Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

MakeSpace (as he named it) would help you get your excess goods into low-cost warehouses. As companies get this initial customer feedback on their product they start to have to ask harder questions about unit economics: How much does it cost us to acquire a new customer? and we were met with weak demand, slow growth and high costs.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 30, 2013

This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. In order for somebody with IA to be your champion he has to be actively helping you through the sales process. Is she managing a P&L and wants to reduce costs or improve sales?

Sales 322

Sales Campaign Search Technology 322

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2013

deliver profitable revenue that while on gross margins of 50% vs. software at 85-95% it is still profits to help you cover fixed costs. So when I meet with GRP portfolio companies that do enterprise sales I try to emphasize the following: 1. Often your sales engineers can do the customizations without bugging the core eng team.

Software Review 321

Software Review Software IP Technical Review 321

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 8, 2010

Very few of them are started, in my experience, by sales people and very few early stage companies really understand sales. That’s why I started the Sales & Marketing Series and at one point I will do a bunch of posts on the sales methodology we developed at my first company called PUCCKA. More on that later.

Early Stage 350

Early Stage Startup Sales Campaign 350

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

The next step after measuring the customers you’re adding is to add the “cost to acquire” by channel. In the early phases if you can’t acquire customers cost effectively enough you’ll need to diagnose why and how to fix it. Make sure that you count the “true” cost to acquire customers. SEO is seldom “free.”. lowering $1.50

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. An obvious example would be in sales. By going on sales calls you pick up directly the feedback of what customers want and also what they’re telling you about competition.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Traditional video had very high costs of distribution due to limited time slots of broadcast TV (we only had enough spectrum to support 3-4 channels). Much of network television can cost $100,000 / minute to produce. Producers can cost-effectively test formats and build fans as they go. Much of it already is. Not so fast.

Video 339

Video Technical Review Distribution Aggregator 339

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 4, 2009

Most start-up entrepreneurs have little or no sales experience. But through nearly a decade of startups I learned that sales comes down to three essential elements: 1. The real test of sales and the topic of my post is “why buy now.” It’s what kills most sales cycles including raising venture capital. I know I didn’t.

Sales 319

Sales Sales Cycle Startup Reputation 319

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

In all of these new product and cost-focused new trends, a big problem has emerged that all of these movements have not addressed. Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. I was the one pointing out that we were behind on our sales targets and our “Elephant Deal&# that had been promised was 6 months late.

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 414

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2016

This may sound straightforward but to test for conditions with extreme accuracy and speed requires designing a small hardware device that is capable of creating a chemical reaction with food, interpreting the results in real time and doing so for a cost that is acceptable for consumers.

Cofounder 207

Cofounder Differentiation Hosting Design 207

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

He also nails the reason why venture capital is still necessary to grow large businesses quickly in a world where the costs of running startups have fallen dramatically. In revenue terms our first two years of sales were $2.1 He talks about making things that people want & going after a big enough market. Growth, again. Not Google.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

Lately I’ve been having to say things I thought I’d never have to remind people, like, “getting to positive gross margin in several territories is a very low bar to claim success” or “profitable excluding marketing costs” is not actually a real thing. But not doing basic research makes no sense.

Startup 150

Startup Seed Money DC Software Review 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

It’s such a tricky balance between being cost-focused & scrappy versus being impractical with how you spend your time. It freed up Ophir to grow out our sales organization, to work more closely with agencies, to innovate on product and to raise capital. But alas I must scale with businesses and make money. And so must you.

Operations 150

Operations Metrics Early Stage Non-Compete 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

He asked each sales / biz dev person to call customers and tell them they had to change their contracts. I just knew that our sales sucked wind and we were burning through tons of cash. We missed our sales targets that year by 66% and the next year by 45% and never really cut costs very much. We were SMOKING cash.

Entrepreneur 306

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Cofounder Sales 306

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

The remainder of this article will deal with this decision but it comes down to the different economics of DVD rentals due to “ the first sale doctrine ” which gives Netflix a complete library of films and the fact that the first-sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital downloads. If they were on the $9.99 And so on.

Customer 287

Customer Technical Review Caching PR 287

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2015

However, the higher you get within an organization in the sale (and the larger the deal) executives are often looking to “win in the market,” which means growing revenue faster, offering products or services at a lower cost or offering features that their competitors can’t.

PR 150

PR Early Stage Software Naming 150

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

They can tell you the square foot costs of their property, they can tell you how much they spend on Amazon Web Services every month, they can tell you the 12 features that you’re working on for your next release. One other big tell for me is the CEO’s grasp of the sales pipeline. Who does sales report to?

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

.&# I took it to mean, “making decisions with small amounts of money (pennies) that end up making bad sense for affecting larger amounts of money (pounds, as in Great British Pounds).&# I thought of it as people who cut corners on small costs but paid dearly in terms of lost productivity on expensive staff.

