Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Thats because a marketing launch is a one-time event, and rarely translates into renewable audiences. Do your customers really read TechCrunch?

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

.&# But we also invalidated a hypothesis that customers wanted an avatar; we had to learn a whole new way of explaining the benefits of avatar-mediated communication because our audience didn’t know what that word meant. And therein lies the most common source of confusion about whether startups should listen to customers.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

But part was a recognition that we could gain substantial competitive advantage by leveraging a community of like-minded visionary customers to serve a wider (and more mainstream) audience than we could alone. In the meantime, I think we have a good explanation for what all those PR dollars are being spent trying to obscure.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

The higher the vanity ratio, the more effective the PR. It helps companies with PR. face an overwhelming incentive to say whatever it is that will sound good to their audience, regardless of whether it is true. And companies crave positive PR and control over their message – all for rational reasons.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Metrics PR 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much. The CAB, DC (aka the C3) and the APC fought hard to help you guys please the general audience, and at many times, the moderators as well, heck there were forum mods on the councils. Desperately.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

This time, I was lucky enough to have my friend Nivi from Venture Hacks in the audience, and he was recording. What happened when we got early press (circa 2004) in violation of our own no-PR rule. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Lean 74

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 74