Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Selling a product is a tough process, full of “no’s,” whether they come on the phone with a prospect or as a low conversion rate on your landing page. This is what our hiring landscape looked like over the past year: Pre-2015, we hired three founders: 1x hustler in charge of strategic growth hacking.

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We spent weeks working on this new product, racing the clock so it would be done in time for the real presidential debates. We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

There has never been a viral outbreak of such magnitude before. A solopreneur is essentially an entrepreneur who does not hire any staff. And, drawing up a budget that contains all of your fixed expenses, will help you keep a handle on your finances and assist in stripping out any non-essential costs.

Bootstrapping 85

Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

Money to be used for hiring and additional product development. A social analytics platform for Facebook app developers and publishers that provides detailed demographic and engagement data. Offers virality optimization tools and A/B testing inside Facebook. Competitors: Gowalla. Total Raised: $21.4mm. Kontagent.

San Francisco 248

San Francisco Venture Capital Analytics Government 248

Hunter Walker

JANUARY 15, 2017

Practically speaking, the burning need was to begin hiring employees so that I could spend more of my day on product development, partnerships and driving sales. Why take on the costs of space, salespeople, etc? Given that our early products were all in the realm of photography, it was a natural attraction.

Marketing 48

Marketing Design Acquisition Bootstrapping 48

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

Starting with Facebook s developer program, social networks are all jumping on the apps bandwagon. Those apps are generating even more page views, making it quite affordable to buy application installs (which is a cost-per-action ad that requires the user to install the app before the action is considered complete).

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Social Network Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

Here the key is for your free customers to get value from the site that is greater than the costs they perceive by the fact that youre selling access to them. At a high level, anything that drives virality should be free. To take your specific example about virality - why do we want to have more users sign up?

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In a previous post , I covered the three main drivers of growth: Paid, Sticky, and Viral. A business that strives for something like this should absolutely be charging money from day one, in order to establish baselines for their two key metrics: CPA (the cost to acquire a new customer) and LTV (the lifetime value of each acquired customer).

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

” April, 2012 – Andrew Chen writes Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing , which goes viral (2.4K September, 2012 – Andrew Chen, who currently does growth at Uber , writes You don’t need a growth hacker , which encourages companies to really consider whether they have product-market fit before hiring a growth hacker.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Estimating Realistic Startup Costs. The business model.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 21, 2013

If you're working on the Sticky Engine of Growth , you're focused on very different metrics from those that you care about in the Viral Engine of Growth. Similarly, a two-sided marketplace cares about different things from a traditional e-commerce product. So churn for those product categories may be lower.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Metrics Churn Rate 167

mashable.com

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

While all of these factors are true to an extent, the truth of the matter is that the reduced costs of hardware and software are easily offset by the expense of engineers and experienced business people. Nearly all of your costs will be headcount, primarily in the engineering department. Sign in with Facebook or Twitter to get started!

Startup 79

Startup Social Media RSS Social Network 79

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers machines. In this post I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how to integrate continuous integration into your team, and how to use it to create two important feedback loops.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

If the product needs to be tweaked just a little bit in order to convert users into customers, you want to figure that out before the launch. If the viral coefficient is 0.9, And if your product doesnt retain customers, whats the point of driving a bunch of them to use it? Slow progress, but has cost less than 150k aud so far.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Sure, it garners the "winning " reply above, but in reality I find the answers below by Cody Riddar that directs the asker to go hire an inexpensive prototype development team much more helpful than the "leading answer" that gives the "Quora rockstar engineer" point of view. In my opinion, yes.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Does having an expensive Verisign branded SSL and site logo gain higher conversion than the low-cost GoDaddy equivalent? For example, does an Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificate gain higher conversions than a standard SSL?

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 132