Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 15, 2020

The key elements of leadership in a company, both individual and organizational, are less tangible, but very critical in setting a market value for investment, acquisition, or going public. For startups, the entrepreneur and founder is almost always the face of the company.

Valuation 311

Valuation Technical Review Due Diligence Leadership 311

SoCal CTO

MARCH 1, 2010

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. Great stuff. where Tony Wright suggests charging right now. Good stuff from Jason.

Acquisition 150

Acquisition Cofounder Technical Cofounder Cost 150

Up and Running

OCTOBER 7, 2019

However, as a founder of a small business or startup, you’re juggling many things. You need to use your time and resources productively by focusing on the right metrics so you can use data to help you implement improvements that matter. The first step is to formulate a KPI strategy by selecting the right metrics to track.

Founder 71

Founder Retention Metrics Technical Review 71

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

GrowthHackers founder and former Head of Growth at Dropbox, Sean Ellis , coined the term: “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. In his course on Growth Mindset (part of CXL’s Growth Marketing Minidegree ), WeTheFuture.org founder John McBride describes three key components of a successful growth marketer: 1.

Retention 113

Retention Marketing Acquisition Channel 113

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 11, 2022

With over three decades of experience in private equity investments, acquisitions and mergers, Mark Hauser has developed a keen ability to recognize trends and do his due diligence. In tandem with these efforts toward organic growth, they will also explore opportunities for inorganic growth through acquisitions.

Private Equity 133

Private Equity Equity Technical Review Software Review 133

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

This is a question startup founders ask themselves multiple times a week. It’s not just the competition against the incumbents and the large tech platforms that founders has to worry about, but most importantly is the company’s performance and product market fit. How are we doing?

Retention 109

Retention Conversion Churn Rate B2C 109

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 7, 2022

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is an important metric for any ecommerce business. Put simply, you need a healthy customer acquisition cost for your business to succeed. It’s up to every ecommerce business to find the middle ground between investing too little in customer acquisition and spending beyond your means.

Acquisition 22

Acquisition eCommerce Cost Customer 22

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

As the idea went from innovating on software & systems to launching a company to rolling it out in the field brought on Rahul Gandhi as his co-founder to physically launch the company. How long does it take me to pay back my original customer acquisition costs? How profitable is my product or service? Seriously, this happens.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

Gavin Braman, Co-Founder @ Drifting Creatives. Just like Peep, other marketers from hypergrown products, such as David Cancel (founder at Drift) argue that product-based differentiation is vanishing. This defines how to connect problem themes to a metric strategy, building a metric-driven action system. How will you act?

B2B 94

B2B Marketing Curation PPC 94

David Teten

DECEMBER 16, 2015

I review a lot of board decks with a beautifully hand-crafted page with metrics for the company. Good metrics are comparable across industries; comparative ; readily understandable; and help drive decisions. Comparative means that you can compare a metric across time periods, groups of users, or competitors. So how do you do it?

Metrics 60

Metrics Analytics Balance Sheet .Net 60

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 21, 2023

Savvy investors tell me that startup founders who claim to have never failed are either lying or have never tried anything innovative. It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. No risk, no innovation. New product process.

Intellectual Property 343

Intellectual Property Metrics .Net Social Network 343

YoungUpstarts

JULY 31, 2019

by Anish Sebastian and Juan Pablo Segura, co-founders of Babyscripts. Founders need seed capital to get their operations up and running, and to begin generating revenue. When founders are wrong (which happens often), that initial seed round runs out quickly, requiring another round of funding — typically referred to as a bridge round.

Cofounder 127

Cofounder Burn Rate Technical Cofounder Seed Capital 127

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2020

Changing Acquisition. We need pockets of marketplace-type behavior where actual systems are competed out based on outcome-oriented metrics. Now we get down to the difficult questions of execution and implementation, which is where they have foundered in the past. And we buy new things more regularly.

Technical Review 394

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Technology United States 394

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 18, 2023

Most startup founders don’t relish the thought of managing repeatable processes, greedy stockholders, and endless regulation reports. New startup founders keep all the operating metrics they need in their head. Running a mature company is totally different from running a startup. Set your startup health gauges and use them.

Exit Strategy 248

Exit Strategy Valuation Acquisition Metrics 248

Hunter Walker

JANUARY 2, 2017

” But we also knew that most Fortune 500 M&A transactions aren’t at unicorn levels (actually well sub-$250m), so we advise founders to not over-raise capital until they’re using it to fund profitable growth (or a clear path to profitability). Satya likes to describe the trend as “outsourced R&D.”

Technical Review 115

Technical Review Cap Table Acquisition Startup 115

VC Cafe

JUNE 6, 2024

It’s not a surprise, given that entrepreneurs are obsessed with data and metrics, but in the conservative VC market of 2024, it feels even more important for founders to know what ‘good’ looks like and what investors expect. Metric Unremarkable Good Excellent Outlier ARR <$500k $500k-$1.5m $1.5m-$2.5m >$2.5m

B2B 78

B2B Burn Rate Generative AI Retention 78

SoCal CTO

MARCH 11, 2013

Yesterday, I was talking to a startup founder about their MVP and they said something that finally got me to write this post: "I have a few investors interested but they want to see a product." If you do build the MVP and show it to them, they will ask you about your metrics. They really want metrics, not a product.

Algorithm 264

Algorithm Metrics Viral Venture Capital 264

View from Seed

DECEMBER 4, 2019

At the time, I spent most of my time describing the metrics themselves and how VCs and their LPs evaluate performance based on these measurements. If you aren’t familiar with these metrics, I recommend reading the original post to get a sense of the numbers that I’ll be reviewing here. So, is this good or bad?

