A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
FEBRUARY 26, 2019
You’re not allocating enough costs to gross margin or the cost to acquire a customer. You can start by selling to small customers and evolve to larger ones, because you’re starting with a low cost-basis and then maturing your product and service. The customer should derive 10x more value than it costs them. Karma works.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
DECEMBER 21, 2009
This gets you to crystallize what cost-centric activities would most help your business. Which of your business operations do you hate? Part of why you're in business for yourself is creating something from scratch and delighting customers, but the fact is that most business operations just suck. It could be an intern.
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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
JANUARY 7, 2014
Today you have a business plan, featuring a plausible growth trajectory (neither too conservative nor too optimistic), and an associated cost structure to drive signups and service customers. Costs arise ahead of associated revenue, especially for SaaS companies, so you need a cash investment to fund that growth.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
FEBRUARY 11, 2014
If you like this, go see his Shockwave Innovations blog ) Anyone that has taken an accounting class or learned basic business financials knows the interaction between key elements of a P&L (revenue, cost, expense) and a balance sheet (assets, liabilities, equity). At that point, you’ve recovered the cost to acquire the customer.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
JULY 23, 2013
I know the argument: The pay-back period on sales, marketing, and up-start costs is long, but there’s a profitable result at the end of the tunnel. The mindset works like this: It costs a lot of money to land an enterprise customer. So these costs are amortized over the customers you do land. for every $1.00 Just wait!
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
APRIL 12, 2010
billion market cap), mid-sized (NetBotz with millions in revenue and funding), and small (sub-$1m operations like us). They were the disruptors, but they didn't profit from the disruption. Disruptive technology often comes from research groups commissioned to produce innovative ideas but unable to capitalize on them.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
MAY 1, 2012
For example, the average cost of customer acquisition diminishes. Suppose you discover that it costs $60 to acquire a new $10/mo customer which is too much to be sustainable — perhaps, but that cost diminishes over time, so it’s not a long-term problem. You spend less on marketing/advertising/acquisition.
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