Hunter Walker

DECEMBER 11, 2023

It might ‘exit’ again at a later point (anything from a sale to an IPO), but it’s no long dependent on VC funding. Is it an evolution or a revolution for your business and customers? Our customers were growing and hiring quickly, and as a result our business was growing fast.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Equity DC Leveraged Buyout 78

ConversionXL

JUNE 2, 2022

Some see it as a sales tactic, while others view it as a content marketing strategy. Account-based marketing is an approach where marketing and sales work together to nurture target accounts and convert or retain customers. It needs perfect alignment from sales, marketing, and executive leaders across the organization.

Customer 98

Customer Marketing Channel Acquisition 98

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

Even for later-stage companies with predictable financials, the lack of liquidity, audited financials, and standardized metrics creates real challenges to scaling quantitative investing. I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales. Pitchbot.vc 3) Originate investments.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Gust

JANUARY 4, 2012

Later stage companies have some additional concerns: What favorable impact could IP have for PR, marketing and investor relations purposes, or as an attraction to potential acquirors? Sales and marketing plans , lists of prospects, supplier and subcontractor relationships, pricing data, media buying plans and strategies, etc.

Intellectual Property 143

Intellectual Property IP Startup United States 143

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

Even when you do sign-up initial customers it’s still not clear that your company will be a success and you’re still likely paying yourself under market rates. In many cases a company could or should be sold early and this can reap great rewards for the executive team and early investors. ” (Warren Buffett).

Technical Review 150

Technical Review Liquidation Preference Silicon Valley IP 150

www.ashmaurya.com

AUGUST 29, 2012

You can learn more about his approach to developing customer relationships in his new book Cold Calling Early Customers. There are many channels that can produce your first early customers and contacts, but the one I see most often is cold email. He is a Ph.D. dropout who spent time working for Google.

Email 52

Email Customer Tennessee Software Review 52

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 15, 2015

Give customers some great reasons to switch from a competitor product. Get a foothold and a customer base before people notice you. To keep team members connected to their users, everyone did customer support one day a week. Every customer wants something a little different. Lecture 19: Part One: Sales and Marketing.

Cofounder 100

Cofounder Delaware Startup Technical Review 100

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 3, 2021

Still, you need to find some way to pull your company out of this early-stage quicksand. You’ll build momentum with marketing, advertising, sales, and other strategies optimized for quick, self-sustaining growth. Many new businesses have a small customer base, limited revenue, and a finite amount of funding to work with.

Early Stage 125

Early Stage PPC Retention Churn Rate 125

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 28, 2019

Your customers are humans — right? A robust knowledge of your target demographic will make it easier to convert sales. This is just old-fashioned marketing expertise—the art of demonstrating why your product’s specific features match up with the customer’s specific needs. Try offering shoppers: How-to guides.

Audience 164

Audience Algorithm eCommerce Cofounder 164

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 9, 2021

The classic example of this is Amazon’s customer Q&A feature. Advocates for the feature then ran a simple experiment by emailing a number of customers, asking them if they were interested in asking and answering questions to and from other customers, and directing them to a mockup website. Sometimes, it’s not obvious.

Leadership 42

Leadership Technical Review Cofounder Later Stage 42

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

Your blog is getting traffic, your social media has lots of followers and you know your product is good and helpful to your customers. Not just the specs, but show it in use so the customer can understand how it works. You’ve done everything right for your ecommerce store. Yet, conversions are stagnant.

eCommerce 194

eCommerce Video Conversion Channel 194

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 6, 2014

You can ask VCs, customers, competitors or somebody who had a similar job function in the same general community. CFOs often know the other CFOs and same for heads of sales, marketing, tech, etc. I know that in later-stage growth equity deals some firms even hire third-parties who will do the reference calls.

Technical Review 302

Technical Review Hiring Later Stage Employee 302

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 31, 2012

Jeff (also an HBS alum) co-teaches the LTV course with Professor Eisenmann about a student of theirs who had written a blog post about sales taking on some of my previous assertions. That student is Erin McCann who formerly worked in sales at Google, so she has some ground to stand on in her assertions. Specifically, 1.

Startup 319

Startup Early Stage Sales Cofounder 319

OnlyOnce

MARCH 14, 2011

We all knew if the feature or function that the client was asking for was within the realm of the possible. • We were very, very focused on creating customers and revenue —We were a startup. You’ll build custom code for certain clients. You find that you have to support channel partners as well as direct customers (or vice versa).

Software Review 67

Software Review Development Team Review Later Stage Technical Review 67

Berkonomics

AUGUST 3, 2023

Some businesses require very little capital and the founder can self-finance the enterprise and retain 100% of its ownership and control from ignition through liquidity event (startup through sale). For those of you who fit that description, nice work. There is a lot to say about retaining control.

Private Equity 118

Private Equity Valuation Cap Table Accredited Investor 118

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

Here’s why that is important: when users are on your website you want to convert them to become paying customers. It’s true that the carrier then gets their huge slice for being the billing and payment engine but the idea is that you as a website more than make up for this in terms of customer conversion. 4mm in Series A.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 5, 2014

If you’re a late stage company trying to penetrate a new market (think Warby Parker trying to expand internationally), we have people who can help with that. We’re not mainly for B2B companies or later stage companies or anything like that. We have the ability to help excellent companies throughout their life cycles.

New York 114

New York Technical Review Networking Advisory Board 114

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them. In sales there are also three rules: Qualify, qualify, qualify.

Term Sheet 332

Term Sheet Due Diligence Campaign Sales 332

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

What startup stage do they typically invest in? Do they “get&# Customer Development ? What Startup Stage Do they Invest In? And some larger funds that specialize in later stage deals may have a partner or two who likes to invest at this stage. Do They Get Customer Development? Lean Startups ?

