Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. But its not really viral growth, even when its exponential.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

There are two viable growth engines for tech companies: Viral, or “inherently viral” growth: Customers either intentionally or unintentionally recruit new customers by using your product. Social platforms use intentional virality; this occurs when users get a more fulfilling experience as more of their friends join the same platform.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

View from Seed

MARCH 22, 2016

Offer reporters an exclusive on the successful, viral campaign that got you there, or a behind-the-scenes look at what your product does and how you’ll deliver on this huge campaign’s promises. You set a $50,000 Kickstarter goal, reached it in four days, and the donation counter’s still ticking toward a million. That is objectively crazy.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage San Francisco Startup CTO Hire 120

crowdSPRING Blog

OCTOBER 14, 2010

Acquisitions: Pulling Back the Covers – [link]. 12 Creative Design Ideas That Went Viral (And The Lessons You Can Learn) – [link]. 12 Creative Design Ideas That Went Viral (And The Lessons You Can Learn) – [link]. Startup Sales – Why Hiring Seasoned Sales Reps May Not Work – [link]. – [link].

Social Media 90

Social Media Small Business Design Media 90

Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

Karrie is Chief Marketing Officer at Typeform, leading brand strategy, advertising, PR, internal communications, and DEI efforts as well as overseeing the internal creative studio. 12:29] Where do you stand on your messaging for client acquisition? [15:49] Marketing Podcast with Karrie Sanderson. So Carrie, welcome to the show.

Marketing 76

Marketing Differentiation B2C PR 76

YoungUpstarts

JULY 4, 2019

In today’s digital world, negative feedback can quickly go viral, leading to potential disaster for even the biggest brands. Before long the brand had gone viral, for all the wrong reasons. Ensure your team is trained to deal with any PR disasters, and your business won’t make headlines for the wrong reasons.

Reputation 145

Reputation Management Australia Boston 145

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. This is essentially a version of the viral loop.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

VC Cafe

JULY 15, 2021

Blogs/ press – to get consumers to learn about your new app, PR remains a viable source, especially when it comes to buzzy/social apps. ProductHunt/ Reddit/ Directories – another form of PR/social media, directories of new products and forums solicit feedback from users and contribute to discovery. Unfortunately not.

Mobile 190

Mobile Social Media Distribution PR 190

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 23, 2011

The sales productivity ratio (measured with the Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC ratio) are also fairly similar for the two groups (except for a small cap dip in Q4 09) and therefore do not explain the difference Why is scale so much rewarded by public markets? Impact of the recession on SaaS Sales&Marketing pr. Software 2.0:

Software Review 101

Software Review Technical Review Valuation Europe 101

Software By Rob

NOVEMBER 15, 2011

I received the following question from a reader: I was wondering if you had any thoughts on cost of customer acquisition for freemium businesses. We are obviously hitting social media, PR, etc. quite hard, but I don’t think paid acquisition could possibly work here. Photo by stevendepolo. My Thoughts. Adjust the Funnel.

Acquisition 56

Acquisition Customer Bootstrapping Viral 56

crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 16, 2012

Secrets of the acquisition process from EA and Zynga – [link]. Marketing the Viral Effect and Not-for-Profit Gold – [link]. Now what could go wrong with Silicon Valley – [link]. Hiring of Kevin Rose by Google sends all the wrong signals to Silicon Valley – [link].

Social Media 94

Social Media Small Business Design Media 94

View from Seed

MARCH 8, 2016

Jesse Derris is the founder and CEO of Derris & Company , a PR, branding, and communications firm based in New York. If you’re building a product that can grow virally—a social network, for example—brand is almost certainly less important at launch than product. And try to listen to the people you’re hiring as experts.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Conversion Startup PR 120

Cracking the Code

NOVEMBER 10, 2009

While poised with a limited number of transactions this year, the world of public Cloud Computing and SaaS companies has been marked by two events in the past few months: the acquisition of Omniture by Adobe and the high profile IPO of LogMeIn, a leading provider of PC remote access and support with a very interesting freemium model.

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review IPO Cloud 48

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

Increased investment in Facebook as an engagement/acquisition channel has translated into requests from CEOs, CMOs and other CxOs about the return on that investment. The number of PR people you can now fire because your Facebook page is such an awesome PR platform – not. The reduced TV ads you have to run.

Metrics 165

Metrics Advertising Marketing Social Media 165

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 9, 2019

Bazaarvoice came out of stealth mode roaring, though, and Sam Decker, our founding CMO, did a great job blogging on the launch and my long-time friend, Emily Brady at Brady PR, did a great job garnering the media attention that we had been waiting until the right time for?—?when when we had strength. but don’t watch this with your kids! ).

Stealth 48

Stealth Cofounder Los Angeles Technical Review 48

Cracking the Code

MARCH 12, 2010

The SaaS growth recovery does not seem to take a "V" shape 2) Sales productivity is ramping up: bottom was hit in the first half of 2009 However, the sales and productivity of the group, measured by the median "Customer Acquisition Cost ratio" or "CAC ratio", seems to be recovering more steeply. Popular Media: the key to viral marketing.

