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

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. A typical ad-based revenue stream on a media website is around $5 per 1000 eyeballs ($5m CPM and give or take $1-$20ish CPMs). This is obvious. Marketing first. Product second.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. A typical ad-based revenue stream on a media website is around $5 per 1000 eyeballs ($5m CPM and give or take $1-$20ish CPMs). This is obvious. Marketing first. Product second.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Spencer Fry

JUNE 29, 2011

Before knowing where or how to acquire new users for free, you need to understand where your best conversions are taking place. You may see a lot of signups by a certain type of user, but that cohort may bring in only half the revenue of another cohort that may provide fewer total signups. The Viral Strategy.

Philippines 77

Philippines Viral Bootstrapping Europe 77

crowdSPRING Blog

JULY 14, 2011

It has been very challenging bootstrapping this venture with my financial aid from grad school. I think the craziest story comes from a serious conversation I had recently, with my team, about me running on Wrigley Field in a panda suit to help QRazy Panda go viral. What are some industry specific challenges you faced?

Small Business 92

Small Business SMS Bootstrapping Viral 92

Software By Rob

NOVEMBER 15, 2011

I’ll admit up front: I’m not a fan of using freemium in a bootstrapped business. If you have funding then freemium is possible to pull off, but growing a company organically using its own revenue doesn’t work when you have an extremely low customer lifetime value (LTV).

Acquisition 56

Acquisition Customer Bootstrapping Viral 56

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

For this article, we asked 14 SaaS CEOs a simple question: “How much did you spend on your MVP before you had your first dollar of revenue?”. The MVP took around four months to build, during which time the company earned no revenue. They then spent the first year qualifying the product and testing out their revenue model.

Sweat Equity 78

Sweat Equity Software Review Vesting Cofounder 78

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

For this article, we asked 14 SaaS CEOs a simple question: “How much did you spend on your MVP before you had your first dollar of revenue?”. The MVP took around four months to build, during which time the company earned no revenue. They then spent the first year qualifying the product and testing out their revenue model.

Sweat Equity 50

Sweat Equity Software Review Vesting Cofounder 50

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2017

The best startups, of course, are those who help the world become a better place, but unless your revenue exceeds your expenses and your work results in profit, you are doing charity, not running a business. The average conversion rates of freemium into premium are as low as 1-2%. It could also work well with a viral app (e.g.

Startup 173

Startup Viral Silicon Valley B2C 173

Hippoland

FEBRUARY 12, 2018

At a high level, business is simple! :) You bring revenue in and your costs send money out the door. You want your revenue to be higher than your costs. I know nothing about viral marketing. So you might think about how to best poise yourself to bootstrap and get to profitability for the next couple of years.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage Business Model B2B Email 48

Hippoland

FEBRUARY 12, 2018

At a high level, business is simple! :) You bring revenue in and your costs send money out the door. You want your revenue to be higher than your costs. I know nothing about viral marketing. So you might think about how to best poise yourself to bootstrap and get to profitability for the next couple of years.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage Business Model B2B Email 48

Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

Where they don’t belong is with a bootstrapped founder trying to figure out how many customers she can expect to reach next month on her shoestring marketing budget. It then crunches those numbers together with an expected conversion rate and expected price to give you an idea of expected monthly revenue.

Marketing 64

Marketing Software Review Matching Bootstrapping 64

Duct Tape Marketing

DECEMBER 14, 2017

We’ve had over 20,000 people download that free tool that we built, and the key metric there is if somebody has used that free tool, their conversion rate on our paid product is three times higher than those who have not. It was a huge piece of the puzzle for us. That part of it was great. Fast forward a couple years.

Kansas City 40

Kansas City CTO Hire Las Vegas Software Developers 40

Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 29, 2019

A lot of investors were interested, but many required some tracks, some results, some revenue before they could invest. But for me at that time, and the way I was thinking about it is how am I going to be able to create traction, how am I going to be able to generate revenue if I don’t have this product. Abdo Riani: Exactly.

Community 55

Community Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Distribution 55