The Next Web

JANUARY 15, 2014

It went viral shortly after, but let’s back up. There’s never a guarantee that something will go viral, but there are ways to stack the deck so the chances increase. We saw a 450 percent increase in traffic to our site and a 150 percent increase in customer sign-ups over a three-day period. Running a startup can be a grind.

Viral 131

Viral Cofounder PR SEO 131

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 18, 2012

Category leaders do very well, while the #2, 3, 4… players struggle to attract customers and financing. In the past, the adoption of an enterprise tool was primarily driven by the quality and aggressiveness of a sales force to win over more customers. Let’s take my own portfolio as an example.

IP 163

IP Technical Review B2C Social Network 163

Up and Running

AUGUST 23, 2016

Now, Base Creative is one of Asia’s leading agencies, with a portfolio that includes Walmart, Cisco, and Hermes. In any niche, quality visual representation can impress a potential customer. In other words, if there’s any one way to control whether a post goes viral, quality is it. Brand activation.

Agile 60

Agile Viral Social Media Differentiation 60

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”. 4 times / 100 means if a customer uses your app frequently (say 10-20 times / day) then they are crashing nearly every day. Customer Acquisition. Do you have a customer referral program?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

mashable.com

JUNE 11, 2013

Your first product will likely be just a little bit ugly, and thats okay — its part of getting to market quickly and testing your idea in front of live customers. I watched a great video with Barbara Corcoran, called " How to get more customers, step 1." Assuming Virality. "A Services dont spontaneously go viral.

Cofounder 111

Cofounder Technical Review Startup Software Review 111

View from Seed

OCTOBER 18, 2017

It’s a daily, habitual product with a pretty large customer base. But these purchases are typically reserved for a small number of customers and are fairly infrequent, so don’t tend to be a great fit for our area of focus either. WeWork also falls into this category. How Can Seed-Stage Startups Become Ubiquitous or Habitual?

Vertical 166

Vertical Seed Stage Viral Portfolio 166

YoungUpstarts

JULY 13, 2017

Build Your Portfolio. With many creative and visual careers, much of your business will be generated by a portfolio of your work. A successful portfolio is one that can capture and convey your achievements in a way which is immediately visually compelling. It’s also good practice to engage in top-notch personal grooming.

Portfolio 124

Portfolio Viral Reputation Matching 124

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

Try charging customers for your product when you have 12 competitors giving the product away free finances by $20 million of VC. It’s also worth noting as data would suggest from this SVB venture funding report, lower costs to build tech & operate businesses implies the possibility of lower loss ratios in portfolios.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Technical Review LP Mobile 347

David Teten

FEBRUARY 26, 2012

Lakewood-Amedex ( www.lakewoodamedex.com ) is a development stage biopharmaceutical company that is developing a diverse portfolio of broad-spectrum anti-bacterials, anti-virals, and targeted therapeutics. Docphin was created to address the “find” problem which has challenged physicians for decades.

Technical Review 128

Technical Review New York Accredited Investor IP 128

Cracking the Code

MARCH 24, 2015

We were fortunate to host very talented speakers from our portfolio (Ilya Sukhar from FB/Parse, Steve Marx from Dropbox, Bill Ready from Braintree, Ali Rayl from Slack, Eric Wittman from Atlassian, Sam Mac Donnell from HotelTonight.) gathered at the event. It is not very polished but was designed for a fast read.

API 48

API Fractional CTO CTO Hire San Francisco 48

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 26, 2017

In my role as a mentor to entrepreneurs and an angel investor, I find that too many are stuck in this myth that a good pitch, and good marketing content, should consist of more product features, and more hype on customer benefits. Customers buy from people they trust, respect, and admire. We need more than facts to convince.

Marketing 173

Marketing Angel Investor Viral Audience 173

BeyondVC

OCTOBER 2, 2015

generate as much revenue as you can to prove that customers find value and are willing to pay. No matter what business you are in, you need to ensure that your ultimate customer (the end user) is happy and absolutely loves using your product. Since we are seed investors in enterprise technology, I am often asked this question.

