Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

Focus on marketing and indirect channels to get the message out quickly. Organic growth (reinvesting profits only) will not allow you to build the “hockey stick” growth curve desired by premium buyers at exit, or financial analysts positioning you for public stock sale. Scaling requires leveraging outside resources.

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Hockey Stick Intellectual Property Non-Compete Business Model 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 11, 2015

Focus on marketing and indirect channels to get the message out quickly. Organic growth (reinvesting profits only) will not allow you to build the “hockey stick” growth curve desired by premium buyers at exit, or financial analysts positioning you for public stock sale. Scaling requires leveraging outside resources.

Hockey Stick 120

Hockey Stick Intellectual Property Non-Compete Business Model 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

This results in a much slower adoption curve – the classic hockey stick. TiVo had plenty of other battles to fight: competition, issues with channel partners, patent battles, as well as the movie studios, cable companies, broadcast networks and advertisers who all wanted TiVo dead. New Market Revenue Curve.

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Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 271

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. So you will likely get outspent on any paid marketing channel you may use to drive traffic to you at scale if there are other people trying to drive traffic to the same property. Another way is to have unique promotion channels, but these must be scalable.

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Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. So you will likely get outspent on any paid marketing channel you may use to drive traffic to you at scale if there are other people trying to drive traffic to the same property. Another way is to have unique promotion channels, but these must be scalable.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 21, 2010

Since we often invest before the big “hockey stick” traction that bigger VCs wait for, a lot of times the company is still trying to tweak exactly what service or application will take off in a given market. This is something that founders should pay a lot of attention to when choosing a partner.

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Product Hockey Stick Entrepreneur Syndicate 68

Up and Running

APRIL 28, 2015

Finding and winning customers can sometimes be the biggest challenge for a startup, so it’s important to show that you have a solid grasp of how you will reach your target market and what sales channels you plan on using. Investors see “hockey stick” projections all the time and will mentally be cutting your projections in half.

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Forecast Hockey Stick Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 60

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

Then they noticed that they’d been cannibalizing other channels—people converting as referrals were leads already acquired from other channels. Incentives work, but they might work too well and convert people who are not really into the service/product or cannibalize other channels. Identify and iterate down-funnel levers.

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114