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?)

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

This is precisely why MakeSpace is growing so rapidly in its core markets: New York, Chicago and Washington DC where they can literally come and pick up your furniture and move it away and you never had to visit a facility and they do this at a cheaper price than incumbents by centralizing the location and thus having cheaper infrastructure costs.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

In a subscription business, maybe your attrition starts matching your acquisition, balancing like magic. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value. Nothing seems to matter. In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers.

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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.

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