Software Review 63

Software Review Technical Review Cloud Forecast 63

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Tech IPOs were a receding memory, and mergers and acquisitions became the only path to liquidity for startups. Startup exits in the next three years will include IPO’s as well as acquisitions. The payoff: in this bubble, a startup can actively “engineer for an acquisition.” The New Exits. Here’s how: Order of Battle.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 8, 2009

But does Larry hate cloud computing that much or is he hiding a potential future acquisition of Salesforce.com? Impact of the recession on SaaS Sales&Marketing pr. Popular Media: the key to viral marketing. A funny video of Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle on Cloud Computing. ▼ 10/04 - 10/11. (2). Laughing Out (c)Loud.

Software Review 48

Software Review Cloud Technical Review Venture Capital 48

ConversionXL

JANUARY 8, 2018

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest levers that a business can use within their acquisition strategy as part of their Growth goals. You’re likely familiar with the different Growth frameworks like AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue). It all start with Acquisition.

SEO 134

SEO Metrics Analytics Search 134

The Next Web

JANUARY 26, 2014

If a big corporation is pushing a new product, you might expect them to take out TV ads, online ads, maybe hire a PR agency and set up big distribution partnerships. Rely on cheaper forms of marketing : Blogging, email, viral tactics etc. Most startups however, don’t have the kind of money required to do that. So what do startups do?

Thailand 167

Thailand Social Network PPC Singapore 167

Duct Tape Marketing

MARCH 25, 2016

Unconventional PR. Viral Marketing. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Once you know your CLV, you can set your maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (i.e. Existing platform > Viral marketing > Community building. This approach creates a very low customer acquisition cost, which allows them to scale.

Channel 28

Channel Viral Marketing Acquisition 28

Cracking the Code

MARCH 10, 2008

Lets call this ratio the Customer Acquisition Cost ratio or CAC ratio. Impact of the recession on SaaS Sales&Marketing pr. Popular Media: the key to viral marketing. A more accurate benchmark would then be to divide the incremental GM (annualized) in a given quarter by the S&M expenses of the previous quarter.

Sales 79

Sales Software Review Marketing Technical Review 79

betashop.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

It has been awesome, flattering, and humbling to see that post went viral and has been seen by so many thousands of people — mainly aspiring entrepreneurs — and has been translated into many languages. My rule is that conferences are to be avoided unless it’s purely for PR purposes or if you’re in sales. .

Technical Review 108

Technical Review Technology Software Review Valuation 108

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. This is completely analogous to the situation elsewhere on the internet, where launching a new website, product, or service with PR is getting harder and harder. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

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. For example, PR doesn’t scale.

Metrics 20

Metrics Churn Rate Acquisition SEM 20

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 10, 2008

The top performing SaaS companies typically achieve annual customer renewal rates above 90% - with most of the churn due to death (bankruptcies) or marriage (acquisitions) - and over 100% renewals on a dollar value basis due to up-sells into this installed base. upfront acquisition cost, making the CLTV equal to $2.5-$0.7= means a $0.7

Software Review 48

Software Review North America Europe Metrics 48

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

I use a more restrictive definition: A growth team is a product tech team that’s focused on acquisition instead of core product features. Contrast this with a marketing team going after any particular channel—events, paid, SEO, community, PR, whatever. Their growth came from users, and they had true virality.

Conversion 133

Conversion Technical Review Channel Engineer 133

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 4, 2008

Among others, I would quote the Bladelogic IPO, the acquisition of Postini by Google for $625m, the two largest SaaS deals in history signed by Cornerstone OnDemand (160k and 350k seats), Eloqua almost doubling its revenues and LinkedIn adding more than 10m users. Impact of the recession on SaaS Sales&Marketing pr. Software 2.0:

Software Review 48

Software Review South Korea IPO Portfolio 48

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

” April, 2012 – Andrew Chen writes Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing , which goes viral (2.4K PR and publicity drive attention…to drive sales. Now, people begin defining growth hacking as a process, a systematic approach, a “viral loop”, etc. Ads drive awareness…to drive sales.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

ConversionXL

JANUARY 18, 2022

Viral marketing is hard to replicate. Nothing quite beats digital PR. Once you’ve created a system on one channel, experiment and scale with new ones. Repurpose your most successful campaigns to suit new audiences. Encourage sharing by tapping into network effects. Most influencers love meeting other smart and like-minded experts.

Audience 122

Audience Technical Review Social Media Campaign 122

www.foliomag.com

JULY 31, 2012

Curalate allows us to see how the content we pin to our boards is performing, as well as the content people are organically pinning from our sites, and more importantly how viral those actions are, since it’s reported that 80 percent of Pinterest activity comes from repins.” Marketing/Communications/PR. Mergers and Acquisitions.

Social Media 40

Social Media Rhode Island Media South Dakota 40

Occam's Razor

APRIL 29, 2013

Innocent on the other hand clearly understands Conversational Marketing (they are a small company, not yet corporatized I suspect, and likely deal with a smaller combination of lawyers/PR types/Social Media Gurus/Agencies – a sad likely bane on Tide's existence). Don't start with LTV, it is hard. And you'll get promoted.

Metrics 166

Metrics Marketing Search SEO 166