Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 29, 2011

You can’t succeed in business without an operational model that delivers value to customers at a reasonable price, with an underlying cost that allows you to make a profit. I support her assertion that a business model consists of at least the first seven of the following ten basic elements: Value proposition.

Business Model 246

Business Model Distribution Viral Green 246

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 3, 2016

I certainly agree that starting a business is fraught with risk, and none of us get it all right the first time. It’s important to learn from your own mistakes, but it’s even smarter to learn from someone else’s mistakes, without paying their high price in time lost, cost, and pain. Assume passion level defines business opportunity.

Intellectual Property 120

Intellectual Property Startup Angel Investor Viral 120

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 1, 2015

I certainly agree that starting a business is fraught with risk, and none of us get it all right the first time. It’s important to learn from your own mistakes, but it’s even smarter to learn from someone else’s mistakes, without paying their high price in time lost, cost, and pain. Assume passion level defines business opportunity.

Intellectual Property 120

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Viral Distribution 120

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Most technical entrepreneurs focus hard on building an innovative product, but forget that an elegant solution doesn’t automatically translate into a successful business. Businesses require an equally elegant business model, with the right price, messaging and delivery channel to the right target customers to keep the dream alive and growing.

Technical Review 220

Technical Review Advisory Board Software Review Business Model 220

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 30, 2021

Most technical entrepreneurs focus hard on building an innovative product, but forget that an elegant solution doesn’t automatically translate into a successful business. Businesses require an equally elegant business model, with the right price, messaging and delivery channel to the right target customers to keep the dream alive and growing.

Technical Review 399

Technical Review Product Advisory Board Business Model 399

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Eric Ries in Times Square For any model to be useful it has to predict what happens in the real world – including the web. I realized the Customer Development model needs to be clearer in what exactly a startup is supposed to do, regardless of the business model. “What is the “Business Model” of your startup?&#

Customer Development 223

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 223

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Where Airbnb recognized the value in another platform, Dropbox doubled down on the strength of its product as a distribution channel. Neither would have achieved virality had customers not received something tangible for their efforts. The result? An increase in listings from 50,000 to 500,000. via CXL’s Growth Marketing Minidegree ].

Retention 113

Retention Marketing Acquisition Channel 113

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

There was no viral social networking products back then like Twitter where people could easily discover your content. Consumer approach to software for business users. Distributed version control model – first in the industry like ours and we are filing patents. Page 4: Business Model. Free product.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Term Sheet San Diego Viral 274

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 7, 2015

Most technical entrepreneurs focus hard on building an innovative product, but forget that an elegant solution doesn’t automatically translate into a successful business. Businesses require an equally elegant business model, with the right price, messaging and delivery channel to the right target customers to keep the dream alive and growing.

Business Model 120

Business Model Technical Review Advisory Board Software Review 120

Genuine VC

APRIL 30, 2008

After the crash at the end of the last decade, web startups clamped down to focus on their core value proposition and were forced out of necessity for survival to hone their revenue models. The old playbook six years ago was that the web distribution could be bought for a price with Google Adwords.

Distribution 103

Distribution Widget Viral Social Media 103

Genuine VC

APRIL 30, 2008

After the crash at the end of the last decade, web startups clamped down to focus on their core value proposition and were forced out of necessity for survival to hone their revenue models. The old playbook six years ago was that the web distribution could be bought for a price with Google Adwords.

Distribution 100

Distribution Widget Viral Social Media 100

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Startups that are searching for a business model need to keep score differently than large companies that are executing a known business model. Yet most entrepreneurs and their VC’s make startups use financial models and spreadsheets that actually hinder their success. Managing the Business. Here’s why.

Balance Sheet 300

Balance Sheet Startup Burn Rate Metrics 300

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 1, 2013

Driven by the recent recession, smart entrepreneurs of all ages are jumping into the fray with new ideas, new recovery strategies, and discarding outmoded business models. It''s far less expensive to nail down repeat business from your existing customers than it is to land new ones. Examine every cost center in your business.

Startup 247

Startup Viral Revenue Distribution 247

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 4, 2012

Driven by the recent recession, smart entrepreneurs of all ages are jumping into the fray with new ideas, new recovery strategies, and discarding outmoded business models. It's far less expensive to nail down repeat business from your existing customers than it is to land new ones. Examine every cost center in your business.

Entrepreneur 234

Entrepreneur Viral Revenue Distribution 234

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 8, 2009

In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models.

Metrics 225

Metrics Startup Retention Acquisition 225

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. It''s a good measurement because it captures both satisfaction and virality. We often tell founders that a business plan is nonsense. It''s that the business model is complex.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 19, 2019

Finally, and importantly, society is better off because Amazon makes the system for distributing books (and other products) vastly more productive, freeing up resources for other value-creating investments. And, as the industrial revolution showed us, there are some real costs to scale.

Cofounder 28

Cofounder Business Model IPO Non-Compete 28

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The goal was to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share – because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits. For a specific startup this list is probably a few hundred names.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 2, 2010

Driven by the recent recession, smart entrepreneurs of all ages are jumping into the fray with new ideas, new recovery strategies, and discarding outmoded business models. As I mentioned in a previous article , it's far less expensive to nail down repeat business from your existing customers than it is to land new ones.