Warrant 333

Warrant Germany France Cost 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

Looong Appendix (only for those interested in reading another story about losing a sale & key lessons): A personal story of losing a sale that haunted me for years. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

China 333

China Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

Looong Appendix (only for those interested in reading another story about losing a sale & key lessons): A personal story of losing a sale that haunted me for years. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

China 328

China Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review 328

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2010

banner ads on a CPM, CPC or a Cost-Per-Install [CPI] basis). You can also compare how in-app purchases perform vs. cross-promoting the other apps you may have for sale. Optimization also helps you optimize ad sales if you’re doing pure advertising. It’s also a great example of why transparency is so important.

Mobile 282

Mobile Management Southern California Application Development 282

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 27, 2012

But it’s kind of hard to say “don’t plant near the big trees” when you just completed a big sale to Microsoft building an app that they should have created and dominated. Where I Might Expand the Argument. Not just in Silicon Valley but in LA, NY, Seattle and other major tech markets. “ And my fear?

Silicon Valley 299

Silicon Valley Technical Review Early Stage Cofounder 299

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 senior sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business 6 months. COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Stock Options 227

Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 14, 2017

Agreeing an annual budget Setting a 409a valuation used to price stock options Agreeing stock option allocations Reviewing financial performance Talking about the organizational structure and where we need to bolster things Discussing sales & marketing strategies, product launches, technical challenges Talking about law suits (patents, trademarks, (..)

Cofounder 217

Cofounder Stock Options Equity Technical Review 217

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

Huge structural under-employment in much of the country and full employment in some niche tech markets where it’s impossible to hire developers, designers or sales professionals. When your competition does irrational things to grow fueled by low-cost capital it makes it harder for you to compete by playing by the conventional rules.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2010

It costs less money to start companies so the world should have way more startups.&# I’ve heard the “world is different&# argument in every bubble I’ve ever seen. This is the time it takes for a bankruptcy or asset sale to occur. But all of this increased company creation has to go somewhere. Or a quick flip.

Florida 299

Florida Technical Review San Antonio Los Angeles 299

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 6, 2014

CFOs often know the other CFOs and same for heads of sales, marketing, tech, etc. When they rep you, the marginal cost of them trying to get you a slightly better deal is high for them relative to settling and moving on. You can ask VCs, customers, competitors or somebody who had a similar job function in the same general community.

Technical Review 302

Technical Review Hiring Later Stage Employee 302

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 18, 2010

There is no cost but you must physically be based in or move to Los Angeles for the 6 months of the program. He was able to raise money from a VC in Minneapolis called Split Rock , grow the business to over $200 million in sales and sell to Experian for nearly $380 million. Today we announced Launchpad LA V2. The rest is history.

Southern California 259

Southern California Los Angeles Technical Review Covenant 259

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

Three reasons: There is a relative valuation between the price a VC pays and their expectations of what it will exit for in an IPO or trade sale. Also, it’s harder to pay a $30 million pre-money value on an unproved company when you see public companies with $100 million in sales trading for less than $20 million.

Burn Rate 263

Burn Rate Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Private Equity 263

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company. I had planned a balance of large companies and SMB/divisional sales but have changed my thinking. Reasons: cost of sales executives, long sales cycles, deep functional requirements.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Term Sheet San Diego Viral 274

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2018

A detailed financial model that shows your anticipated revenue, costs and profits (Income Statement) as well as your balance sheet and cashflow statements. For starters you have to realize that fund-raising is a sales process. A brochure is an easy out for you in the sales process without being rude. It felt like heresy.

Cap Table 336

Cap Table Due Diligence Forecast Churn Rate 336

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

It seems the focus on “virtual&# goods has been both the demo of the consumer as well as the fact that by definition virtual goods have almost no marginal costs to the seller so giving a huge slice to the carrier (and Zong) isn’t a problem since actual costs are ~ $0. 15mm in Series A. 10mm in Series C.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2014

But then you can springboard from there to your next gig and you’ll be an experienced startup employee with functional experience at sales, marketing, product or whatever roles you played.” The first job you take may not work out financially. I’ve said this to recent graduates from university.

Founder 409

Founder Salary Startup Early Stage 409

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 25, 2011

Early in a services business there is usually no profits as the company reinvests in hiring people to grow, but by $20 million in sales the company should at least be pulling in 10% profits (if not more) depending on how much is reinvested. Who are your competitors – how much do they charge?&#. It’s pure irony. interest?

Silicon Valley 332

Silicon Valley IP Dividend Finance 332

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 15, 2009

I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps. Winning the contract meant that we would hit our quarterly revenue figure and be in good position for our annual sales target. I later learned one of my biggest lesson in sales.

Software Review 151

Software Review Technical Review Silicon Valley France 151

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 16, 2010

You don’t have to hire as many sales people because much can be sold online. He acknowledged the importance of the growing seed fund movement in creating a new wave of cost-effective innovation. You don’t need to buy hardware – there’s Amazon AWS. Fred Wilson wrote a great piece on this.

LP 311

LP Technical Review Early Stage Silicon Valley 311