Founder 232

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 232

David Teten

JULY 25, 2017

We also have a better known brand than some of our early stage companies, so we can leverage that to help source talent. Most importantly, we have regular meetings with later-stage VCs and enterprise clients both in the US and internationally to discuss our companies which fit their investment mandates.

Portfolio 60

Portfolio Technical Review Private Equity Database 60

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2018

If your teaser deck was 8–12 pages it would likely include: team market problem why your solution solves this problem progress to date (funding, team, customers, revenue if significant) TAM (market sizing / why this will be valuable) Your “meeting deck” should just be an expansion of what was in your teaser deck. whether they invest or not.

Portfolio 261

Portfolio IP Later Stage Email 261

View from Seed

MARCH 19, 2015

He’s dubbed the approach “ pretotyping ,” and it shares many of the same principles as both its similar-sounding (if later-stage) cousin, prototyping, as well as the more well-known lean startup movement. You make your case with objective data: CTR, customer acquisition cost, etc.

Product 120

Product Technical Review Marketing Lean 120

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 26, 2022

The startup didn’t work out, but I found ways to be around it, whether it was on the sales side in Goldman for a few years. You’re going out to acquire customers. And these things are dynamic as they see real-time signals from how customers behave when they’re paying back bills. Jonathan Siddharth. David Zhang.

Partner 132

Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 9, 2022

It’s never a good thing to be selling a product for a loss on every sale before you even pay your overhead, or selling something that’s a vitamin, and not medicine. Grow the f**k out of the business while making sure you’re making money on each customer, client, etc. If so, yeah, then I’d say I’d be concerned. But, you know what?

Stock 97

Stock Marketing Valuation Later Stage 97

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 30, 2010

We have a good sense of what later stage VCs are going to look for and can help think about how much you need to raise to get additional interest down the line. Why not ask people who may have entrepreneurial, operational, sales, marketing, etc. Sometimes, we even have good product feedback. backgrounds at startups?

Technical Review 113

Technical Review Due Diligence Venture Capital Later Stage 113

View from Seed

JUNE 5, 2018

The quest for building such hiring machine is universal across companies at various stages. Keeping that in mind, we designed the program in such way that later-stage portfolio companies such as Dia&Co and MealPal could gain insights alongside younger ones such as Voodoo Manufacturing , ExecThread , and Virgent Realty.

Hiring 120

Hiring Portfolio Metrics B2C 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

” Here’s the logic: We (Rackspace) have extremely efficient mechanisms for acquiring customers. When you add up all our costs in Sales and Marketing (SaaS metric: CAC), the result is very small compared to the total revenue we’ll earn from than customer over the next few years (SaaS metric: LTV). Some say 3.

Metrics 238

Metrics Revenue Flash Later Stage 238

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 12, 2013

Sites like KickStarter have for years offered rewards and pre-sales for crowd investments, but real equity won’t be legalized until sometime this year for people other than accredited investors. A pivot is a quick change of direction or strategic correction by a startup, based on customer feedback or changes in technology and the marketplace.

Entrepreneur 274

Entrepreneur Accredited Investor Silicon Valley Angel Investor 274

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 21, 2010

Consider it a sales & marketing expense for them. They want to lock in future clients at an early stage. When you’re doing biz dev deals or customer deals you need to start with a list of the things that you think could go wrong or that you want to protect against. And Brad Feld. Not the other way around.

Southern California 318

Southern California Silicon Valley IP Stock Options 318

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 5, 2012

If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, fishing for money is a waste of time for both of you. For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts.

Investment Bankers 241

Investment Bankers Venture Capital Startup Initial Public Offering 241

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2011

The awareness phase is where other later-stage investors start to notice the momentum, bringing additional money in and pushing prices higher. million in 2010 sales). million in 2010 sales). Obviously, some of these companies will have hundreds of millions of customers, unprecedented revenue growth and great profits.

Silicon Valley 330

Silicon Valley Stealth Valuation Mississippi 330

Up and Running

AUGUST 17, 2015

This is particularly useful if you are catering to a millennial customer. Business school provided them the perfect opportunity to work closely with their target customer. One drastically underrated advantage of founding a company while in business school is access to a very large test group that can help you validate your idea.

Entrepreneur 60

Entrepreneur Cofounder Angel Investor eCommerce 60

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 12, 2013

He shared tons of information about how how they were using marketing to quantitatively make marketing decisions at HauteLook and acquire customers for prices that were far cheaper than similar companies. I instantly hit it off with Greg because we was a fountain of knowledge. On each subsequent meeting I’d learn a little bit more.

Partner 360

Partner Las Vegas Los Angeles San Francisco 360

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 18, 2016

Investors know that valuations at startup early stages are negotiable, but they do expect that smart entrepreneurs understand the top three elements of a startup valuation would include the following. First priority is real revenue, customers and contracts. Get premium for billion-dollar markets with double-digit growth rates.

Intellectual Property 120

Intellectual Property Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Startup 120

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development. But most commonly these are customer relationships: the operating unit becomes one of the startup’s first or largest customers. Are they good sales people?

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 13, 2010

If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, the courting is a waste of time for both of you. For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts. Growth stage.

Investment Bankers 231

Investment Bankers Venture Capital Startup Initial Public Offering 231

Growthink Blog

MAY 10, 2012

You see, equity capital is raised in stages or rounds. The five main stages include the following: 1. Early Stage Investment (Series A & B) 4. Later Stage Investment (Series C, D, and so on) 5. Put everything else on your "wish list" to buy with revenues from sales or additional financing.

Equity 88

Equity Mezzanine Later Stage Venture Capital 88