A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
AUGUST 18, 2015
The insight is: The profitable revenue stream is a prison. A company with a large, profitable, growing revenue stream betrays facts useful to a startup: There’s a huge market to be had (else it wouldn’t be large and growing). The big profitable revenue stream is the goose that’s laying the golden eggs. Not anymore.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
DECEMBER 16, 2014
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!
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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
MARCH 21, 2017
Revenue multiples, profit multiples, premium over the previous financing — these are metrics used by sellers to help determine a minimum acceptable price. Even for startups, it takes years for a new product to become good enough to demand many millions of dollars in revenue.). Yet mobile advertising revenues were paltry.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
OCTOBER 23, 2012
After I sold Smart Bear, that division has increased revenue and profit every year, for five years, even through the 2008/2009 economic disaster. GroupOn’s engine that turned capital into revenue growth was a form of force-feeding rather than building a product). But really, are all those acquirers so stupid? Surely not.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
FEBRUARY 21, 2011
Of course the numbers don’t match because, again, I pulled those potential valuations out of nowhere. To make $250,000 out of $5m the investor would need 5%; to make $840,000 from $25m the investor needs 3%. That’s a much tighter range than you had before you started reading this article!
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
JUNE 27, 2011
ME: Of course getting tied up with that might distract you from other growth opportunities, and sometimes buyers don’t like that you’re dependent on another company for revenue. They know there’s a minimum valuation, under which you’re not interested.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
JUNE 20, 2011
They’ve heard rules of thumb like “A growing software company is worth 5 times their trailing 12-months revenue.&# Even narrowing the field as much as feasible, revenue multiples varied between 1.2x The “Multiples&# argument does work well in industries where company’s growth and revenue is highly predictable.
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