A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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Solving the "marketplace" business model

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

In fact, 3 of the 10 selected companies from the past two years has followed this business model. These are distinct operations — different clients, different technology, different sales process — almost like two separate companies. What are other advantages or pitfalls of marketplace-style businesses?

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Pricing determines your business

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Your product is designed with natural tripwires to trigger other pricing ( Freemium model ), or not (business model left as an exercise to your future self). Requires venture funding because you have no income, and if you’re successful you’ll need lots of people and tech to run the business.

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Why it’s nice to compete against a large, profitable company

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

They have everything: money, brand, momentum, existing customers, press, product teams, distribution channels, expertise, market insight, analysts, sales offices, product features, and, by definition, a working business model. All a little startup has is a decent idea and extremely greasy elbows. Not anymore.

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“Fantastic” beats “efficient”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Customers gleefully avoid the Blockbuster none-of-these-look-good-just-pick-one-already-zombie-walk — and NetFlix just put Blockbuster out of business — but is this a workable business model? Turning a profit at a growing company is nearly impossible regardless of business model.

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The mistake of 1/c in LTV calculations

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

This is the third article in a series on novel ideas for SaaS metrics, which started with The unprofitable SaaS business model trap and COC: a new metric for cancellations. You can’t read an article about SaaS metrics without running into LTV — The L ife t ime V alue of a customer.

Retention 262
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A programmer commiserates with journalists

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

I know, time waits for no one, survival of the fittest, broken business models, you can’t live off useless classifieds, etc etc. There are jobs for us whether or not we keep up with the latest technology (COBOL developers in NYC command the same salary as Rubyists). We have no need to unionize because we are not exploited.

Salary 234
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Why I don’t like the LTV metric

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

This is the fifth article in a series on novel ideas for SaaS metrics, which started with The unprofitable SaaS business model trap , COC: a new metric for cancellations , The mistake of 1/c in LTV , and SSEBITDA: Steady-state profit metric. Metrics summarize tons of processes, causes, and effects into a single number.

Metrics 244