Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2013

Like most startup entrepreneurs, when I began my first company in 1999 I had no formal sales experience. And when you achieve product / market fit your company often ramps revenue very fast and you need to build an organization to address it from demand generation (aka marketing) to sales discovery to implementation and after-sales support.

Sales 393

Sales Startup Framework Search 393

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 26, 2016

profitable and companies like Amazon who chose to focus on growth > profitability were not losing money on each book sale (ie they were gross margin positive). But often this doesn’t tell the whole story because often companies are also spending money on PR and other marketing activities in order to support the sales process.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

In his tenure as CEO of DataSift we have never missed a monthly revenue figure. He has grown our US operations from 1 employee (him) to a global organization of 75 employees that will finish the year with 8-digit revenues (90+% recurring) and more than 350% year-over-year growth. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

The main thrust of the post is that with YouTube taking a 45% of revenue and talent taking 70% of the remaining revenue, YouTube Networks didn’t have sustainable businesses unless they invested heavily in technology as a tool to increase margin and provide defensibility. Build Non-Ad-Based Revenue.

Video 339

Video Technical Review Distribution Aggregator 339

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

Revenue Metrics. Revenue metrics are one of the first things I ask for from the startups in which I invest. I like to think of revenue drivers. And they are revenue drivers in that simplistically impressions x fill rate x eCPM equals revenue. 10% of our revenue is coming from direct sales of our banner inventory.

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

By now you have many smart people around your board but probably people who don’t totally understand the nuances of your employees, customers, sales reps, marketing messages, technology challenges, competitors and strategic choices. how much energy to put into channel partners vs. direct sales. how to evolve our management team.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

Throughout the first year we made many fixes and saw our revenue base in these markets accelerate so we felt we were ready to attack Los Angeles, amongst the most important storage markets in the country. An example of the systems companies build are pricing & revenue management tools to best help to optimize yield.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

In revenue terms our first two years of sales were $2.1 We sold the company when we hit $36 million in bookings and $16 million in SaaS GAAP revenue. And it launched this author’s career and taught me everything I know about sales, marketing, hiring, firing, fund raising and so on. million and then $5.9 Not Google.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Let’s take your revenue line. Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever. How will your costs scale as your revenue scales. Or lower revenue assumptions.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 8, 2009

Your friends and advisers tell you that this means you need revenue because in this economy VC’s will only fund businesses with revenue. So if it’s not necessarily revenue that’s preventing an investment, then WTF is traction? Unfortunately your advisers are wrong. VC’s are the same.

Technical Review 309

Technical Review Term Sheet Venture Capital Revenue 309

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

They will often run all of the daily reports into them covering off for finance, sales, marketing, biz dev & HR. You can always spot these types because they can’t tell you what their revenue number for last month was or what their sales target is for next month. But ask yourself, what does a COO actually do?

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Due Diligence 325

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. I was the one pointing out that we were behind on our sales targets and our “Elephant Deal&# that had been promised was 6 months late.

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 414

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Still, I’ll bet that functionally you divide areas of competence like sales & marketing, product, engineering, biz dev, etc. I usually encourage people to think about titles like, “Founder & CTO&# or “Founder & VP Marketing.&#. .&# The company that wrote me this told me they were doing $4 million in sales.

Operations 292

Operations CTO Hire Startup Early Stage 292

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2010

They are tasked with “getting deals done&# so they race around talking to tons of potential partners inking anything from channel sale deals , product integration, international distribution agreements, co-marketing arrangements, M&A discussions, etc. You have a marketing department with three people. I love that saying.

Development Team Review 323

Development Team Review SEM Channel Social Media 323

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. new features need to go into the sale people’s slides so that they know the latest and greatest about how to differentiate from the competition. A few people have asked me to try and define the perfect startup organization chart. In summary.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2016

It has grown recurring revenue by more than 500% and deal-size by 276%. The explosion of mobile phones has led to a boom in inbound click-to-call traffic that has proven to convert at a higher close rate and increase average-order-value over web-only sales & marketing.

Venture Capital 150

Venture Capital Fractional CTO Cofounder Early Stage 150

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 21, 2014

And importantly we’ve had revenue. The problem with shelfware is that if you have great sales people, you have raised tons of VC money from prominent investors, you have some marquee clients and you thus likely have some great press about you it can be hard to tell true success from that which is ephemeral. I know, I know.

Marketing 354

Marketing Incubator Turkey Metrics 354

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

The remainder of this article will deal with this decision but it comes down to the different economics of DVD rentals due to “ the first sale doctrine ” which gives Netflix a complete library of films and the fact that the first-sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital downloads. Each mag has a different mix.

Customer 287

Customer Technical Review Caching PR 287

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

It turns out that to build a successful company you ultimately need this strange thing called “revenue” that people don’t just hand you: You need to earn it. And there’s this other thing called “gross margin,” which shows the quality of your revenue. How much ad revenue does TripAdvisor make?

