Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 26, 2014

Every entrepreneur thinks he can relax a bit after his business model is proven, funding is in place, and revenues are scaling as projected up that hockey-stick curve. Customer acquisition gets harder and more expensive. This S-Curve, with no correction, can quickly lead to disaster.

Hockey Stick 263

Hockey Stick Guerilla Acquisition Revenue 263

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 26, 2010

The only concern was that they didn’t know what their cost of customer acquisition was, nor did they which channels would be most effective, or how much they could acquire out of each channel. The good thing is that customer acquisition is a pretty easily testable thing. That makes it pretty tough to know how scalable the business is.

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Acquisition Hockey Stick Customer SEM 128

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 3, 2018

Every entrepreneur thinks he can relax a bit after his business model is proven, funding is in place, and revenues are scaling as projected up that hockey-stick curve. Customer acquisition gets harder and more expensive. This S-Curve, with no correction, can quickly lead to disaster.

Hockey Stick 130

Hockey Stick Guerilla Acquisition Revenue 130

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 1, 2015

Every entrepreneur thinks he can relax a bit after his business model is proven, funding is in place, and revenues are scaling as projected up that hockey-stick curve. Customer acquisition gets harder and more expensive. This S-Curve, with no correction, can quickly lead to disaster.

Hockey Stick 120

Hockey Stick Guerilla Startup Acquisition 120

David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

The value ascribed by subsequent investors (in a secondary); buyers (acquisition); or the public markets (IPO). As a result, unfounded hockey-stick graphs and unicorn promises give way to financial fluency, realistic expectations, frank conversations about what a business can credibly achieve, and transparency. .

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Ben's Blog

JULY 20, 2011

When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of the quarter.

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Hockey Stick Management Employee Retention 78

Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

VC companies need hockey stick growth. Acquisition can be manual. Anything that isn’t automated, in terms of customer acquisition, is ignored when you’re trying to dominate a large market. Linear growth, or heaven forbid, sporadic-up-and-down-non-uniform growth, is heavily frowned upon. Startups'

Hockey Stick 69

Hockey Stick Bootstrapping Cofounder Acquisition 69

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 19, 2016

You get more traffic, more conversions, more money – in an endless hockey stick shaped cycle. How do you balance traffic acquisition with conversion optimization? You can usually tell this is the case when your SEO traffic converts well below other acquisition channels. Of course, it’s not so simple.

SEO 48

SEO Technical Review Algorithm Jacksonville 48

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 31, 2010

For startups targeting consumers, "investors want to see 'hockey stick' adoption rates which imply consistent or increasing growth rates on a percentage basis," says Davis. The marketing equation is defined as the relationship between the customer lifetime value and the cost of acquisition," says Davis.

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Hockey Stick Startup Curation Vertical 130

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This wasn’t very impressive, but we had two things going for us: A hockey stick shaped growth curve. People often forget the most important part of the hockey stick: the long flat part. For example, I’ve talked a few times about how IMVU raised its first venture round with monthly revenues of around $10,000.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. So, the customer acquisition is easy, because this person doesn’t need to pay money.

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. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. So, the customer acquisition is easy, because this person doesn’t need to pay money.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

This is going to be BIG.

MARCH 30, 2015

Instead of paid acquisition fueling an up and to the right hockey stick, these companies would grow organically. Retention, referral and growth hacking experts would be in high demand, asked to squeeze blood from a stone in order to grow a userbase without paid acquisition.

Hockey Stick 60

Hockey Stick Valuation Startup Maryland 60

Software By Rob

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

VC companies need hockey stick growth. Acquisition can be manual. Anything that isn’t automated, in terms of customer acquisition, is ignored when you’re trying to dominate a large market. Linear growth, or heaven forbid, sporadic-up-and-down-non-uniform growth, is heavily frowned upon.

Hockey Stick 27

Hockey Stick Bootstrapping Cofounder Acquisition 27

Growthink Blog

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

They and us will talk about which companies and technologies are best positioned to profit from huge government stimulus dollars being thrown at the sector, how "cloud computing" applications are beginning to see real adoption rates, and what has been driving the robust financing and acquisition activity in the sector.

Hockey Stick 72

Hockey Stick Private Equity Washington Government 72

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 21, 2010

Since we often invest before the big “hockey stick” traction that bigger VCs wait for, a lot of times the company is still trying to tweak exactly what service or application will take off in a given market. At First Round , I often hear the term “product-market” fit. Think about what your product and market will demand of you.

Product 68

Product Hockey Stick Entrepreneur Syndicate 68

Up and Running

AUGUST 21, 2014

All that money that you spend in pay-per-click is going to go into your customer acquisition cost. Obviously, at the end of the day, the eCommerce conversion rate, how many people end up purchasing, it’s what you’re going to end up using to actually track your customer acquisition costs. If we increase our-.

Metrics 84

Metrics Startup Churn Rate Forecast 84

Up and Running

MARCH 11, 2015

That moves into the customer acquisition strategy. This includes again another acronym I’m going to share, CAC, the cost to acquire a customer, the customer acquisition cost. Are you doing an acquisition? The customer acquisition cost that I talked about. If you’re sure … Peter I think you need to mute yourself again.

Technical Review 60

Technical Review Software Review Due Diligence Exit Strategy 60

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

Invites went up 50%; 35% lift in referral acquisition. The reality is that it’s hockey stick growth—you have to spend tons of money before you see any results (and then the results are exponential). At ClassPass, they see referrals as important for bringing in new clients, so it makes sense to incentivize referrals.

Artificial Inteligence 114

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114