Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 25, 2023

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention, and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing. High customer loyalty and high team passion.

Valuation 235

Valuation Revenue Viral Retention 235

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 21, 2020

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention, and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing. High customer loyalty and high team passion.

Revenue 434

Revenue Valuation Viral Retention 434

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

We spend a lot of time trying to get people focused on building products that have viral components and why that has to be measured and constantly tested. I have seen many teams pour tons of money, time and effort into PR strategies without thinking about how product tweaks could drive more consumption, more retention and more referrals.

Technical Review 384

Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

In my daily work with ecommerce brands, I see two types of companies: The first type focuses on acquisition and conversion. The second relies on retention. Overall acquisition costs for both B2C and B2B have gone up by 50% in the past five years. A retention analysis of coupon codes reveals a lot about your customers.

Retention 126

Retention Analytics Campaign eCommerce 126

ConversionXL

APRIL 4, 2017

Paid Acquisition. You’re undoubtedly familiar with paid acquisition, as it’s the digital equivalent of traditional advertising. Here are some resources to learn more about paid acquisition: Customer Acquisition Master Course (includes SEO). When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups?

Channel 118

Channel Marketing Viral SEO 118

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. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

In other words, you prove retention. With both growth and retention, you earn the right to build more. 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. We call it an MVP tree.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

Customer Acquisition. Measuring viral adoption is obviously important. Those two things together would lower your acquisition costs nearly in half to $6.11. Ironically, there are times where it may actually pay to INCREASE your customer acquisition costs. Retention / Churn. How many adds came through organic SEO?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

View from Seed

AUGUST 30, 2016

Acquisitions are happening more and more, while companies like PillPack, Actifio, CarGurus, OnShape, Acquia, Applause, and others continue to march forward. What customer retention strategies are working best for other florists? Looking at the pillar companies and those on deck locally, you’ll note a diversity of sector.

Social Media 185

Social Media B2B North America Media 185

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

You need to begin to “instrument” your customer acquisition process with analytics. You’ve built detailed analytics tracking into your product and you should be seeing organic and viral growth; and can provide Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users, 30d/90d/120d retention. 2M in 18 months.

Cofounder 429

Cofounder Seed Stage Valuation Metrics 429

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Instead, watch payback period for acquisition efficiency, watch retention for product/market fit, watch expansion revenue for long-term growth, and watch gross margin for long-term profitability. A reliable paid acquisition channel results in a somewhat stable business. Sales” is not a dirty word.

Restful 202

Restful Founder Revenue Acquisition 202

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

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 23, 2013

Even with a great retention rate (e.g. time to earn back the revenue to cover all your customer acquisition expenses) 75% annual retention. Use viral growth to offset cancellations. Few B2B companies can truly claim “viral growth” characteristics. Drastically reduce the cost of customer acquisition.

Business Model 335

Business Model .Net Revenue IPO 335

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

In a previous post , I covered the three main drivers of growth: Paid, Sticky, and Viral. Let’s look at a viral growth company, like Facebook. If you are building a large, viral, ad-support consumer internet property, you just want to go big! They’re off to cross the chasm. As soon as possible!&#

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 8, 2009

In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models. Great stuff.

Metrics 225

Metrics Startup Retention Acquisition 225

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 27, 2013

Within hours, your response to your disgruntled customer can go viral—even obtaining national attention (something you definitely don’t want). According to a post that went viral on Facebook, a little girl’s father was in Afghanistan and ordered a bouquet that came with a necklace for his daughter to be delivered on Valentine’s Day.

Social Media 70

Social Media Viral Media Customer 70

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 10, 2014

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing. High customer loyalty and high team passion.

Revenue 246

Revenue Entrepreneur Valuation Viral 246

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 26, 2016

Startup productivity is embodied in key ratios, including low cost of customer acquisition, high retention, and high revenue per employee. These days, you need customer evangelists who see the value and will pull in their friends through viral actions to keep the business growing. High customer loyalty and high team passion.

Revenue 145

Revenue Valuation Startup Viral 145

VC Cafe

JULY 15, 2021

So while ads can be an effective way to grow, spending on user acquisition before figuring out monetisation is a sure way to shorten runway for early stage startups. Build a community – often overlooked, but building a community around your app can help you build better products and dramatically increase retention.

Mobile 190

Mobile Social Media Distribution PR 190

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. But, if they are not, it’s very hard to use paid acquisition to generate that type of traffic for under $5. 3) Does your business have naturally short retention?

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. But, if they are not, it’s very hard to use paid acquisition to generate that type of traffic for under $5. 3) Does your business have naturally short retention?

