Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

This preference isn’t necessarily due to market size, but rather the structure of the market: are there only a few dozen customers that might buy your product or are there thousands, or even tens of thousands of potential customers? How do we differentiate between B2B start-ups that sell to many vs. sell to a few?

Fractional CTO 154

Fractional CTO Software Review Viral Sales Cycle 154

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully-formed go to market function.”. A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. Organize events in your vertical. AskAnything.VC Fundraising.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

Typically, this value falls into one of three categories: Differentiation: The features you’re looking to build or acquire will help you stand out among your competitors. Market maturity: Conversely, competitors are investing in a new featureset and thus, they’ve become table stakes. You need to build or buy these features to keep up.

Software Review 96

Software Review Technical Review Software Acquisition 96

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

Customer Development 232

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 232

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 305

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 305

David Teten

JANUARY 9, 2018

He looked at his resume, and asked just one question: “ What’s your edge? ” My friend got the job because his answer was differentiated, credible, and backed up by a history of investing success. Many VCs focus on specific verticals, usually based on the sector in which a VC initially made her reputation. – Reputation.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Private Equity Silicon Valley Differentiation 60

David Teten

JANUARY 9, 2018

He looked at his resume, and asked just one question: “ What’s your edge? ” My friend got the job because his answer was differentiated, credible, and backed up by a history of investing success. Many VCs focus on specific verticals, usually based on the sector in which a VC initially made her reputation. – Reputation.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Private Equity Silicon Valley Differentiation 60

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

Route One: High LTV per user The exact definition of a “high” user LTV depends on the specific vertical, so it’s typically better to analyze the ratio between Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and the Life Time Value of the customer. As a VC, the biggest challenge in evaluating LTV models is that metrics can dramatically change at scale.

Churn Rate 168

Churn Rate Viral Acquisition Cofounder 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Was the company attempting to introduce faster and better products to an existing market? No, not really.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 153

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 5, 2010

This was in large part due to the marketing efforts of Jason that created a great top end of the funnel (100+ companies applied) and the herculean efforts of Tyler Crowley who spent days going through all of the submissions and serving up 5 very interesting companies. Then let’s hope both startups can build national practices.

San Francisco 254

San Francisco Technical Review Los Angeles Software Review 254

Version One Ventures

JULY 21, 2020

The startup market evolves, and so do we as VCs. However, most businesses are looking for network effects, so they are less of a differentiator than they were a decade ago. No matter the vertical, geography, business model, macro or micro trends, entrepreneurs form the nucleus of a generational company.

Founder 213

Founder Vertical Differentiation Portfolio 213

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

So you’ve started a business: you’ve made a great product, achieved product-market fit and have an extraordinary road map laid out. But to build a scalable business you need more than just product-market fit. Many lack intuitive financial sense that can help them build a great company once they achieve product-market fit.

Founder 148

Founder Valuation Dividend Startup 148

mashable.com

OCTOBER 11, 2011

10 Essential PR Tips for Startups. Sign up for her course on “ PR for Startups ” to learn more about getting media coverage for your fledgling business. Not to mention, early-stage startups usually only employ a few people focused on product and development. Read on for my startup tips.

PR 103

PR Startup Social Media Technical Review 103

VC Cafe

APRIL 27, 2011

10 things VCs can do to differentiate themselves and provide more value to potential investments – based on feedback from dozens of entrepreneurs. Despite the VC’s obvious disadvantage in the early stages, marketing and differentiation of venture capital funds is limited today. Can they teach each other something?

Venture Capital 90

Venture Capital Differentiation Incubator Angel Investor 90

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

What Markets? My job was to figure out what markets Ardent should target, who were the key customers in these markets and what applications these customers had to have. See the previous Ardent posts for context.) A supercomputer could be a 100x faster.

Silicon Valley 163

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 163

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

We believe that it’s good to be contrarian to the rest of the market and other investors, but not to be conflicted in a partnership where alignment should be more important. In a deep ocean of early stage investors, it’s important to signal to the market that you have specific areas of interest, even if you look to invest in everything.

Cofounder 180

Cofounder Portfolio Capital Gains Vertical 180

Duct Tape Marketing

MAY 25, 2023

The Power Of Digital Strategy In The Digital Age written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Marketing Podcast with Mike Lenox In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast , I interview Mike Lenox. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don't.

ChatGPT 69

ChatGPT Technical Review Generative AI Technology 69

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 23, 2011

My advice was to keep doing the SharePoint solution development and consulting work the company does today and develop the store project as a side effort until the market is ready. He is heading straight into an intensely competitive market without adequate differentiation or competitive positioning.

Spain 115

Spain Entrepreneur India San Francisco 115

Start Up Blog

APRIL 29, 2013

Startups are lucky that they can’t afford research, so they test in market and land upon on ideas that would never fly based on what we think or what focus groups would respond with. Given technology is becoming the major form of market access – it should now be viewed in the same realm as access to medicine and education.

Uruguay 123

Uruguay Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 123

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 26, 2010

Because if you’re truly that early / novel there’s a good chance that you’re too early and will spend lots of time / money educating the market. which features do you believe your customers care about and where you’re try to differentiate? Remember: being too early is the same as being wrong.

