Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Entrepreneurs who plan to complete a business plan the first month, find an investor the second, and roll out a product the third month are just kidding themselves. Count on several months of effort and costly assistance to court investors, with less than a 10% success rate. The best partners are ones who share costs and risks.

Bootstrapping 276

Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Startup Burn Rate 276

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

Tossing their agile development process and at times their entire business model in the air, the company would go into fire-drill mode and engineering would start working on whatever his latest insight was. ” “A pivot is a substantive change to one or more of components to your business model.

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 28, 2013

Entrepreneurs who plan to complete a business plan the first month, find an investor the second, and roll out a product the third month are just kidding themselves. Count on several months of effort and costly assistance to court investors, with less than a 10% success rate. The best partners are ones who share costs and risks.

Startup 264

Startup Burn Rate Bootstrapping Valuation 264

Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 17, 2014

After all, a sustainable business model requires repeat customers! It is crucial for entrepreneurs to understand their costs of goods and services. This is the rate at which a company uses up its capital to finance overhead before generating positive cash flow from operations. Gross Margin.

Metrics 146

Metrics Burn Rate Entrepreneur Forecast 146

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 9, 2017

Here’s a checklist that will help you get started: Estimate Start-Up Costs. Depending on the type of business, this includes everything from legal, machinery, equipment, inventory, overhead, and domain name, to web services. Penalties for failing to register a business can be very costly. Estimate your monthly “burn rate.”

Burn Rate 100

Burn Rate B2C Finance Later Stage 100

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 7, 2015

How the solution and business model work to fund the business. Every customer understands that your solution has to generate more revenue than cost, but you should not put that data in a customer pitch. Investors will impatiently expect a winning business model, customer segment definitions and volume projections.

Product 120

Product Intellectual Property Liquidity Event Burn Rate 120

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 27, 2012

The approach I recommend is to build the investor presentation first, by iterating on the bullets with your team, and then fleshing out the points into a full-blown text-based business plan document. Explain in analogies your mother could understand, and quantify the “cost-of-pain” in dollars or time. Business model.

Elevator Pitch 247

Elevator Pitch Exit Strategy Burn Rate Merger 247

Gust

DECEMBER 7, 2014

Entrepreneurs who plan to complete a business plan the first month, find an investor the second, and roll out a product the third month are just kidding themselves. Count on several months of effort and costly assistance to court investors, with less than a 10% success rate. The best partners are ones who share costs and risks.

Bootstrapping 191

Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Startup Burn Rate 191

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 14, 2015

Even non-profits require money to operate, so every startup needs a business model with plans to bring in income. This means delegating tasks and not micro-managing, as well as more time spent working on the business, rather than in the business. Calculate and manage your financials.

Elevator Pitch 120

Elevator Pitch Burn Rate Startup Metrics 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 10, 2011

The approach I recommend is to build the investor presentation first, by iterating on the bullets with your team, and then fleshing out the points into a full-blown text-based business plan document. Explain in analogies your mother could understand, and quantify the “cost-of-pain” in dollars or time. Business model.

Elevator Pitch 234

Elevator Pitch Exit Strategy Burn Rate Merger 234

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 19, 2010

An alternative approach, which I prefer, is to build the investor presentation first, by iterating on the bullets with your team, and then fleshing out the points into a full-blown text-based business plan document. Explain in analogies your mother could understand, and quantify the “cost-of-pain” in dollars or time. Business model.

Elevator Pitch 235

Elevator Pitch Exit Strategy Burn Rate Merger 235

Gust

AUGUST 19, 2012

The approach I recommend is to build the investor presentation first, by iterating on the bullets with your team, and then fleshing out the points into a full-blown text-based business plan document. Explain in analogies your mother could understand, and quantify the “cost-of-pain” in dollars or time. Business model.

Elevator Pitch 146

Elevator Pitch Exit Strategy Burn Rate Merger 146

Early Growth Financial Services

MARCH 26, 2013

If you haven’t yet found a viable business model that will allow you to acquire customers at a lower cost than the lifetime value of that customer, you simply are not ready to scale. Your burn rate … Continue reading → But you can ready your company by focusing on your finances first.

Burn Rate 53

Burn Rate Startup Business Model Finance 53

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 9, 2012

Projecting the financials should be the last step of your business plan preparation, since it assumes you already know the opportunity size, customer buying habits, pricing, costs, and competition. Unless your volumes are in the millions or higher, the difference between manufacturing cost and customer price better be 50% or greater.

