A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

By which they mean: Without stupid rules that assume employees are dumb or evil, without everything taking ten times longer than it should, without wall-to-wall meetings, without resorting to hiring anything less than the top 1% of the talent pool, and so on. It’s a big reason why they move quickly. No, it’s a colossal failure.

Government 223

Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 19, 2012

” It’s just made-up leftovers because you’re not acknowledge the actual costs of a startup, which include time and you having to work a second job. years before I could even hire one employee, and even then it was 1/4 of the salary he deserved (and later ended up making). In that case what have you proved?

Salary 246

Salary Bootstrapping Web Distribution 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 13, 2015

and 5%” or “cost to acquire a customer between $50 and $500″ or “average monthly revenue per customer between $20 and $200.” Often your best estimate of any metric or market behavior or business model component is at best accurate within a power of ten, for example “expected conversion rate between 0.5%

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 19, 2010

I've incurred the cost, so for planning purposes I have to pretend that cash is gone. It's perfect when you're wondering if you can afford $5000 in graphic design work, a new $6500 marketing campaign, or whether you can hire someone and have 3 months of runway to discover that was a massive mistake.

Revenue 232

Revenue Startup Forecast Finance 232

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 28, 2014

But for those of you in the earlier stages of your companies, when you project 5x growth coupled to just 5x the costs (or only 3x the costs because you’ll get cost-savings at scale), you’re guessing low.

Technical Review 275

Technical Review Social Media Engineer Cost 275

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

It cost you less than a week because you’ve got your template and you’re fast and smart, and you’re done. They had, maybe, a bad experience or it cost a lot of money, and the whole idea is to pay between $25 and $50 a month to get a higher quality website than what they have right now. Jared: Sure. Jason: In revenue.

API 220

API Software Review Hosting Technical Review 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

The one thing that you might be able to do is outsource the development costs of it. But even if it’s national, our trips cost about $1000 per trip. So you can hire one more person. I don’t know what your investment potential is. Interviewee: Right. But even if it’s international, not international.

Cofounder 199

Cofounder Technical Review Chicago Technical Cofounder 199

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 28, 2012

hiring a few developers). And we can’t afford to hire tech support folks who will ensure your questions, bug reports, and feature requests are handled with the speed and friendliness you’ve come to expect. It’s all our fault for setting the price lower than the cost of creating ${product} and growing ${company}.

Software Review 240

Software Review Technical Review Email Revenue 240

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker hired to complete tasks you should not be doing as the founder of a startup. Your startup time plummets to near zero even though your maintenance costs are a bit higher since you're paying someone an hourly rate to handle the task. And the cost is negligible. Case Studies.

Software Review 284

Software Review Startup Technical Review Hosting 284

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

Examples: large bidders tripled the cost per click, Google’s SEO algorithm changed, the event organizers changed the rules or stopped doing the event, the link-sharing site became irrelevant, the hot blog lost its traffic, the magazine running the ads finally failed. Talk about brittle! Solving these things takes time and money.

Software Review 294

Software Review Channel Revenue Non-Compete 294

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

What’s the cost of continuing to run this company in a way that may have that sort of more traditional trajectory. What’s the cost of that? Well the cost of that might be my satisfaction. But I think what we see often is the costs that do come with that. Adelaide: Absolutely.

Cofounder 223

Cofounder New York Conversion Entrepreneur 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 24, 2012

It’s quite simple, which is when you had systems where you had limitations on distribution or transportation of products, it enabled you to operate with a certain cost structure. That cost structure for traditional industry, for historic reason, remains high. It doesn’t matter how many people that is.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley Software Review Internet Technical Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

So hiring more people and being around more people and getting more things done is not actually one of the reasons. Is there a marketing person at Remember the Milk you can hire and say look, what you did is great. And some of that may be exactly to hire this other person to do whatever, like acquisition, and fuel the growth that way.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 3, 2012

We employed significantly different pricing; at launch, my book cost $39, and Sacha’s cost $3-6. Sacha wrote a book and priced it relative to the cost of other books, which is the strategy just about everyone follows. On the website, I compare spending thousands of dollars and hiring a designer to buying an ebook.

Sales 261

Sales Bootstrapping Design Audience 261

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 17, 2011

You sign up customers faster than your ability to hire quality people, so either existing people are stretched thin or you make the more fatal error of lowering standards to fill chairs. In the case of WP Engine, we knock off 2% for credit card fees and a certain amount for hosting and bandwidth costs.

Business Model 245

Business Model Metrics Engineer Technical Review 245

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 7, 2016

Early on it’s easy to hire, because it’s cool and fun to join a startup, and assuming you’ve hired great talent, those people never have trouble finding another job if they have to, even in a down economy. We can all name companies with spectacular success or failure, employing any of these techniques.

San Francisco 170

San Francisco Startup Framework Azure 170

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 27, 2014

For boot-strappers: How could you double your take-home profits without additional hires? Hint: it’s usually increasing price , not cutting costs.) Are you spending a seemingly disproportionate amount of time sourcing and hiring, finding those 10xers ? What good questions have you not taken the time to ask?

Angel Investor 264

Angel Investor Hiring Sales Employee 264

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Maybe hire an employee for $30 per hour and re-bill them at $60. Suppose you hire an employee at $60,000/year. So your cost per billable hour is: Nominal Cost: $30/hour. Recomputing the cost of the remaining billable hours, we have: 20 WD/month, $31/hour. The true cost of an employee is double the nominal cost.

America 330

America Employee Hiring HTML 330

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

I think you’d find yourself, you’re going to drop a lot of people when you instantly mention, ‘This costs money.’ Discrimination on race when you’re hiring is bad, discriminating on price based upon behavior of customers is very appropriate. There are all these dimensions that you could split them up on.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 29, 2010

Here are four opposing viewpoints of how you could approach the situation: The Long Tail is too expensive to sell into because it requires reaching a lot of people, each of whom don't give us much money, so it won't be cost-effective. However, in the middle of the period the student hired a tutor.

Metrics 257

Metrics Analytics Conversion Ratio Texas 257

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 22, 2012

Maybe your competitors have figured out that it’s not cost-effective to sell to the middle. If we just chose one or the other, we could optimize the rest of the business around it — hiring, automation, marketing, sales — and maybe we should. ” But there isn’t necessarily an opportunity.

Marketing 235

Marketing RSS Employee Software 235

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

If you hire employees, are you not responsible to them? Rather, focus on creating something that people will pay money for, today, and much more money than it costs to acquire or serve them. Yes, except if you don’t listen to what customers are telling you to do, you’ll build a product no one wants to use.

Cofounder 312

Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 20, 2011

To hire key employees. Otherwise they have a lot of planning and hiring to do before the project has a decent velocity, which could take 6-18 months. So it’s not a cut-and-dry decision, but it’s clear how your company will be valued primarily: The cost of acquisition + re-culturing versus the cost of build-from-scratch.

Sales 260

Sales Channel Cofounder Valuation 260