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.

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Hockey Stick Intellectual Property Non-Compete Business Model 120

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 26, 2010

The only concern was that they didn’t know what their cost of customer acquisition was, nor did they which channels would be most effective, or how much they could acquire out of each channel. You can spend the next six weeks trying out a bunch of different channels and seeing what works, which is what we recommended.

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Acquisition Hockey Stick Customer SEM 128

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

By 1992 Research in Motion (RIM) had been in business for eight years, had 16 employees, sales of about $500,000 a year, and three or four business lines. Their intent: initial sales would come from users who already understood what the product could do so adoption would occur rapidly. RIM sales were $15 billion in 2010.

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Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 271

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 19, 2016

You get more traffic, more conversions, more money – in an endless hockey stick shaped cycle. You can usually tell this is the case when your SEO traffic converts well below other acquisition channels. Also note that often, organic traffic is one of the highest converting channels. Of course, it’s not so simple.

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SEO Technical Review Algorithm Jacksonville 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. For example, if you are running affiliate ads for hotels, you might get 3-5% on a sale. 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.

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Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. For example, if you are running affiliate ads for hotels, you might get 3-5% on a sale. 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.

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Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

With that implicit assumption, startups hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies while marketing creates a brand and buzz to create demand and drive it into the sales channel (web, direct salesforce, etc.) If they had done this, there would have been zero dollars in sales.

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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. On the other hand, I recently saw a deal where it was clear that we needed a very business development focused entrepreneur.

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Product Hockey Stick Entrepreneur Syndicate 68

Up and Running

APRIL 28, 2015

If you already have sales or early adopters using your product, talk about that here. Slide 7: Marketing and sales strategy. How are you planning on getting customers’ attention and what will your sales process look like? Use this slide to outline your marketing and sales plan. Slide 6: Traction and validation/roadmap.

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Forecast Hockey Stick Exit Strategy Intellectual Property 60

ConversionXL

APRIL 10, 2020

No one cares about a team or individuals’ “experience” with platforms or channels. Hockey-stick growth requires being ahead of, not in line with, conventional wisdom: The most impactful ideas won’t be found in “best practices.” The solution isn’t just to learn a platform or channel. Mailchimp’s Willie Tran agrees.

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Duct Tape Marketing

JULY 26, 2017

Though I would say based on the numbers that I see it’s not like a hockey stick growth, but the growth in people’s desire to listen to the content and people’s desire to create terrific podcast content has really never been higher. A lot of sales today is relationship-based. John Jantsch: Yeah.

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ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

Go beyond standard sources of voice of customer data ; better options are: Interview founders (the original “customers”); Thank-you page surveys; Usertesting.com; Mine sales calls; Mine support tickets; Mine Facebook comments ; Mine online reviews. Or absolutely awful? Have the interview on video and record it (with permission).

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114