Hockey Stick 313

Hockey Stick Differentiation AJAX Vertical 313

cdixon.org

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret. I have a personal diligence rule that when speaking to people at large companies, the facts that they tell you are very useful but their opinions about startup ideas no more valuable than any other smart person’s opinions). Very, very few markets have room for only one player.

Stealth 68

Stealth Startup NDA Cofounder 68

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

The company was founded to build games with embedded video to bring Hollywood stories, characters, and narratives to a market where “shoot and die” twitch games were in vogue. So I hired a VP of Marketing from Sega, one of the video game platforms on which our games would run.

Silicon Valley 221

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 221

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Expand the market to new domains. New domains would include attracting business customers as well as individuals, taking your online business into retail, and diving into verticals. These may sound straightforward, but they can be deceptively hard to implement, perhaps why so few companies consistently outperform the market.

Vertical 167

Vertical Differentiation Restful Audience 167

Hippoland

APRIL 3, 2016

It’s super annoying when investors say your market size is small. So, you do all this extra research – you look for Gartner’s excerpts and articles about projected market sizes, etc, and you come back with research to argue that your market is much bigger. Unfortunately, it’s ineffective.

Differentiation 48

Differentiation Marketing Vertical Software 48

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 26, 2018

A good business or startup name sets the right tone for your business and comes with some of the following benefits: Brand awareness. Depending on your vertical, total cost of business name change can run into millions of dollars like the attempt to change UTA to TDU. Differentiation in this case is key. Brand recognition.

Naming 92

Naming eCommerce Startup Database 92

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2011

Startup after Iron Planet? (6:00 Yes an online video startup in ‘99 that helped large media companies encode and distribute their videos through portals. So it is a combination of markets and people. The contextual ad market was attractive. What gets you interested in a startup? (16:35-19:35). 6:00 – 7:30).

Vertical 265

Vertical Curation Boston Burn Rate 265

Austin Startup

APRIL 25, 2017

Even by July 2014, Facebook’s core application had effectively saturated the US market, with more than 80% of US adults on Facebook. And to top it all off, Snap isn’t offering voting rights to public market investors, which should discount the stock price further. It’s up from 40 minutes in July 2014.

Valuation 48

Valuation Technical Review Forecast Social Network 48

Hearpreneur

JUNE 26, 2016

Each day some new story comes out about some creative marketing plan that takes the cake and drives huge traffic to a business. Whether you pull off unique marketing stunts, have products which need no introduction or style yourself as an innovative CEO, having a defining quality is what customers will notice. #1

Entrepreneur 91

Entrepreneur Technical Review Harvest Portfolio 91

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series/ebook, over the years I’ve noticed that I tend to frequently share certain Lucky7 posts with entrepreneurs we’ve backed , team members at data.world, or other startup investors I know. This is a huge recruiting year for data.world as we’ve found our product-market fit in the enterprise.

Software Review 48

Software Review Sales Cofounder Analytics 48

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Bootstrapped startup Omnisend carved out a $19 million niche in an already saturated vertical. With a tactical understanding of two different marketing strategies: demand generation and lead generation. Lead generation marketers capitalize on the interest demand generation creates.

Lead Generation 107

Lead Generation Demand Audience eCommerce 107

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.

Customer Development 217

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 217

Hearpreneur

NOVEMBER 20, 2022

Thanks to Cassandra Shuck, Tola Marketing & Creative ! #2- I love learning and for me founding my own ed-tech startup is like learning on steroids. Customers will order from a specific vertical only so often, so we started thinking like our audience to address their expanding needs and keep them engaged and doing business with us.

Entrepreneur 70

Entrepreneur Asia LLC Community 70

The Next Web

FEBRUARY 24, 2014

With a little knowledge of some of the key cultural differences and unique properties of the local tech scene, Russia can easily become one of the most attractive tech markets in the world for investors. Russia currently has the largest online market in Europe. Russia in numbers. There is no secret Russian handshake that lands a deal.

Russia 140

Russia Europe Government Vertical 140

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

It’s Episode 3 my little “ Loveline for startups. ” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

The Equity Kicker

AUGUST 28, 2012

These acquisitions tell us very clearly that the world’s largest software companies now clearly understand the benefits of leveraging social in their enterprise software and new startups in these markets will need to cleverly navigate the existing players if they are to succeed.

Vertical 94

Vertical Acquisition eCommerce Flash 94

Mucker Lab

DECEMBER 2, 2015

Most brilliant “Internet of Things” ideas are quicksand for capital unless you have the branding, vertical integration and customer lock-in that Apple achieved. 20 years ago, a majority of “Sand Hill” venture capital went into enterprise-focused startups. Only the most daring and risk-tolerant investors bothered with consumer startups.

Vertical 60

Vertical Widget Distribution China 60

Cracking the Code

JANUARY 19, 2016

What makes a good VC for a SaaS startup? SaaS startups need to have a VC that understands the SaaS model, including market development strategies, upsell dynamics, sales incentive plan, etc. Lastly, SaaS startups can only thrive if they become leaders in the US. More and more champions will be built out of Europe.

API 48

API Silicon Valley Europe Differentiation 48