Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Between January 2015 and January 2016, we grew our platform Slidebean from $1K to $20K in monthly recurring revenue. Getting the first tracks of revenue is one of the toughest processes of building a startup. Then, in 2015, this is who we added to the team: Jan-15: Head of Customer Success (growth team).

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 25, 2007

As I look at more and more start-ups predicated on viral growth, and at the use of social marketing, its becoming simultaneously easier to understand some aspects of viral growth and still a gap in understanding whats going to be that "hook" that will grab people at the end of the day.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

VC Cafe

JULY 15, 2021

According to Statista, revenue generated from apps (paid downloads and in-app advertising) will reach $935 billion by 2023, and that doesn’t doesn’t include the many trillions of dollars transacted via apps in the last decade alone (think Amazon, Uber, games, etc). Worldwide mobile app revenues in 2014 to 2023 (in billion U.S.

Mobile 190

Mobile Social Media Distribution PR 190

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

Even a non-profit has to generate revenue (or donations) to offset operating costs. You may have the solution to the world hunger problem, but if your customers have no money, your business won’t last long. Intellectual property is also often the largest element of early-stage company valuations for professional investors.

Intellectual Property 251

Intellectual Property Startup Viral Early Stage 251

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 1, 2012

Even a non-profit has to generate revenue (or donations) to offset operating costs. You may have the solution to the world hunger problem, but if your customers have no money, your business won’t last long. Intellectual property is also often the largest element of early-stage company valuations for professional investors.

Intellectual Property 274

Intellectual Property Entrepreneur Viral Early Stage 274

Agile VC

MAY 26, 2011

In another we decended into a debate about our 5 year forecasts (I built the models so fielded most of these questions), and it became clear they probably weren’t the best fit for our Series A round (this group is no longer in the early-stage VC business). And a third firm “pressure tested” (i.e. link] leehower.

Term Sheet 178

Term Sheet Silicon Valley Technical Review Social Network 178

abovethecrowd.com

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

Wow” moments lead to word-of-mouth viral growth and high net promoter scores. The opposite was true for OpenTable where the installation of a personal computer and internet connectivity were part of the early roll-out requirements. Some customers now use it as a second car alternative. Economic Advantages vs. the Status Quo.

Aggregator 101

Aggregator Marketing Software Review North America 101

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. LSC: Tell us about the customer development you did for your book: Alistair: We''ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders. Alistair: There are plenty.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Gust

NOVEMBER 3, 2013

Even a non-profit has to generate revenue (or donations) to offset operating costs. You may have the solution to the world hunger problem, but if your customers have no money, your business won’t last long. Intellectual property is also often the largest element of early-stage company valuations for professional investors.

Intellectual Property 183

Intellectual Property Startup Viral Early Stage 183

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 23, 2021

For example, if you haven’t achieved product-market fit, instrumenting every aspect of customer acquisition is overkill. It’s hard to acquire more customers and drive more engagement if you can’t measure what is driving customer growth or where they’re spending their time in the product.

Venture Capital 46

Venture Capital Metrics Investment Bankers Framework 46

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 8, 2009

This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs. This kind of a simple model also helps: Define the early proof points for the company. R : Revenue - can you monetize any of this behavior? In fact, this often becomes the mantra that we live by. Great stuff.

Metrics 225

Metrics Startup Retention Acquisition 225

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 23, 2011

With the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, risk-averse investors wanted to invest in more than just a business plan – they wanted to see real customers and real revenue before they stumped up the money. “It forced us to get laser-focused and drive customer value and revenue as quickly as we could,&# he remembers.

Community 162

Community United States Colorado Social Media 162

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

The company has just missed its quarterly revenue forecast. Lets take an example, and look at how they might do this: They will be able to tell you that revenue is composed of deals. To compute revenue, you multiply average deal size by number of deals. Bookings is the pre-cursor to Revenue. Obvious, isn’t it?

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

we had no revenue. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue. We are the leader in the professional domain with viral growth. Instead, our strategy was to steer immediately into the revenue question because that was the top concern of investors in 2004.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

Genuine VC

APRIL 30, 2008

After the crash at the end of the last decade, web startups clamped down to focus on their core value proposition and were forced out of necessity for survival to hone their revenue models. The stories of tremendous growth in adoption with the promise of revenue later on has been enough to excite both entrepreneurs alike.

Distribution 103

Distribution Widget Viral Social Media 103

Board Effect

AUGUST 30, 2019

A half-baked approach to cybersecurity can generate a host of consequences including lost revenue, legal problems, and reputational risk. One comment on social media from a client citing their lack of trust in a company can go viral within minutes and create a public outrage even if the comments are untrue.

Agile 45

Agile Government Technology Software 45

Genuine VC

APRIL 30, 2008

After the crash at the end of the last decade, web startups clamped down to focus on their core value proposition and were forced out of necessity for survival to hone their revenue models. The stories of tremendous growth in adoption with the promise of revenue later on has been enough to excite both entrepreneurs alike.

Distribution 100

Distribution Widget Viral Social Media 100

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

In an over-funding environment companies are encouraged to eschew revenues in a land grab to acquire eyeballs, clicks, page views or whatever other vanity metrics give VCs the false comfort that they’re sitting on a gold mine. The opportunity to transact at the point of purchase increases the sheer number of revenue opportunities.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

Hippoland

OCTOBER 16, 2016

In this post, I’m going to very *simplistically* dive into some high level categories and talk about how early stage investors consider each. As a result, for these kinds of businesses, investors often don’t expect that companies can earn revenue right out of the gate, because they may not legally be able to. Really really fast.