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

This is a common problem that results from viral-loop optimization. By copying the exact same registration flow as every other successful viral app, many viral apps completely lose their positioning. At IMVU , we would routinely find retention effects that would stem from registration changes and have impact days or weeks later.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

ConversionXL

APRIL 13, 2017

same thing as growth hacker or growth marketer): “The Growth Manager function typically lives at the intersection of marketing and product development, and is focused on customer and user acquisition, activation, retention, and upsell. This usually comes down to very company specific things, like what channels are effective for growth.

Analytics 99

Analytics Engineer SEO Channel 99

David Teten

MAY 1, 2013

When deciding on the purchase of an expensive domain, startup teams should first consider whether the money might be better spent on other areas such as product development, customer acquisition, or hiring new talent. . Thanks to Matt Joyce and Saumil Jariwala for research help on this blog post. I previously published this in Forbes.

Naming 114

Naming Semantic Venture Capital Startup 114

The Equity Kicker

MAY 15, 2012

I read some great stuff today on topics like why aren’t VCs lean and scrappy , and why Pinterest took so long to go viral , but the pick of the bunch by far were some of the answers to What are some decisions taken by the “Growth team” at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users? But maybe I should.

Viral 108

Viral Framework Aggregator Retention 108

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

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward. I use tools to invoke my creative self. One example is driving, which has an actual physiological reason it makes you creative. I hear very little discussion ever about how to be more creative.

Technical Review 356

Technical Review Framework Audience Media 356

andrewchenblog.com

JANUARY 28, 2010

To become profitable using a freemium business model, this simple equation must hold true: Lifetime value > Cost per acquisition + Cost of service (paying & free) Said in plain english, the lifetime value of your paying customers needs to be greater than the cost it took to acquire them, plus, the cost servicing all users (free or paying).

CPA 51

CPA Retention Viral Acquisition 51

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JUNE 11, 2012

Many of the circa 2009 social games were more focused on growth than retention, and in many cases more focused on “satisfaction” than fun. In 2009, viral growth through invitations and notification were the way that Facebook games could get discovered. Paid acquisition. This has changed dramatically.

IP 108

IP Distribution Viral Mobile 108

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

#tearsofpain One way of removing silos and focusing on the entire business is to leverage Acquisition, Behavior and Outcome metrics. A small change I’ll make in this post is that when I recommend the metrics, I’ll follow the Outcomes | Behavior | Acquisition structure throughout this post. Hence that’s the macro-outcome.

Metrics 141

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 141

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. I think its helpful to think about two kinds of competition for distribution: acquisition competition and retention competition. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. So what can you do? My advice: dont launch big.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2019

Research in this field has identified many issues such as the viral nature of information, the unique realities of detecting bias or outright “fake news” in the digital world, cyberbullying, and other features of emergent digital life that are pivotal for the well-being of young people but also for the health of our societies as a whole.

China 113

China Global Framework Singapore 113

Venture Chronicles

DECEMBER 6, 2010

Social Media Monitoring evolved out of the explosion of non-traditional media channels developed in the last decade combined with the increased velocity of information flow as a consequence of viral information sharing. Influencing strategies also attempt to exploit brand loyalist behaviors for retention and promotion within the market.

Social Media 60

Social Media Media Viral Channel 60

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2018

Tara Robertson – How to 10x Growth by Optimizing Customer Marketing & Retention. Retention is the most important thing – if that’s poor, nothing else matters. Retention is the most important thing – if that’s poor, nothing else matters. Start with retention. Make it about the CUSTOMER.

Retention 106

Retention Artificial Inteligence Channel Email 106

abovethecrowd.com

JUNE 2, 2021

Paypal famously offered customers $5 to invite a friend, who would then also get $5 as part of a highly successful viral marketing campaign (they actually started at $20, and then reduced it to $10 and then ended at $5). Would that help retention and NPS (Net Promote Score)? You guessed it — straight up free money. Would they be loyal?

IPO 82

IPO Customer Matching Silicon Valley 82

Hippoland

OCTOBER 16, 2016

Companies in this category include companies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc… These are all companies that need a TON of users, great retention and engagement and continued-fast-growth of user adoption in order to later make money off ad revenue. Do you have virality built into the product?

Startup 48

Startup Vertical Early Stage Bootstrapping 48

The Startup Toolkit

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

It’s harder for people (including your own team) to intuit the implications of your retention rate. The lean startup book’s engines of growth is a great starting point for picking good metrics: Growing virally? Focus on retention. Focus on cost of acquisition versus lifetime value. It’s tempting, too.

Metrics 46

Metrics Retention Viral .Net 46