A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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WP Engine passes $100M in revenue and secures $250M investment from Silver Lake

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Late last year we passed $100M in annual recurring revenue. That revenue is in on 75,000 customers, earned through the hard work of 500 employees across six offices on three continents. Every day, 5% of the entire online world visits a customer running on the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform.

Engineer 152
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Who’s lying?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Revenue from your billing system compared to cash flows from your bank statements. Revenue from your billing system compared to cash flows from your bank statements. Number of active customers from Stripe, and from your User Portal. Once I discovered our credit card processor was delaying our cash receipts.)

Analytics 248
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Pricing determines your business

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. Consider the consequences of these monthly pricing possibilities: $0/mo means your goal is to maximize growth (trust and usage) instead of revenue. simple enough to be self-service). Again, like shared hosting companies.)

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Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

They’re a selfish ploy, tricking people who thought they were customers into being alpha testers. Founders explain failures with things like “our two main competitors did [thing] to us” or “customers didn’t understand [our point of view].” Sometimes that’s product design so thrilling that every customer spreads the word to five more.

Restful 202
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Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY the damn thing?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

I say "get off your ass and produce hard evidence that customers are in your future light cone? ". Since I'm my own target customer, I already know what to build.". By definition, if you're a startup founder you're explicitly not your customer. Our customers did a lot of stuff that I would never do. We think differently.

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Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Okay okay, "Planning == Bad," but the supposed benefits of planning are still important: designing for profitability, understanding your customers and competitors, focusing your attention, deciding what's worth doing next, changing directions, and ensuring the founders agree on important issues. But is that really the case?

Startup 315
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Which is better: Many customers at low price-point or few at high price?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Sacha demonstrated the benefits of selling many copies of an eBook at a low price, while Jarrod pointed out the advantages of higher prices, bringing in more revenue with 1/6th the number of units sold. Company A has 1,000 customers each paying $10/mo. Company B has 10 customers each paying $1,000/mo. Which is better?

Customer 320