Startup 48

Startup Vertical Early Stage Bootstrapping 48

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

A friend of mine is a serial entrepreneur and is running a high-profile, early stage company in NorCal. We should end the year with a few million in fully recurring revenue and we’re projected to double next year. But more spend = more viral opps = more revenue down the road. Probably revenue based.

Founder 329

Founder Liquidation Preference Term Sheet Participating Preferred 329

Ben's Blog

MAY 15, 2020

Finally, we’ll zoom out and assess the big picture: how various categories of company may be impacted long-term, how this crisis compares to 2008 (and what that means for early-stage founders), and the industries and business models that are now prime for growth. Are we right or wrong about these things?”

Founder 36

Founder Conversion Technical Review Cash Position 36

View from Seed

MARCH 22, 2016

This is for the early-stage companies — the entrepreneurs with great ideas and tireless work ethics who feel like they’ve emailed half of the country’s news outlets with nothing but the rare “thanks, but not interested” reply to show for it. This one is tricker in the pre-revenue stage. The irony hurts. Pitch late.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage San Francisco Startup CTO Hire 120

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

This provides us more time to develop meaningful relationships with prospects and customers. Data companies focused on early-stage startups include Aingel , fundsUP , Preseries , PredictLeads , and Sploda. These typically have a larger support ecosystem and greater assurance of long-term stability than the custom vendors.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 11, 2015

Mastering your pitch to a VC, prospective customers, new hires or partners is part art and part science. Don’t hold back your passion and your vision – give examples of crazy flights and nights in the office to meet a launch date, or epic stories with your first customers. Talk about passion and commitment!

San Francisco 48

San Francisco Churn Rate Silicon Valley Engineer 48

Rob Go

MARCH 16, 2012

Many of the early stage investors that used to do a lot of raw consumer deals are saying “man, consumer is hard! Whereas B2B might yield a more predictable customer and real revenue from the beginning, scaling a company selling to businesses happens more slowly. It’s not viral.

B2B 46

B2B Seed Stage Viral Early Stage 46

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2016

From Aspiration to Hero For companies that do have that moment of success where everything seems to come together: funding, hiring, customers, PR, product releases and so forth — you have a “hero” moment where you feel invincible. Or some teams who start driving revenue paper over the fact that they aren’t acquiring customers profitably.

Churn Rate 150

Churn Rate Vesting Dilution Europe 150

Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 19, 2023

And it's the same thing for individuals because at that early stage of a business, when you don't yet have a product, even sometimes when you don't yet have, um, customers, you don't yet have traction in sales, how are you gonna judge it? These are the kind of decisions we wanted to help people with at that early stage.

Audio 87

Audio Cofounder Framework Early Stage 87

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 3, 2015

To make sure everyone is on the same page, here’s what we define a marketing channel as: A marketing channel is a way of speaking to your customers. It is a communication method you use to interact with someone in order to encourage them to make a purchase or remain a customer. Things spread virally when your product is good.

Lead Generation 28

Lead Generation Channel B2B Early Stage 28

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 3, 2015

To make sure everyone is on the same page, here’s what we define a marketing channel as: A marketing channel is a way of speaking to your customers. It is a communication method you use to interact with someone in order to encourage them to make a purchase or remain a customer. Things spread virally when your product is good.

Lead Generation 28

Lead Generation Channel B2B Early Stage 28

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

Growth Hacking isn’t viral marketing (although viral marketing is part of it). and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product.

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 3, 2015

To make sure everyone is on the same page, here’s what we define a marketing channel as: A marketing channel is a way of speaking to your customers. It is a communication method you use to interact with someone in order to encourage them to make a purchase or remain a customer. Things spread virally when your product is good.

Lead Generation 28

Lead Generation Channel B2B Early Stage 28

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2020

That's why the Corona Initiative is a Public Benefit Corporation--a for-profit company dedicated to the public good that aims to fund its research with its revenues. You really want to see how your company treats its employees, treats its customers, treats the environment, taking a longer-term view." Can you just explain that a bit?

Technical Review 68

Technical Review Software Review Finance Technology 68

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service. Solve a problem you can relate to.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

I’m sure its customers wonder, “Why is an organic grocer named RydeOn?”. In the world of technology companies, a pivot generally involves changing the product in a substantive way that changes how the company engages with its customers. It’s easier (but still hard) when you’re running a small, early-stage organization.

Startup 36

Startup Silicon Valley Business Model Mobile 36

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

The goal is for each company’s Google Data Studio to not look like a CDP (customized data puke), but to be a focused strategic dashboard with an emphasis on IABI. Outcomes: Revenue | Ideas Funded Behavior: Path Length | Cart Abandonment Rate Acquisition: Assisted Conversions | Share of Search. If you want to play along.

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

There are two reasons to raise money: You have a killer idea that is only partially validated, that you think can get to $50M+ of revenue in 5 years with 80%+ gross margins (if margins are lower, you need a lot more revenue)and you need money to get to product-market fit, or. Better answer, “Because I’m the customer.”)

Cofounder 429

Cofounder Seed Stage Valuation Metrics 429

Hippoland

FEBRUARY 12, 2018

I’ll give you an example with my own startup LaunchBit and how our understanding of the problem and the customer became more refined over time: V1: Helping online marketers get customers profitably. V2: Helping online marketers who have previously bought ads in email lists get customers profitably. But the execution is hard.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage Business Model B2B Email 48