A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

article thumbnail

How do I figure out who my next important hire should be?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

The question is: How do you decide what role is most important to hire for? If I hire someone to do X, I’ll have time for Y and Z. Hire the best person for that role. Examples: You hire the VP of Engineering for Facebook. You hire a super-effective VP of Sales , would that 10x sales in the next 12 months? (If

article thumbnail

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. We just announced a few more things.

Engineer 152
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

If you had zero revenue from now on, on what date would you run out of money? Second, you know the length of your fuse even in event of disaster (if you have revenue) or if you never manage to land a customer (if you're just starting out). Cartoon by Andertoons. That's OK, that's not the point of this question. Or switch off.

Startup 315
article thumbnail

Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Instead, watch payback period for acquisition efficiency, watch retention for product/market fit, watch expansion revenue for long-term growth, and watch gross margin for long-term profitability. The “boring” but established, large market is where revenue is easy and competition is old, slow, and has something to lose.

Restful 202
article thumbnail

More money if you do, more money if you don’t

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Costs arise ahead of associated revenue, especially for SaaS companies, so you need a cash investment to fund that growth. But what if, nine months from now, revenue isn’t growing quite as quickly as you planned? But what if, nine months from now, revenue is growing more quickly than you planned?

Revenue 270
article thumbnail

Teeny bit of traction — what next?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Burgeoning Startup Founder writes: After a year of work, my startup is now doing about $6,000/mo in revenue and $3,000/mo in profit. You can’t hire someone with it. It has to be on getting more revenue. Both short-term bursts and, more interestingly, building systematic ways of growing revenue month over month.

Affiliate 261
article thumbnail

The wrongness of relativism

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Still… Now Slack has been valued at over a billion dollars, less than a year after launch, every month adding more than a million dollars of annual recurring revenue. “It’s not fair,” we all said to ourselves. Well, at least they had to toil for four years instead of two. They’re next!

Metrics 246