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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc. For eBay, this is caused by the incredible network effects of their business (so-called demand-side increasing returns and supply-side increasing returns).

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Cracking The Code: Getting the most of your online marketing: the In.

Cracking the Code

Getting the most of your online marketing: the In & Out of SEM/SEO. Feedburner Network. Paperblog network. on a scale of 1-4). on a scale of 1-4). The videos can be watched at Bessemer Online Marketing Portal (the other materials are not public). David Cowan. Justin Label. Jeremy Levine. Sarah Tavel. Raj Kapoor. Tariq Krim.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

For example, one angel investor reportedly invested in several hundred social networking ventures employing this philosophy. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Customers found it confusing and it turned out to be at odds with our fundamental value proposition (which really requires an independant IM network). Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake. So we had to completely throw that code away, including all of its beatiful tests and specs. Talk about waste.

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How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

Startup Lessons Learned

This was 2004, and we had never even heard of MySpace, let alone had any understanding of social networking. It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. But the early customers all compared it to MySpace.

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Advertising Wants to be Measurable – An Investment Thesis

Both Sides of the Table

By now we all know that the largest part of the online spend has been SEM (search engine marketing) where people buy CPC (cost per click) links to display alongside the “organic&# search results in the search engine. I believe that many social networks confused this idea. Not necessarily in the shopping mindset.

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Lessons Learned: Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

Startup Lessons Learned

Pick a similar product that they do use, and ask them "who was the first person you know who started using [social networking, mobile phones, plasma TV, instant messaging.]? For companies in the early-adopter phase, you can play "the earlyvangelist game" whenever a customer turns out to be too mainstream for your product. More of the same.