Startup 150

Startup Seed Money DC Software Review 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2010

The “private sale” market phenomenon was started in France by Vente-Privee (literally means “private sale”) and was replicated in Germany by BrandsforFriends. Gilt Group is currently the largest private sale web site in US. Note that these are “gross” revenue numbers. I would also note that they claim 2.1

Partner 240

Partner New York City Cofounder Syndicate 240

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2013

Yet our initial customer success didn’t translate into big revenue growth and we faced issues such as: Do we support developers, end-users or both? Yet with major advances in our product infrastructure we still hadn’t proven we could scale sales. Again, captured eloquently in the words of Reid Hoffman. ” So true.

Technical Review 303

Technical Review Cofounder Analytics Founder 303

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 senior sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business 6 months. The Nature of Revenue Matters Of course revenue alone won’t tell you enough.

Stock Options 227

Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

One other big tell for me is the CEO’s grasp of the sales pipeline. I can’t tell you how many CEO’s I’ve met with who can’t walk me through the details of their sales pipeline. Who does sales report to? It had a strategy-setting CEO, a limelight-seeking President and a COO who ran the company.

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

He asked each sales / biz dev person to call customers and tell them they had to change their contracts. I just knew that our sales sucked wind and we were burning through tons of cash. We missed our sales targets that year by 66% and the next year by 45% and never really cut costs very much. We were SMOKING cash.

Entrepreneur 306

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Cofounder Sales 306

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2010

Summary view for people who don’t want to read all of the details: it helps you optimize your revenue by comparing the effectiveness of all possible monetization types: cross promotion, in-app purchasing or ads. it provides complete transparency in how much advertisers are paying, how much Burstly takes and what your revenue is.

Mobile 282

Mobile Management Southern California Application Development 282

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

Looong Appendix (only for those interested in reading another story about losing a sale & key lessons): A personal story of losing a sale that haunted me for years. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

China 333

China Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

Looong Appendix (only for those interested in reading another story about losing a sale & key lessons): A personal story of losing a sale that haunted me for years. I was working hand-in-hand with my close friend and associate Stuart Lander who was running our UK office and with one of our local sales reps.

China 328

China Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review 328

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2015

However, the higher you get within an organization in the sale (and the larger the deal) executives are often looking to “win in the market,” which means growing revenue faster, offering products or services at a lower cost or offering features that their competitors can’t.

PR 150

PR Early Stage Software Naming 150

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 4, 2014

– while the other might want a quick sale and pocket some bucks while the tech market is hot. He felt the CEO was willing to “sell his soul” for revenue and wanted things to be more pure. One founder has more risk tolerance and the other wants to be conservative. Those are the easy cases.

Founder 340

Founder Sacramento Cofounder Technical Review 340

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

Then you can do a little bit of research and find out that very few companies ever achieve this valuation in a trade sale so you’re clearly gunning for an IPO. million post-money valuation with no revenue. They did an inside round, spent a bunch of money and then went through a fire sale of the business less than 2 years later.

Pre-Money Valuation 336

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Silicon Valley Stock 336

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 17, 2011

It means somebody who held the director of sales in their last company but in this company wants to be VP. I might be grooming them for when I have more money or more revenue. Don’t promise revenue or growth faster than you know you can achieve. It’s a boxing analogy. It means a “young Turk” who has something to prove.

Hiring 399

Hiring Startup Global Revenue 399

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

I was looking for a person to head up my UK sales team. But he also used to opportunity to emphasize that he is full of stamina, works late and hard and had always performed well in his previous sales leadership roles for which he’s be happy to provide pay slips as proof. One of the people who came to see me was named Nick.

Venture Capital 264

Venture Capital Due Diligence Flash Strategic Investors 264

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

I’ll publish the final post in this series this week and then move on to my next series – sales & marketing. I’ll be covering my PUCCKA sales methodology. There’s one attribute (coming soon) that I need to have in order to write a check but I don’t believe is vital for success.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 28, 2009

Our sales forecasts were revised downward – many times. I know that we haven’t brought in revenue as quickly as we had hoped. They haven’t hit their revenue targets. Our customers were generally happy but they were pushing us hard for promised features. But still we made progress. But here is the problem.

PR 331

PR Software Review Ireland Germany 331

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 6, 2018

Let’s say you have built a SaaS company where a large part of the early revenue comes from a few big customers or a large part of the revenue is services based vs. software based. Let me give you an example. The investor is a customer and they have money to spend but only for a limited number of companies.

Revenue 236

Revenue Valuation Portfolio Restful 236

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

Three reasons: There is a relative valuation between the price a VC pays and their expectations of what it will exit for in an IPO or trade sale. Also, it’s harder to pay a $30 million pre-money value on an unproved company when you see public companies with $100 million in sales trading for less than $20 million.

Burn Rate 263

Burn Rate Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Private Equity 263

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2019

Invoca is now doing 10s of millions in recurring revenue and is growing > 75% year-over-year but it took the first 3 years to really build out the technology and acquire our initial enterprise clients. I mentioned that we sold our position in Kyriba for > $1 billion but when we invested it had virtually no revenue.

IP 223

IP Intellectual Property IRR Cofounder 223