Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry. With 317 million people the U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

Sales people cost money, and when they’re not bringing in revenue, their wandering in the woods is time consuming, cash-draining and demoralizing. Scalable: The goal is not to get one customer but many – and to get those customers so each additional customer adds incremental revenue and profit. Lets see why. Something else?

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 20, 2014

I have been saying privately for years now that I believe online video will evolve into fragmented distribution (my next online video post) and vertical production. Example of these collaboration include Enchufe TV, the largest Spanish-language sketch company channel on YouTube. Why Double Down on YouTube.

South America 291

South America Colombia Mexico Vertical 291

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 8, 2019

On the heels of seeing the 10% influencer base increase the referrals process yielded, the team at Intellifluence pushed to create a brand-to-brand referral program as well, intent on creating user acquisition flywheels wherever possible. Photo Credit: Matt Daigle. There is so much for me to be proud of in 2019!

Entrepreneur 117

Entrepreneur Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 117

mashable.com

JULY 18, 2012

The search giant’s VP of Corporate Development, along with CEO Larry Page, signs off on the dozens of acquisitions and acqui-hires made every year, large and small. There’s YouTube , of course — well established in its own right, it rewrote the book on how an acquisition can be run delicately, as a company within a company.

San Francisco 104

San Francisco Acquisition Social Media Mobile 104

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

Last week, I wrote about Akamai , a company with strong network effects that successfully transitioned from a single product to build a platform that garners over a billion dollars in revenue and is now a core part of the Internet’s fabric. Expedia grew to account for roughly one third of the company’s revenues. Think about that.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 6, 2011

This curriculum is based on the various questions entrepreneurs have asked me over these 64 sessions, spanning financing, positioning, customer acquisition, marketing, sales, channel, and various other early stage, startup-related issues. As usual, then, I worked with three entrepreneurs working on specific businesses.

Vertical 115

Vertical Web San Francisco Entrepreneur 115

Occam's Razor

JULY 24, 2018

Some metrics apply across all channels, like Awareness, Consideration and Purchase Intent. For a large European client with a multi-channel existence, here’s what the Impact Matrix looked like after this honest self-reflection: More of the digital metrics are green, because there are more digital metrics period. If yes, hurray!

Analytics 93

Analytics Framework Metrics Algorithm 93

ConversionXL

JUNE 2, 2022

How LiveRamp drove over $50M in annual revenue from 15 target accounts. They also use multi-channel content distribution to improve brand awareness and meet prospects where they already are. Then, design a multi-touch, multi-channel outreach campaign that meets your target audience where you know they’ll be.

Marketing 100

Marketing Campaign Email Sales 100

Austin Startup

APRIL 25, 2017

Revenue needs to grow 20x, and margins must expand dramatically. I won’t dive into cost structure in this blog post, but let’s think through how Snap could grow revenue 20x. I won’t dive into cost structure in this blog post, but let’s think through how Snap could grow revenue 20x. Global smartphone revenue is about $420B.

Valuation 48

Valuation Technical Review Forecast Social Network 48

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 3, 2018

Instead, they were shared in company Slack channels, emailed between VPs and investors, and featured in industry newsletters. Most businesses have a handful of target accounts they dream of closing—big, prestigious companies that could generate a whole lot of revenue in a single deal. It created powerful network effects.

B2B 133

B2B Marketing SEO Search 133

Hunter Walker

MARCH 7, 2019

Unsustainable revenue curves willed into existence in order to prove growth ahead of raising more capital is the organizational version of phosphorous. There’s an increased belief (maybe reality for some), that seed VCs want to see revenue before investing in verticals like SaaS, marketplaces, commerce.

Startup 97

Startup Revenue Vertical Retention 97

ConversionXL

JUNE 2, 2022

Snowflake decides which channels to use according to industry verticals and where their buyers are likely to be. This approach works for both new account acquisition and account expansion. They developed an omnichannel approach using direct mail, email , display ads, and outbound calls, ensuring each channel used the same CTA.

Marketing 105

Marketing Campaign Artificial Inteligence Sales Cycle 105

ConversionXL

AUGUST 21, 2014

This equates to a loss of revenue, which requires more and more signups from new customers just to replace what you are organically losing every month. I have seen this happen at a few startups I’ve worked with by expanding revenue from the current product, plus up-sell and cross-sell opportunities , but that will be a future post.

Retention 106

Retention Churn Rate Metrics Software Review 106

Version One Ventures

APRIL 23, 2013

Looking back, there were several factors limiting our ability to grow, including: Geographical markets: We had internationalized to five non-English speaking countries in Europe, but felt that conquering Asia was too risky an endeavor for a relatively small company (our platform revenues were in the hundreds of millions of dollars).