Startup 127

Startup Viral Revenue Distribution 127

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

There has never been a viral outbreak of such magnitude before. Additionally, “a startup is usually a company designed to effectively develop and validate a scalable business model. The good news is that, in the digital world, brand development does not have to cost an insane amount of money.

Bootstrapping 85

Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

Duct Tape Marketing

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

What do you see as the challenges to that business model for most people that attempt to do it? And when I tell people about it, cause it's not actually the offer that I promote the most, I promote my other two businesses. And when I present it to them in terms of a cost analysis, [00:05:00] in terms of what you would.

Channel 66

Channel Acquisition Framework B2B 66

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

If the elements of your business aren't expertly developed and aligned, even the best dream will be in jeopardy. Such failures ignore the essential business elements investors look for before committing to a startup. Product distribution or service delivery. A near-term customer value proposition.

Exit Strategy 120

Exit Strategy Technical Review Distribution Viral 120

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

What matters is proving the viability of the company’s business model, what investors call “traction.&# Of course this is not at all true of many profitable small businesses, but they are not what I mean by startups.) Most importantly, they have lots of data about the unit economics of their business.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

crowdSPRING Blog

SEPTEMBER 30, 2012

For much of the past five years academics, journalists, bloggers, and assorted mass-media-tag-alongs have been heralding the “ death of newspapers ,” the downfall of the publishing industry and the collapse of information distribution as we know it. Lean Marketing: Public Relations strategies for small businesses and startups.

Small Business 88

Small Business Public Relations Social Media New York 88

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 5, 2022

Specifically, I plan on putting out one study per quarter that I'll send out to reporters and hopefully get viral coverage on social media. I’ve devised a sustainable business model where we will contribute to the ecological welfare of our environment. Our business merges well with the storytelling. 5- Go green.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur Affiliate Green Cloud 114

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

I had just enough data to optimize the main funnel, found a bunch of wins, then hit a hard wall and needed to rebuild the entire distribution strategy from scratch to keep growing. Even if you recruit in lower-cost areas and look for more junior folks, you’re looking at $150K each, fully loaded. This is exactly what happened to me.

Conversion 133

Conversion Technical Review Channel Engineer 133

Rob Go

JULY 11, 2013

As a seed fund, we tend to layer in “ capital efficient beginnings ” to the mix given our investing model and belief about the best way to build internet and software businesses. We tend to favor companies that have a “distribution advantage”. So what are some examples of distribution advantages?

Distribution 66

Distribution Vertical Viral B2B 66

BeyondVC

JANUARY 12, 2009

  From a business model perspective we had it nailed…or so we thought…buy the hardware device at cost and we would make money back by selling a monthly subscription service.    I learned a lot from that investment. 

Mobile 60

Mobile SMS Venture Capital Web 60

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 5, 2018

The reality is that successful businesses these days require an equally elegant business model, with the right marketing, delivery channel, price, and target customers, to get real traction. In the investment community, this work is called proving the business model. Finalize your channel and marketing strategy.

Product 137

Product Advisory Board Business Model Cofounder 137

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

For a Series A round you want to prove you have built a repeatable and scalable sales/revenue model and understand all parts of the business model. Series B is about proving your net revenue model (can you be profitable?). Team, Product, Traction, Business Model and Market. Business Model.

Cofounder 429

Cofounder Seed Stage Valuation Metrics 429

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

What if you are a tiny local business in a narrow niche, should you use the same approach as Betabrand? Always adapt to what’s most important and sensible for you (and remember that nothing is free, every measurement decision you make has a cost!). Yet, you won’t notice it in my KPIs. Make tough choices. Newspapers: Tampa Bay Times.

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

The first did a “purchase credits&# model like iStockphoto where you then burn down the credits you bought. They realized for them this was dumb because people didn’t want to use up their credits so viral adoption wasn’t happening quickly enough. They switched to a flat rate model and sharing went up immediately.

Viral 303

Viral Investment Bankers Video Business Model 303

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Technographics vendors such as Builtwith , Datanyze , HG Data , Stackshare, and Stacklist help CEOs identify the right tech platform on which to build their business; they’re also helpful for investors to due diligence a company’s tech stack choices. Capital has built a free online tool for founders to calculate their cost of capital.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 21, 2013

If you're working on the Sticky Engine of Growth , you're focused on very different metrics from those that you care about in the Viral Engine of Growth. On the other hand, in an industry with relatively low switching costs, churn will be substantially higher. So churn for those product categories may be lower.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Metrics Churn Rate 167

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

The one-page pitch format is also more suitable for SaaS businesses that are constantly testing new ideas. Your pitch is going to cover your strategy (what you’re going to do), your tactics (how you’re going to do it), your business model (how you will make money), and your schedule (who is doing what and when).

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 7, 2016

Social Media makes group-games viral. Even something as simple as Pinterest turning on advertisements makes it possible to build a business optimizing those advertisements. ” Something happened in the world that removed the last blocker. Where → Why here? Why should you build this startup in your current location?

San Francisco 170

San Francisco Startup Framework Azure 170

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

When I first wrote about ‘creative automation’ Dall-E wasn’t open for beta users, and while the tech of generative text to image AI existed, it wasn’t widely distributed. As an investor, I could see big opportunities in using this kind of tech to create new business models and populate the metaverse.

Colorado 103

Colorado Viral Early Stage Open Source 103