Revenue 60

Revenue Customer Metrics Aggregator 60

reidhoffman.org

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

It doesn’t matter whether an entrepreneur is in our portfolio, whether we’re considering an investment, or whether we’re casually meeting for the first time. We are the leader in the professional domain with viral growth. This is mostly a mistake slide because customer slides are more appropriate for enterprise pitches.

Entrepreneur 111

Entrepreneur Revenue Viral Networking 111

ReadWriteStart

APRIL 4, 2023

These fees are charged to cover the costs of operating the crowdfunding platform, including marketing, payment processing, and customer support. A campaign should only be used if your product has a “viral” quality to it. Nonetheless, a successful crowdfunding campaign might act as a portfolio to show to potential investors.

Startup 141

Startup Campaign Cofounder Venture Capital 141

Brandanew

NOVEMBER 2, 2015

Stage 2 Interest – Grabbing customer attention, getting their contact and building interaction with them. Stage 4 Sales – Converting your email leads to a paying customer and creating loyalty ( more ). It may be a authority blog or an arresting portfolio of images or even a YouTube channel depending on what you do.

Viral 100

Viral Social Media SEO Later Stage 100

View from Seed

APRIL 23, 2015

This is doing right by both your company and your customers. Their business models are, in many cases, focused on outlier exits within the portfolio. It’s an insufficient approach to gaining customer or user traction, which is the more important thing, but it’s also insufficient in most VC pitches.

Founder 120

Founder Distribution Viral Seed Stage 120

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 12, 2017

https://medium.com/media/cc969482e7abf6b75d3c0958c8ee409d/href I moved to Los Angeles in 2007 and as a VC who had built his career as a programmer, database designer, program manager, CEO then VP Products at Salesforce, I wanted to build a portfolio of software investments. I asked Jonah in my interview how he became this viral guru.

Media 210

Media Los Angeles Russia Viral 210

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2010

Other players such as Obopay have set out to focus on mobile person-to-person cash transfers, mFoundry (a GRP portfolio company) has focused on mobile banking and a mobile wallet and one of my favorite companies m-via is focusing on mobile remittances (right now between the US and Mexico). Marketo competes with MarketBrite and Eloqua.

Venture Capital 270

Venture Capital Cofounder Spain San Diego 270

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2020

You really want to see how your company treats its employees, treats its customers, treats the environment, taking a longer-term view." You really want to see how your company treats its employees, treats its customers, treats the environment, what's taking a longer term view. You really want to see the whole system.

Technical Review 68

Technical Review Software Review Finance Technology 68

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 23, 2011

The sales productivity ratio (measured with the Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC ratio) are also fairly similar for the two groups (except for a small cap dip in Q4 09) and therefore do not explain the difference Why is scale so much rewarded by public markets? Portfolio. (3). Popular Media: the key to viral marketing.

Software Review 101

Software Review Technical Review Valuation Europe 101

abovethecrowd.com

OCTOBER 17, 2013

Customers are first asked to fill out an in depth profile to help identify their size, style, and preferences. Then, on the customer’s requested date, the company sends a personally styled offering (a Fix) of five items (previously unseen) to the individual to try on in her own home. Katrina herself is equally impressive.

eCommerce 62

eCommerce Technical Review North America San Francisco 62

David Teten

MAY 1, 2013

The ff Venture Capital portfolio is evidence of how much we believe this, e.g., our companies Alerts.com , Gobbler.com , Identified.com , Patents.com , Phone.com , and Plated.com. However, they remain key to your email identity, and fundamental to your marketing and even capital-raising. A bad domain name can sink you.

Naming 114

Naming Semantic Venture Capital Startup 114

Austin Startup

AUGUST 22, 2018

This is research that Google conducts because it’s information that its advertising customers would find useful. Keep in mind that authenticity increasingly matters to customers. Design Typecasting IRL A very talented friend who designs brands took on a restaurant project that went a little viral. He was stuck.

Design 48

Design New York City Cofounder Bankruptcy 48

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

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

Cracking the Code

MAY 25, 2010

As an Eloqua customer and just getting done reading the Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws of Cloud Computing and SaaS and am working on being able to share it potential clients. Portfolio. (3). Popular Media: the key to viral marketing. Tuesday, May 25, 2010. "10 Labels: design , internet , sales and marketing. Super-Duper site!

