A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Sometimes that’s defensible distribution channels. Instead, watch payback period for acquisition efficiency, watch retention for product/market fit, watch expansion revenue for long-term growth, and watch gross margin for long-term profitability. A reliable paid acquisition channel results in a somewhat stable 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. The insight is: The profitable revenue stream is a prison. But David has a clear path to slaying Goliath.

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For marketing early startups: Deep, not wide

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Watch a bunch of interviews of founders of successful companies, and here’s what you don’t hear: We tried eight different marketing channels — AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, social media, events, retargeting, SEO, guest-posting, PR, and so on. How to pick the one channel?

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Telling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his Ass

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

The question is: How can you own your little piece of the world; Not: How can you wrest $100m of revenue from a big guy. They can't take a risk because protecting the existing revenue stream is more important than anything else, even if it means their ultimate demise. but doesn't have to be worth $1B, then the game isn't "us or them."

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Brittleness comes from “One Thing”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

, but informally I’ve observed the following things, which follow a pattern that can be identified and counteracted: The initial marketing channel quickly saturated , so growth stalled at a non-zero but unsustainably-low rate. The initial marketing channel was sustainable for a while , but got wiped away due to external forces.

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Bootstrapped CPC rule of thumb: MRR/25

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

ignoring indirect costs) or saying they’ll “fix that later” by raising prices, finding other channels of revenue. CAC = MRR x 4 If you combine the previous two results, you see that the cost to acquire a customer should be no more than four months of revenue.

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Teeny bit of traction — what next?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Burgeoning Startup Founder writes: After a year of work, my startup is now doing about $6,000/mo in revenue and $3,000/mo in profit. It has to be on getting more revenue. Both short-term bursts and, more interestingly, building systematic ways of growing revenue month over month. What should I do next?

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