Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 7, 2015

Here are the motivation elements that investors expect to hear: Size and growth potential of the market opportunity. Your customers don’t care if you are targeting a billion-dollar market and growing at double-digit rates, but investors will skip small or shrinking opportunities. First to market” is not sustainable by a startup.

Product 120

Product Intellectual Property Liquidity Event Burn Rate 120

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. Define metrics to keep on track for the journey.

Elevator Pitch 120

Elevator Pitch Burn Rate Startup Metrics 120

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

One question that keeps coming up when speaking with early stage entrepreneurs when it comes to funding, is what metrics the company needs to hit to raise seed/series A/B etc: What’s a good conversion rate? Is my churn rate below the category average? Benchmarks are typically specific to stage/business model/geo.

B2C 141

B2C Technical Review Startup Retention 141

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 2011

Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model. Yet boards of large companies exist to monitor efficient strategy and execution of a known business model. What do those numbers/metrics look like?

Silicon Valley 117

Silicon Valley Balance Sheet Metrics Early Stage 117

Professor VC

FEBRUARY 26, 2008

Challenge the Status Quo - StubHub entered an industry dominated by a couple of large players who had a vested interest to block the legality of their business of providing a marketplace for the sale of tickets in the secondary market. He definitely had a lot of people tell him that it couldnt be done. Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?

Technical Review 28

Technical Review San Jose Angel Investor Silicon Valley 28

Professor VC

AUGUST 26, 2011

What are the key drivers and metrics? Is the model consistent with the business plan? Does the business model make sense? Do you understand the business and market? Byron Deeter has a good blog post on SAAS metrics. How should you include market comps? How do you think? ► July. (1).

Silicon Valley 35

Silicon Valley San Jose Hockey Stick Venture Capital 35

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. This is the usual reason given for a marketing launch, but for most early stage startups, its a failure. You have to know your business model.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Up and Running

MAY 22, 2018

The ideas that I am talking about here are game-changing, have vast potential and addressable market, and can create a buzz in the industry—if and when they see the light of the day. Every successful small business goes through four stages during its entire existence: Existence : expanding from pilot production to broad-scale production.

Exit Strategy 90

Exit Strategy Angel Investor Search Elevator Pitch 90

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 11, 2018

By saturating one market or sub-market at a time, we started building the best marketing channel there is: word of mouth (WOM). Typically, marketing dollars are spent in two ways: on awareness building (letting people know your product exists) and conversion (getting them to buy it).

Los Angeles 133

Los Angeles Investment Bankers Cofounder Viral 133