Software Review 74

Software Review Cloud IPO Jordan 74

BeyondVC

FEBRUARY 12, 2014

While this sounds simple, there is a ton of work that goes into helping our portfolio companies get to a successful Series A. Finally, we try to prewire the Series A investment by getting our portfolio companies to meet with the right partners at the right firms early on before they even need money.

Seed Stage 110

Seed Stage Agile Viral API 110

This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 1, 2020

Two, if you are lucky, you are still being paid to do a job—a job that, for founders, marketers and sales teams, means connecting with customers during a terrible health crisis and a recession. Start with the customer in mind first—ask what content you would want to consume if you were them. Here are some tips: 1. What do they need?

Marketing 138

Marketing Channel Video Viral 138

Version One Ventures

MAY 30, 2013

For startups, the message is that you should develop your business in the long tail, focusing on those customers in your market that the incumbents don’t care about. First, customers in the long tail usually require a smaller feature set which means that you can get a MVP into the market faster.

Sales Cycle 141

Sales Cycle Startup Viral Agile 141

mashable.com

OCTOBER 27, 2010

You can also get great recommendations from your existing network; just be sure to research portfolios, websites and references thoroughly before making a decision to work with a particular developer. Familiarize yourself with the agency’s portfolio and get recommendations from colleagues whenever possible.

Small Business 104

Small Business Technical Review Social Media Software Review 104

Occam's Razor

JUNE 11, 2014

Zappos has great return conditions and very good customer service. That gets it xx million customers. But if they decided not have a Motel 6 experience, rather step up to a Hilton, or God forbid the Four Seasons, could they have xxx million customers (and improve margins while they are at it)? other stores/brands).

Design 150

Design Software Review Technical Review Mobile 150

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 9, 2009

One way to measure this productivity is to look at the Customer Acqusition Cost ratio that I have defined in a previous post. Just some food for thought as you build your investment portfolio. In other words, how much of the decline in revenue growth is due to signing up fewer customer vs lower revenues from each new customer.

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review Cloud Europe 48

crowdSPRING Blog

JULY 17, 2015

How to Optimize Facebook Custom Tabs for More Conversions [link] crowdspring.co/1KKEEQh Boost Your Chances of Going Viral on YouTube [link] crowdspring.co/1HdNBO8 The Best 10 Portfolio Themes Around | Top Design Magazine – Web Design and Digital Content [link] crowdspring.co/1HLmcVe Creating a Survey? 1NLI8zX .

Small Business 48

Small Business Design Social Media Cuba 48

mashable.com

NOVEMBER 3, 2010

Kapor Capital’s expansive portfolio includes Bit.ly The firm’s portfolio includes the likes of Gist , Lijit , Brightleaf, Memeo, SimpleGeo , StockTwits and Zynga. Gary Vaynerchuk: Personal branding master and creator of Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk is also an angel investor with an expanding portfolio of companies.

Angel Investor 80

Angel Investor Startup San Francisco Social Media 80

Babbling VC

DECEMBER 5, 2010

Unfortunately I made the mistake of thinking I knew the customer or user. These business would scale on the sheer virality of their communities. Unfortunately, when the products were launched, we had realized that they really weren't our customers. I had a business in the portfolio doing fairly well. We never led rounds.

Technical Review 76

Technical Review Europe Portfolio Germany 76

Cracking the Code

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

A few days ago, Bessemer West Coast SaaS Practice - David Cowan , Byron Deeter and myself, hosted a CFO Dinner for our SaaS portfolio at John Bentleys in Redwood City. Fifteen CFOs participated - about half of them from Bessemer portfolio SaaS companies (Cornerstone On Demand, Intacct. Rethink vertical segmentation: Healthcare?

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review Valuation Portfolio 48

Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 1, 2009

Portfolio. (3). Popular Media: the key to viral marketing. The recession created opportunities! anecdotes. (13). Cloud Computing. (1). Europe Consumer. (1). Favorite Podcasts. (1). internet. (6). McKinsey highlights. (1). Online Gaming. (1). sales and marketing. (10). Small and medium businesses. (2). software. (10). Venture Capital.

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review Cloud Europe 48