View from Seed

MARCH 3, 2015

But even with that webinar’s success, we still had a lot of education to do in order to get people to understand what we did and even how we saw marketing in general, which we needed to do to generate demand and sales. But marketing should always be ahead of sales to alleviate pressure. I’m at Toast now and see something similar.

Marketing 120

Marketing Sales Cycle Startup CTO Hire 120

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SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

The point of sale (POS) industry for online and offline businesses is vast and pretty mature… not to mention, an area we’re familiar with from our prior investments, like Upserve. We were excited to get to know Dispense’s co-founder & CEO Kyla Moore earlier this year.

Cofounder 202

Cofounder B2B Early Stage Software 202

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FEBRUARY 4, 2016

The perks of being early in the marketplace are obvious: shorter sales cycles due to lack of competition, less competition for top talent, and so on. The challenge, however, is that there will be people—VCs, potential customers, and employees—who don’t understand the concept, or don’t see the value of your product.

Startup 120

Startup Cofounder Software Review Sales Cycle 120

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

The point of sale (POS) industry for online and offline businesses is vast and pretty mature… not to mention, an area we’re familiar with from our prior investments, like Upserve. We were excited to get to know Dispense’s co-founder & CEO Kyla Moore earlier this year.

Cofounder 156

Cofounder B2B Early Stage Software 156

View from Seed

APRIL 8, 2020

Stevens has held roles across verticals such as head of sales, marketing, product, and professional services at five startups over twenty years. He helps early-stage startups with sales, marketing, and general “go to market” topics. Understand Your Customer and Their Timelines. Retaining Customers in a Recession.

B2B 156

B2B Angel Investor Vertical Early Stage 156

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MARCH 24, 2021

Put differently, it’s amazing how crappy or bare bones products or services are when they start to show meaningful adoption and wildly happy customers.” Boxes vs Conveyor Belt Businesses “Box companies struggle to keep customers engaged and buying from the company over time. ” (Rob Go). ” (Melody Koh).

Seed Stage 177

Seed Stage Hiring IPO Analytics 177

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MARCH 29, 2016

But even well-prepared startups that have laid out strategies for scaling can find themselves scrambling in the face of a fast-growing customer base. Founders need to make sure the quality of the startup’s offerings remains high and provide adequate sales and service support for prospective customers and new users.

Metrics 120

Metrics Founder CTO Hire Technical Review 120

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JULY 19, 2022

Stelios has a compelling vision for nudgem that allows ecommerce merchants to gather data across the entire user journey and unify those data points to build enriched customer profiles for robust personalization.” RH: Who are your customers? ” – Melody Koh. Get to know the business. And your least?

eCommerce 156

eCommerce Greece Early Stage SMS 156

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APRIL 21, 2015

Joris Poort , Founder and CEO, Rescale (Software platform and hardware infrastructure to perform scientific and engineering simulations; undisclosed capital raised, per CrunchBase): We spent two and a half years writing custom software to run large-scale simulations on Boeing’s data centers. On Harvard Business School.

Founder 120

Founder Las Vegas Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

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SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

In particular, think about a few specific areas: Double down on how much customers are loving your product. This can take the form of customer quotes, NPS scores, usage and engagement metrics, negative churn, and referral metrics. Overall, at this point in the pitch, there should be a bit of a flip in the nature of the conversation.

Seed Stage 192

Seed Stage Metrics PR Leadership 192

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JUNE 21, 2022

We believe that Nuw represents a huge leap in this market by enabling a near frictionless peer-to-peer model that their early customers absolutely love!” Without the sale – a gamified fashion experience using what you have to build a whole nuw wardrobe and reduce fashion pollution. . RH: Who are your customers?

Ireland 156

Ireland Europe Early Stage Founder 156

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DECEMBER 6, 2018

In practice it is essentially an invention by retailer Alibaba who holds massive online sales on this day across their platform (Taobao, Tmall, etc). Other Chinese e-commerce companies like JD.com will likely do tens of billions in sales in their own one day or multi-day sales.

