Small Business Force

SEPTEMBER 7, 2013

Virtually, every business plan that's ever been presented to the investor community, invariably, has that fabled "hockey stick growth" period where suddenly revenue jumps exponentially. So, while "hockey stick growth" might be something you're chasing, it may not be something you can manage. Don't just let it happen.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Behind this analysis is a spreadsheet model, complete with detailed metrics for a set of customer behaviors that show just how valuable the new product will be. For a little while, the team can resort to the last defense of entrepreneurs in trouble: the promised hockey-stick. Read the rest here. Read the rest here.

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Up and Running

OCTOBER 8, 2014

Ingenie claims to help customers (often students) save up to 50% of what they would otherwise be paying. The GoPro camera – a wide-angle lens HD camera capable of taking excellent video and good action shots, and which could go where other affordable cameras couldn’t. Every 10 days the box assigns you a score out of 100.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 7, 2013

I see too many business plans that are really product plans for customers, touting free services and long feature lists. No product, even with a large opportunity, is ready to scale until you can show it working, with multiple customers paying the full price, to validate the business model. Word-of-mouth does not scale.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 6, 2016

It’s equally easy to go online and incorporate your new entity, register some intellectual property and have some fun with social media for marketing and interacting with customers. With the unlimited access to “how-to” videos and detailed instructions on the Internet, you shouldn’t need to hire experts for most things.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

I see too many business plans that are really product plans for customers, touting free services and long feature lists. No product, even with a large opportunity, is ready to scale until you can show it working, with multiple customers paying the full price, to validate the business model. Word-of-mouth does not scale.

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Hockey Stick Intellectual Property Non-Compete Business Model 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 11, 2015

I see too many business plans that are really product plans for customers, touting free services and long feature lists. No product, even with a large opportunity, is ready to scale until you can show it working, with multiple customers paying the full price, to validate the business model. Word-of-mouth does not scale.

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Hockey Stick Intellectual Property Non-Compete Business Model 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

But RIM decided to hide all of that from their customers. While phrases like “mobile email and packet switching” didn’t mean a thing to RIM’s first customers, the “interactive pager” positioning proved important in attracting early adopters. Video Recording. It was the logical marriage of computers and video recording.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Most important slide: hockey stick Micro-scale results Key questions: who is the customer, and how do you know? who is the customer? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? or drive traffic to that profitable destination?) what is the potential market size?

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Professor VC

JUNE 7, 2018

I am a strong believer in the new school of entrepreneurship education (lean startup, customer discovery, etc.). In the session, I used a classic video from a talk that VC Mark Suster (Upfront Ventures and the great startup blog Both Sides of the Table ) gave at Stanford in 2010 that remains spot on (video embedded at end of post).

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 19, 2016

You get more traffic, more conversions, more money – in an endless hockey stick shaped cycle. Considering position #1 has been shown to get 33% of traffic, you can lose a lot of potential customers. I like to keep most test assets (videos, images, and audio) alive for these reasons. Of course, it’s not so simple.

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Small Business Force

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

Sure, you've got a business plan and it shows the proverbial "hockey stick" of growth. Then, let's suppose your plan shows that you expect to be able to convert 25% of those prospects to customers; roughly 5% of the total number of prospects contacted. A video with your product in it, suddenly goes viral.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation. The heart of the Cafepress presentation is the “ Lessons Learned from our Customers ” section. You already have the hockey stick and exponential growth.

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Up and Running

AUGUST 21, 2014

Every single page you have on your website needs to have a purpose and needs to have a functionality for that customer or that visitor. All that money that you spend in pay-per-click is going to go into your customer acquisition cost. In a real brick and mortar store, that wouldn’t happen.

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Metrics Startup Churn Rate Forecast 84

Up and Running

APRIL 28, 2015

This is a quick one sentence overview of your business and the value that you provide to your customers. We’re the Netflix for Video Games”. Use this slide to expand on who your ideal customer is and how many of them there are. How are you planning on getting customers’ attention and what will your sales process look like?

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Occam's Razor

MAY 31, 2016

Selling it recently to Simplilearn was a thrill, we are all so excited for the hockey stick growth that we expect MM to have now. My customer (you!). I also started Market Motive to transform education for digital disciplines with my friend John and Michael. But, the upside for me is that you can only find my content here.

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Duct Tape Marketing

JULY 26, 2017

Though I would say based on the numbers that I see it’s not like a hockey stick growth, but the growth in people’s desire to listen to the content and people’s desire to create terrific podcast content has really never been higher. Both written and video is a very visual medium. John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah.

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ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

There was this, too: Our opening video that gave away all the secrets of growing…growth: [This post contains video, click to play]. Joanna Wiebe: “Writing Mirrors: How to Use the Voice of the Customer to Write High-Converting Copy”. Have the interview on video and record it (with permission). Tell Don’t Sell.

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