in “lifetime” revenue. Or: How many customers do we need to produce $10m in revenue? High LTVs are nice because it means the business has good cash flow, and means we can spend more on things like marketing and advertising.

Metrics 273

Metrics Startup Revenue Engineer 273

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 4, 2013

…yes, except every advisor and blogger directs you to A/B tests and landing page experiments and advertising alternatives and failing fast where “failing” means 3% fewer people clicked X than clicked Y, because when it comes to pricing your “philosophy” doesn’t mean s**t if rearranging the tiers and using unholy language (..)

Marketing 259

Marketing Early Stage Lean Metrics 259

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

I'm a great example of someone who wasn't an authority on anything , but built that authority over time to the point where now my company (Smart Bear) is untouchable as the leader in both revenue and ideas in the area of peer code review. But how does authority convert to revenue?

Software Review 325

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Those tools do not integrate as seamlessly with e-mail as advertised. We would rather chase revenue. It’s frustrating to be constantly confronted by this idea that we have to be chasing funding options instead of chasing revenue. Of course you should chase revenue. We’ve tried it. Jason: Oh, good.

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 11, 2010

In the last interview Peldi Guilizzoni (Balsamiq Studios) gave detailed advice about how he earned almost a million dollars in revenue in his first year of operation. Is traditional marketing and advertising completely dead, or is there still room for it in a startup? They're rarely actionable or insightful. Podcast: Startup Success.

Entrepreneur 225

Entrepreneur Social Media Software Web 225

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

All you’ve proven is that you can make $200 a month in revenue off of some basic websites. If you did that, now you’ve got something like one or $2,000 a month of revenue, proving that this is interesting. Jason: In revenue. I realize it seems all kind of nebulous right now. Jason: Here’s what it seems like.

API 220

API Software Review Hosting Technical Review 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 1, 2010

Your advertisements become pointed, powerful, pithy, and other words starting with "p." See, we don't line our pockets with that revenue, we spend it making you maximally effective. Hanging your hat on just one advantage that you can own completely is stronger than diluting your message across many advantages.

Open Source 239

Open Source Dilution Software Developers Software Development 239

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

Like this: Used to be, Twitter let you post anything, even advertisements, even if you didn't identify those tweets as ads. popped up as liaisons between advertisers and popular Twitter-ers. Specifically, an advertiser might be willing to pay $3 to have someone with 10,000 followers tweet about how great their widget is, as in this Ad.ly

Marketing 229

Marketing SEO Ruby Widget 229

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

How do you split revenue? And then the final thing is just getting the revenue up. Jason: A lot of things are solved with revenue. Is there a repeatable advertising channel that’s going to get you people? . “Gee, I’ve invested all this time. I’ve invested all this money.” ” Jason: So?

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Totally automate all that so it doesn’t bring me down all the time and instead I can sign all the revenue, because that’s fun. Like the ability to spend X dollars on advertising and gain Y dollars in revenue or something like that. Patrick: How close did he get? Ryan: 50%, sort of. Patrick: All right.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 14, 2013

You don’t have a huge budget, but you can plough some of your winnings back into advertising. These aren’t hypotheticals — I talked to no fewer than four startups in the past few months (mostly at SxSW) in exactly this position, with these advertising channels, with about the same costs.

Affiliate 282

Affiliate Marketing Channel Campaign 282

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 16, 2013

Which means it costs 20-100x as much on marketing campaigns to achieve the equivalent revenue. This essentially takes paid-advertising and almost all other forms of marketing off the table for driving growth in a freemium business, unless you’re willing to take big losses to get things rolling.

Marketing 318

Marketing Viral Campaign Business Model 318

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 6, 2013

The cost to earn a dollar of MRR What does it cost a SaaS company to add $1 of new monthly recurring revenue? MRR ( M onthly R ecurring R evenue) is the revenue you get every month from a customer, averaged across all customers. Thus, MRR = R / N, where R is your total revenue, and N is your total number of customers.

Metrics 270

Metrics Business Model .Net Revenue 270