Cracking the Code

MARCH 24, 2015

Successful on your platform but not sticking to guidelines, can also affect the rest of your customers - you need to help developers become more successful - can you outsource support in an authentic way?

API 48

API Fractional CTO CTO Hire San Francisco 48

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

The last quarter of the 19 th century, what Perez calls the Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering, saw the growth of America’s first national corporations in railroads, steel, telegraph, meatpacking, and industrial equipment. The railroads initially served a region of the country, but very quickly grew into nationwide companies.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Venture Capital United States Technical Review 120

ConversionXL

MAY 22, 2017

After that, the adoption of the cloud as a more scalable and cost-effective approach allowed small/medium business to build CRMs around very specific market needs and establish dominance in new vertical segments. Just like cars with a great engine but no wheels. Your marketing is always as good as your data.

Customer 92

Customer Marketing Artificial Inteligence Clickthrough 92

Haystack

DECEMBER 29, 2018

Also during this time, the underlying metrics in that business can change positively, potentially trapping companies to accept the initially-agreed upon valuation. During this time, there’s financial leverage used in the transaction to help buffer the firm’s cost of capital (e.g. 2/ The Scooter Phenomenon.

Technical Review 165

Technical Review Venture Capital Russia China 165

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 27, 2013

At WP Engine a series of events, different in detail but equal in incredulity, happens with the constancy of the sand-falls of the beach. Where is the space for true innovation and exploration in a land of metrics optimization? How do you realize you can move vertically when your compass measures only two dimensions?

Metrics 225

Metrics Vertical Algorithm Demand 225

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JANUARY 6, 2011

Ed Baker of Friend.ly , a fun way to meet new people, is focused on driving innovation: Encourage more product suggestions from our engineering team. Our engineers often come up with great ideas, and they are the most productive when they work on these ideas. We will measure our traction in three ways: 1.

Stealth 60

Stealth Startup Lean Cofounder 60

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

I first met Steve when he was VP of Engineering at Centerline software, a software development tools startup, and I was a junior in college. In founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer wanted to take his hard core engineering skills and apply them to vertical search in travel. Big Data meets travel…in 2000.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. The VC Software Stack — the Untouched Vertical. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian. What a great idea.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. Two paragraphs, Five bullets.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Occam's Razor

OCTOBER 14, 2014

Conversion rate is one of those metrics that I strongly encourage you only create benchmarks for from your own data. One of the easiest ways to improve outcomes on your website, it is great to make sure that people don't say this via your bounce rate metric : I came, I puked, I left. None of the four other methods are advisable.

Analytics 133

Analytics Vertical Metrics Web 133

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

This is when metrics come into play. See Also: The Top 10 Tools for Tracking Your Web Metrics. This optimization results in emails with an open rate greater than 60 percent and a click through rate greater than 20 percent—an unimaginable metric if we were just sending emails blindly. Successful and failed experiments.

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Lean Case provides standard business models & metrics, so you can apply a standard approach to business planning, modeling, and profitability tracking. The simplest way to track a company’s performance: have them give you access to their internal metrics dashboard. the Untouched Vertical. The VC Software Stack?—?the

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. What’s more it also required a large team of smart engineers that had experience in programming cross-platform software. This is the flip-side of the above advice, but when you start seeing your metrics turn positive, be prepared to invest and grow rapidly.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

ConversionXL

JULY 8, 2020

Google is the biggest search engine ad platform in the world. This is a subheading for your ad, separated from the first title by a vertical bar. Inside the competition tab, you can peek at some of the key advertising performance metrics of your competitors, such as impression share, average position, and many more.

PPC 100

PPC Matching Software Review Campaign 100

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 14, 2012

Bonus: Add paid options like Radian6 or Trackur for deeper listening metrics. Find and signup for an email service provider (ESP) – I can recommend Infusionsoft, MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber and Vertical Response as I’ve used each. Investigate social settings in your CRM and add Rapportive to your email.

Software Review 74

Software Review Social Network Social Media Analytics 74

Austin Startup

APRIL 25, 2017

In order to achieve 20x growth, Snap needs grow both of those metrics 4–5x. The smartphone is for everyone, we don’t have to think the iPhone is about a certain demographic, or country or vertical market: it’s for everyone. It’s been widely reported that Apple has had hundreds of engineers working on AR and VR for some time.

Valuation 48

Valuation Technical Review Forecast Social Network 48

ConversionXL

JANUARY 14, 2020

In each case, an extension to the existing solution was shipped in a search engine–friendly way and now drives a lot of organic traffic, while also improving the product. First, they have to be publicly accessible for users and search engines. Those features are helping sites ranking for thousands, even millions, of keywords.