Forecast 238

Forecast Burn Rate .Net Business Model 238

Professor VC

JULY 31, 2008

However, the cost to the students ended up at over $140. This whole process got me thinking about the textbook business model. Labels: business models , Grateful Dead , textbook. It was kind of fun to add each case and see the price of the book adjust on the fly. Steve Bennet. at 7:05 PM. Email This BlogThis!

San Jose 28

San Jose Software Review Angel Investor Silicon Valley 28

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 15, 2013

Projecting the financials should be the last step of your business plan preparation, since it assumes you already know the opportunity size, customer buying habits, pricing, costs, and competition. Unless your volumes are in the millions or higher, the difference between manufacturing cost and customer price better be 50% or greater.

Forecast 238

Forecast Business Plan Burn Rate .Net 238

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 19, 2016

While you absolutely need to keep an eye on earnings and burn rate, human capital is ultimately the fuel that makes the machine run. He wants to hire “someone who is not afraid to go figure it out on her own, who has the capacity to discover what is needed and then present the business case for how to get that skill.”.

Startup 100

Startup Burn Rate Cofounder Salary 100

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 22, 2011

Projecting the financials should be the last step of your business plan preparation, since it assumes you already know the opportunity size, customer buying habits, pricing, costs, and competition. Unless your volumes are in the millions or higher, the difference between manufacturing cost and customer price better be 50% or greater.

Forecast 230

Forecast Burn Rate Startup .Net 230

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 15, 2020

I mean people out there don't realize the cost per click for advertising is going down. The customer acquisition costs are going down. ER : One of the things that Sam Altman said struck me was that during a boom the only thing that gets cheaper is cost of capital, everything else gets more expensive. People like your product."

Dallas 68

Dallas Employee Government Social Media 68

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

If you can’t find enough paying customers in the Customer Validation step, the model returns you to Customer Discovery to rediscover what you failed to hear or understand the first time through the loop.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 25, 2010

Projecting the financials should be the last step of your business plan preparation, since it assumes you already know the opportunity size, customer buying habits, pricing, costs, and competition. Unless your volumes are in the millions or higher, the difference between manufacturing cost and customer price better be 50% or greater.

Forecast 151

Forecast Startup Burn Rate .Net 151

Professor VC

FEBRUARY 18, 2011

It was going to be challenging to get scale with a model that charged on a per business card basis, a requirement given the amount of funding and cost for the crowdsourced labor. In this case, LinkedIn was the only logical one that came to mind and didn’t see a viable business model short of that result.

Acquisition 31

Acquisition San Jose Angel Investor IPO 31

abovethecrowd.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

As these late-stage private companies digest these large fund raises, they are pushing profitability further and further into the future, as well as the proof that their business model actually works. If you want to know if the business model truly hunts, you must pay careful attention. Consider the case of Fab.com.

IPO 40

IPO Liquidation Preference Valuation Technical Review 40

Up and Running

MAY 22, 2018

Every successful small business goes through four stages during its entire existence: Existence : expanding from pilot production to broad-scale production. Survival : generating enough cash flow to stay in business. Success : business model works and is stable, but there is still untapped potential. Create an MVP.

Exit Strategy 90

Exit Strategy Angel Investor Search Elevator Pitch 90

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

You have to know your business model. Most startups launch before theyve figured out what business theyre in. And even worse, wed cranked up the burn rate in order to be ready to handle all those millions of mainstream customers we anticipated. Slow progress, but has cost less than 150k aud so far.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

created a vastly higher cost structure; I had 80 people mostly on base salaries under $100,000 and was bringing in revenue at the rate of $20 million annually. Contributing to the high cost structure was the new culture of working 9-5 Monday through Friday. We had the wrong business model. Company : YouCastr.

Software Review 79

Software Review Startup Technical Review Vesting 79

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

Huge funding increases lead to massive wage inflation, rent inflation and thus higher burn rates. Just as with the late 90s there is no new “business model” that defies the laws of gravity. Companies are valued based on the expectation of future profits. A reversion to the mean should be expected.

Valuation 150

Valuation Down Round Startup Later Stage 150

Professor VC

OCTOBER 11, 2010

link] We are developing a software technology that works on the web using cloud computing to build software 100X faster and reduce bugs and cut costs. I'd be happy to send you our business plan, exec summary, and ppt. If I could have coffee with you sometime and talk either in San Jose or Palo Alto that would be great.

Social Network 28

Social Network Networking Software Review San Jose 28

VC Cafe

JULY 6, 2010

It also has synching services that usually cost money. VC Cafe: What is you business model? Our burn rate is very low and the technology is very scalable. Since we have APIs, we have opportunities for business models with media and content partners. It’s a hard job, and a big vision. Simple as that.

Media 84

Media Management API HTML 84