Vertical 130

Vertical Non-Compete Asia Europe 130

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. This is obvious. Marketing first. Product second.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. This is obvious. Marketing first. Product second.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

ConversionXL

AUGUST 19, 2016

Marketers should also be looking at acquisition (visits, unique visitors, pageviews), behavior (pages per visit, time on site, bounce rate), and revenue (if you’re eCommerce). For example, according to Mona Elesseily , “conversions in the health vertical have the best ROI during work hours and into the evening on tablet devices.”.

Mobile 48

Mobile Technical Review Software Review Metrics 48

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

A tool like Quuu identifies relevant, shareable content to keep your social media channels active. . Some notable metrics are revenue growth rates, free cashflow, leverage ratios, historical financing amounts, returns on marketing spend, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value of customers, customer churn rates, and team social scores.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) So what’s wrong the product development model? before you ship.

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Mucker Lab

MAY 1, 2013

From the outside, they are vertically integrated challengers to decades if not hundred-years old incumbents. Instead of aiming for hundreds of millions of dollars in software licensing revenue – they want to conquer existing industries and aim for tens of billions of dollars in widget revenues. Software is eating industries.

Software 107

Software Silicon Valley Los Angeles Columbus 107

ReadWriteStart

MAY 12, 2011

Vrushali is moderator of a forum for technical documentation professionals and gets a lot of her clients through that channel. She has, thus far, not done any other formal customer acquisition initiative. Today, he has over a thousand, and he has chosen to focus on the realtor vertical. He is seeing excellent results.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Entrepreneur Silicon Valley India 125

VC Cafe

JUNE 22, 2010

ForNova provides a B2B turnkey solution to enable building aggregation solutions for classifieds eCommerce, travel and many other specific content verticals. The platform supports multiple verticals such as real estate, cars, travel, hotels, flights, jobs, events, products, eCommerce and more.

Media 145

Media Social Network Flash 145

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Site-centric analysis is primarily focused on looking at direct competitors, or adjacent ones, and learning from what is happening with Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes on their website (desktop and/or mobile). Hence, a lot of your time will be spent in acquisition analysis to improve your digital advertising and marketing strategy.

Metrics 60

Metrics Analytics Non-Compete Search 60

ConversionXL

MAY 3, 2017

A customer survey conducted by BigCommerce revealed that 51% of SMBs expect social advertising channels (specifically Facebook Ads) will play a major role in accelerating revenue throughout 2017 and beyond. Facebook Custom Audience campaigns will help you cover the gap, and get some real mileage out of your acquisitions.

San Jose 133

San Jose Customer Database Campaign 133

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 16, 2010

The trends include Cloud computing, outsourcing, social Web, vertical and local Web, smartphones and tablets, online advertising, online video, online gaming, e-books, and bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Jimmy already has about 65 customers and about a million dollars in annual revenue. You can find details in the blog post on [link].

Senegal 117

Senegal Nevada Bootstrapping Silicon Valley 117

justinmares.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

It follows that failure occurs when a company cannot grow fast enough to support itself on revenues, or does not have promising enough growth on which they can raise money. Think of several traction verticals that could potentially work for you, and come up with cheap ways to test them as acquisition channels.

Vertical 44

Vertical Lean Channel PR 44

www.kalzumeus.com

AUGUST 13, 2012

This is objectively suboptimal, because email is the best broadcast channel ever invented for business purposes. Email: Geeks Ignore The Best Marketing Channel Ever. Email Helps Get Marginal Revenue Out Of Existing Customers For Almost Nothing. Doubling SaaS Revenue By Changing The Pricing Model. Kalzumeus Podcast Ep.

Email 54

Email Software Review Software Campaign 54

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. Here are a few other key metrics that are hard to scale: Customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is like drilling for oil. in 2009 to $11.80

Metrics 20

Metrics Churn Rate Acquisition SEM 20

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 28, 2012

Freemium is not magical pixel dust, it is a way to deliver a multi-channel business model that intersects customer segments regardless of size, complexity, and revenue opportunity. Build your website for throughput and efficiency in support of customer acquisition through the trial experience. compliance).

Software 43

Software Vertical Acquisition Channel 43

ConversionXL

JANUARY 14, 2016

Each app in each vertical is a world of its own. Stage 2: Optimize Your User Acquisition Campaigns. Connecting meaningful in-app activity to its acquisition source is important. Table sorted by Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Stage 1: Which In-App Events Correlate With Your Goals? Image Source. Feature image source.

Mobile 48

Mobile Conversion Retention Campaign 48

www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

A good set of metrics will allow me to predict that if I spend $1 on a certain marketing tactic, I’m likely to get $X of revenue in Y days. Closed revenue – the actual value of the deal after it has closed. Opportunity Pipeline – the dollar value of the opportunity. If you enjoyed that, you should subscribe!

B2B 42

B2B Metrics Marketing Startup 42