SEO 159

SEO Framework SCRUM Search 159

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

They work to improve top-of-funnel metrics like brand awareness and identify opportunities to improve customer activation, retention, and referral efforts. If your campaign works and your brand awareness metrics improve, you win. Then, compare any change in the awareness metrics you’re measuring in that region with other markets.

Framework 102

Framework Marketing Acquisition Retention 102

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy. To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Despite all the energy invested in talking to authors about the size of their platform, very few gatekeepers have a rigorous set of metrics for measuring it. The problem is that there are no other metrics they can look at to judge the content of a book to know if it’s worth reviewing. Is that a lot? In that I see opportunity.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Bootstrapped startup Omnisend carved out a $19 million niche in an already saturated vertical. Organic search is a highly competitive domain for many SaaS verticals (email marketing, for example). With a tactical understanding of two different marketing strategies: demand generation and lead generation. SEO should lead with intent.

Lead Generation 107

Lead Generation Demand Audience eCommerce 107

Seeing Both Sides

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Conventional wisdom suggests that the most important metrics for a startup - such as unit economics, cost of acquisition, lifetime value, churn rates - typically get better with time. I hear this asserted frequently by entrepreneurs who confidently project their businesses with increasingly improving metrics as they scale into the future.

Metrics 20

Metrics Churn Rate Acquisition SEM 20

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. I normally recommend you just store this directory on your master database, but you could use a standalone vertical shard (or even a key-based partition!) This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

ReadWriteStart

APRIL 14, 2011

Daily Accountability Marketing Metrics. As founder of DuckDuckGo , a search engine serving up millions of queries each month, he knows how to get the word out. Traction Verticals. Fox reveals sensitive information such as traffic, metrics from marketing campaigns, even site conversion rates. Gabriel Weinberg.

Entrepreneur 134

Entrepreneur Marketing Cofounder Campaign 134

ConversionXL

JANUARY 28, 2016

According to Experiment Engine’s data, anywhere from 50% to 80% of test results are inconclusive, depending on the vertical and stage of the testing program. So perhaps if a variation increases some correlative micro-conversion metrics, it would be okay to implement that. A surprising amount of tests end up inconclusive.

Conversion 48

Conversion Technical Review Video Revenue 48

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Genuine VC

DECEMBER 23, 2009

And this strategy of building a series of publications around vertical topics plays right into this movement. The property finally came into its own earlier this decade when Google rewarded its deep linked pages when people were searching for niche subject areas on its engine.

Arkansas 100

Arkansas Algorithm Advertising Audience 100

Genuine VC

DECEMBER 23, 2009

And this strategy of building a series of publications around vertical topics plays right into this movement. The property finally came into its own earlier this decade when Google rewarded its deep linked pages when people were searching for niche subject areas on its engine.

Arkansas 100

Arkansas Algorithm Advertising Audience 100

David Teten

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

Kappos: We added 5 new metrics with guide on how to use them on the site. Our process to process appeals is particularly bad; # appeals not yet heard forms a vertical line if we graph it. Our models are we’ll be at 655 by end of this year, despite the fa. ct that filings are up 7.5% Now it’s way back up.

Intellectual Property 60

Intellectual Property Detroit Technical Review Software Review 60

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Is that true or is there some engine there I’m not familiar with? So if I were you I would say, ‘That is not a viable engine.’ Obviously anybody that’s popular, that’s some of it, but, you know, it’s not a fundamental part of your business engine. So you’re going to need another engine.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

There are three parts to a good competitive analysis: (1) defining the metrics and identifying the competitors you’re comparing, (2) gathering the data, and (3) the analysis. You’re going to need some brand health metrics to track. Start by defining what metrics are important. 3) Develop personas for your target customers.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 25, 2018

Content creation, the engine of inbound marketing, creates the draw (i.e. For marketers, SLAs typically redefine “leads” from simple metrics like form fills to marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) —those that are a “good fit” and “sales ready.” Each quarter is an opportunity to test and refine campaign tactics for other verticals. “I

Demand 132

Demand Vertical Campaign Channel 132

VC Cafe

JUNE 19, 2020

Blackrock, the American global investment management corporation, has already allocated $200 billion to Impact investments, while giants such as Unilever and Nestle point at Impact as one of their central business growth avenues, backed by data and metrics.

Venture Capital 174

Venture Capital Global South Africa 174

ConversionXL

JUNE 20, 2019

It’s the second largest search engine in the world, and content from their platform reaches more 18–49 year-olds than any broadcast or cable TV network. In comparison, Facebook Live shows overview metrics like minutes viewed, average percentage completion, and unique viewers.). The plan targets data scientists and video engineers.

Hosting 127

Hosting Video Technical Review Software Review 127