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. But its not really viral growth, even when its exponential.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

ConversionXL

APRIL 4, 2017

SEM is great because you can capture people as they’re searching for a solution, which is often some of the highest intent traffic you can find. Virality and Referral. Virality is the key lever of many of the most famous growth examples: Dropbox, Uber, Facebook, Hotmail. If you sell shoes, would virality work for you?

Channel 118

Channel Marketing Viral SEO 118

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

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. Retention competition is how you get people to come back to your app. My advice: dont launch big.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Revenue is always my preferred measure, but you can use anything that is important to your business: retention, activation, viral invites, or even customer satisfaction in the form of something like net promoter score. If an optimization has an effect at the micro level that doesnt translate into the macro level - who cares? .

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68