Demand 136

Demand China Sales Revenue 136

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MARCH 5, 2019

Early on, one of the key questions for all ride sharing companies was the breadth & depth of usage by their customers. If you look at the yearly cohort level though, you do see a pattern where on average people use Lyft more frequently the longer they are a customer. Analysis of Lyft S-1 Cohort Data.

Aggregator 120

Aggregator IPO .Net Revenue 120

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AUGUST 10, 2021

Hologram has grown to hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and attracted substantial capital all from its home base in Chicago. For Hologram this meant being heads down primarily focused on product development in early years, and then only scaling sales and marketing as the market opportunity across IoT really blossomed.

Chicago 177

Chicago Cofounder Miami B2B 177

View from Seed

JULY 17, 2019

Your company is likely both one step removed from many brand name B2B customers and a step removed from reporters and press that are excited to tell your story. The main benefits of this strategy is mainly around closing sales. This is a bummer, but you just need to accept this and figure out a way to combat it.

San Francisco 243

San Francisco Cofounder B2B Seed Stage 243

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NOVEMBER 18, 2020

But ops & customer support is another 17-20% of revenue and arguably you couldn’t run the business if you took that away. Sales and marketing has been 30%+ basically forever, though undoubtedly Airbnb has enough brand recognition and loyal customers that if you turned off marketing spend then revenue would drop but not to zero.

North America 401

North America IPO Prospectus Europe 401

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AUGUST 10, 2021

Hologram has grown to hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and attracted substantial capital all from its home base in Chicago. For Hologram this meant being heads down primarily focused on product development in early years, and then only scaling sales and marketing as the market opportunity across IoT really blossomed.

Chicago 156

Chicago Cofounder Miami B2B 156

View from Seed

MAY 16, 2019

Below the headline figures you can see that a key driver of revenue growth is “expansion” revenue of existing customers spending more each year with Slack. in MRR in 2019 from existing customers for every $1.00 in MRR from customers at the end of 2018. next 3–5yrs at least, barring massive changes in customer behavior).

Lock-up Period 168

Lock-up Period Retention Azure .Net 168

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MAY 28, 2020

Farmers need to know how much to grow, distributors need to know how much to order and sell to maximize sales and reduce spoilage, restaurants need to order more efficiently, and consumers are demanding more transparency and less waste. Online ordering and payment will replace the physical menu and check as we knew them.

Memphis 256

Memphis Distribution Bankruptcy Operations 256

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AUGUST 10, 2021

Hologram has grown to hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and attracted substantial capital all from its home base in Chicago. For Hologram this meant being heads down primarily focused on product development in early years, and then only scaling sales and marketing as the market opportunity across IoT really blossomed.

Chicago 136

Chicago Cofounder Miami B2B 136

View from Seed

JUNE 13, 2019

Chewy sells tens of thousands of products from many 3rd party brands, as well as its own private label brands (though latter remains <10% of sales). Embedded Growth From Existing Customers. One of the key features of Chewy’s business is the recurring nature of customer purchases. For example, Chewy’s 2015 cohort (e.g.

Leadership 214

Leadership .Net Revenue Acquisition 214

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MARCH 19, 2015

Before you invest big money on producing 100,000 feet of this line and put it on sale, you should test your assumption. You make your case with objective data: CTR, customer acquisition cost, etc. Note: I cover ILI and the just as important OLI — Ongoing Level of Interest — metrics in Pretotype It. ).

Product 120

Product Technical Review Marketing Lean 120

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JANUARY 5, 2021

He also famously championed a philosophy of not having salespeople , and though that ultimately wasn’t the case Butterfield and others did spread a commercial model centered more on bottoms-up adoption and customer success teams than traditional outbound sales which is now being replicated across many B2B software businesses.

Detroit 367

Detroit SEC Founder Affiliate 367

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JANUARY 11, 2018

This benefit changes the cash cycle for property owners, freeing up more capital to improve customers’ experiences with property improvements and additional services. For consumers renting a property from a Payfully customer, it’s not immediately apparent that Payfully affects their stay, but it changes the way they experience it.