LP 256

LP IRR Distribution Portfolio 256

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

. + 1,000 startup founders, investors, and press! Vinod Khosla Founder Dave McClure Founding Partner Eric Ries Author Steve Blank Serial Entrepreneur & Professor Todd Park CTO Travis Kalanick CEO & Co-Founder Joe Zadeh Director of Product Sam Shank Co-Founder & CEO NEW!

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

YoungUpstarts

MAY 29, 2011

Founders that learn are more successful. Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x Solo founders take 3.6x Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money , have 2.9x

Silicon Valley 230

Silicon Valley Cofounder Technical Cofounder Startup 230

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 9, 2021

Most startup founders don’t relish the thought of managing repeatable processes, greedy stockholders, and endless regulation reports. New startup founders keep all the operating metrics they need in their head. Running a mature company is totally different from running a startup. Set your startup health gauges and use them.

Exit Strategy 434

Exit Strategy Valuation Acquisition Metrics 434

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Founders almost never have a real strategy. Founders explain failures with things like “our two main competitors did [thing] to us” or “customers didn’t understand [our point of view].” The 10,000th biggest company in the world is a very successful company, as is the two-person company where the founders each take home $300k/year.

Restful 202

Restful Founder Revenue Acquisition 202

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 8, 2009

A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. Normally, when I am talking to the founder of any startup trying to figure out what they need to do, one of the things I always try to do is understand their business at its core. Define what you need from a metrics and reporting standpoint.

Metrics 225

Metrics Startup Retention Acquisition 225

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 7, 2018

by Humberto Farias, CEO and co-founder at Concepta. Predictive analytics help determine the most effective markets for adspend, suggesting areas where the product is being well-received and those where the cost of customer acquisition is unreasonably high.

Artificial Inteligence 164

Artificial Inteligence Analytics SCRUM Cofounder 164

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Google Analytics is the standard for measuring acquisition—identifying the sources of traffic to your website or app. Google Analytics switched its default metric from “sessions” to “users” in 2018, mirroring Mixpanel’s emphasis on users over pageviews. Acquisition. Anything else is merely a list of data points. Image source ).

Analytics 119

Analytics Technical Review Acquisition Retention 119

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 25, 2018

Toronto’s Mark Attanasio has spent some 20 years advising businesses at various stages in their development on what it takes to position themselves for growth – whether it’s through traditional transactional activities like management buyouts and mergers and acquisitions or via a public listing on a Canadian stock exchange.

Partner 113

Partner Technical Review Management Due Diligence 113

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 21, 2021

In fact, it’s highly unlikely that you as the Founder will survive. Explosive growth to an enterprise normally requires a scalable sales model, a well-documented process with incentives, training, and metrics for tracking and management. Utilize mergers and acquisitions to accelerate growth.

Merger 379

Merger Due Diligence SEC IPO 379

View from Seed

MARCH 19, 2015

Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Alberto Savoia: Pretotyping consists of a set of techniques and metrics to help you make sure that you are building “The Right It” before you build “It” right — where “It” represents your new product, service, company, etc.

Product 120

Product Technical Review Marketing Lean 120

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 23, 2016

Failure to react quickly often leads to funding freezes and founder replacements. Initiate new strategic partnerships and investigate acquisitions versus in-house changes. Define and use market metrics to tune your plan. You need metrics to spot these changes, and regular new initiatives to test new and old alternatives.

Social Media 120

Social Media Technical Review Metrics Channel 120

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. Max Ventilla took Aardvark from startup to Google acquisition, a case study Eric described in The Lean Startup. Eric Ries will interview him.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 25, 2020

Savvy investors tell me that startup founders who claim to have never failed are either lying or have never tried anything innovative. It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. No risk, no innovation. New product process.

Intellectual Property 360

Intellectual Property Social Network Metrics .Net 360

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

From RBI, Flexible VCs borrow the ability to reap meaningful returns without demanding founders build for an exit. Every Flexible VC structure allows founders to access immediate risk capital while preserving exit, growth trajectory, and ownership optionality. . Flexible VC 102: Variations.

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 25, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Sunday, February 25, 2007 Challenge of Predicting Winners I just read a bit on the payout to YouTube from the Google Acquisition ( Internet News , CNN ). Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -. The poor guy. What a bad $200M decision.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

Generally speaking, there are two ways (and only two ways) to scale a business to hit that $100 million threshold: Your business has a high Life Time Value (LTV) per user, giving you the freedom to spend a significant amount of money in customer acquisition. High LTV can usually be found in transactional or subscription businesses.

Churn Rate 168

Churn Rate Viral Acquisition Cofounder 168

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

The email continued, &# The problem I’m working on is that many founders are either making uninformed decisions or inefficiently learning the new skills they need. The solution I’m exploring is a just in time learning methodology that accelerates founders’ learning curve by aggregating relevant content, peers and mentors.&#.

Technical Cofounder 334

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 334

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

Just ask Blue Apron, which has found itself in the news recently for its poor stock market performance and its widely criticized acquisition-focused growth strategy — not to mention CEO Brad Dickerson’s unwillingness to release its retention numbers. Blue Apron is hardly alone with its churn problem. Dig deeper. Why or why not?

Customer 173

Customer Technical Review Retention Acquisition 173

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2015

The key elements of leadership in a company, both individual and organizational, are less tangible, but very critical in setting a market value for investment, acquisition, or going public. For startups, the entrepreneur and founder is almost always the face of the company.

Leadership 120

Leadership Technical Review Due Diligence Valuation 120