B2B 120

B2B B2C Vertical Portfolio 120

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JULY 28, 2016

It can be used to convert customers, convince co-marketing partners to collaborate with you, and build loyalty longer term. Whether you’re pre-launch and need to build some initial interest or your marketing and sales machine is humming and you need a steady flow of prospects, it’s often a landing page at the center of it all.

Startup 136

Startup Seed Stage Cofounder Aggregator 136

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JUNE 5, 2018

Measure and manage your recruiting effort like a marketing/sales funnel. B2C companies usually have a strong grasp of their marketing funnel (and B2B companies with their sales funnel), and the best ones are relentless on constant fine-tuning and optimization. How to track your recruiting funnel like a pro.

Hiring 120

Hiring Portfolio Metrics B2C 120

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DECEMBER 17, 2015

What percent of your time do you spend head-down coding versus managing or scoping product or talking to customers? NV: What are some questions someone non-technical can ask in these cases? SV: How many lines of code have you written in the past year? How many hours in a day do you spend coding?

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Engineer Software Review Founder 120

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SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

Marketing Deep Dive: How are you acquiring those customers and why? All of these questions can be addressed in an additional slide that take a closer look at the (sales &) marketing function of the organization and the results to date. What channels have worked to date and done so cost-efficiently?

Seed Stage 166

Seed Stage Retention Restful Valuation 166

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APRIL 16, 2015

Get three paying customers. Similarly, proving sales friction can sometimes be done with very little actual product built. When Fred Shilmover started InsightSquared , he essentially sold an Excel model to his early customers that showed what their ultimate product would do. These might include: Bring on a technical co-founder.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Cofounder Early Stage Startup 120

View from Seed

MARCH 24, 2015

These are private sales of a minority position in these companies, not IPOs or acquisitions. In reality, the goal is to build a great company that creates huge value for users or customers and will keep doing so for a long, long time. In particular, I feel a few things really strongly: 1. $1

Valuation 120

Valuation Startup IPO Finance 120

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JUNE 7, 2019

Are customer so excited about it that they are telling other people about it and getting them hooked as well? Some companies can attract tons of happy customers, but have a hard time capturing the value that they create. Some companies can attract tons of happy customers, but have a hard time capturing the value that they create.

eCommerce 42

eCommerce Business Model Revenue Founder 42

View from Seed

JANUARY 13, 2015

monetizing a large audience or moving from end-user SaaS to enterprise sales). Someone with experience and relationships in the company’s target market are better at landing early customers, negotiating more favorable deals, building out and managing sales teams, and raising more money earlier to build a more robust product.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage B2B Distribution Early Stage 120

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APRIL 2, 2015

I even had one veteran entrepreneur pull me aside in the office to ask which vector icon best illustrated “more sales.” These all serve as doorways to different but important audiences that a founder needs to impress, ranging from investors to target customers or users to potential new hires.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Design Startup Early Stage 120

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MARCH 15, 2016

And then there’s the rest of us out there trying to get traction and go from 10 customers to 100 customers, $10,000 in MRR to $100,000 in MRR, etc. Getting traction is all about the hand-to-hand combat—one lead, one customer, one loyal fan at a time. Customer-Driven Copywriting. Treat Every Person as a Possible Fan.

Customer 174

Customer Startup Email Channel 174

View from Seed

JANUARY 30, 2020

For example, if are focused on a bottoms-up end user focused GTM strategy, you may not jive well with an investor that is very focused on top-down enterprise sales. Has this investor ever introduced you to a customer you closed or to a candidate that you gave an offer to? If not, did any of your other investors do this?

Due Diligence 195

Due Diligence Partner Term Sheet Finance 195

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JANUARY 8, 2015

Eventually, if the company succeeds, your product will succeed in solving that problem, while your blog and all content marketing should drive qualified visitors, subscribers, and/or customers to that product. Both should always align, and both must be consistently built as assets and as solutions for your customers.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Startup Audience Leadership 120

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

In 2010, we were recruiting for a Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Backupify, and it was clear that many of the people I was interviewing wanted the CEO role. Below, he gives an honest take about what he’d do differently and what he’d do again as a startup CEO. Startups are incredibly hard.

Founder 120

Founder Startup Cofounder Business Model 120