Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

“Growth hacking perpetuates this myth that you can magically achieve hockey-stick growth by using short-term “hacks.” “ I have always encouraged teams to think about growth as daily blocking-and-tackling rather than a dark art. I laughed as I did at much of his rant. He even used some terminology near and dear to my heart.

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Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 18, 2020

Use multiple social-media channels, blogging, email and voicemail to build the same image and responsiveness as larger competitors. Investors have spread the word that you can’t get “hockey-stick” growth without a large cash infusion. Use your networking to get advice, but all jobs can be do-it-yourself.

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Hockey Stick Bootstrapping Sweat Equity Intellectual Property 423

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 27, 2015

In fact, for startups, it usually makes sense to announce your solution on social media and blogs even before you have built the first one. All investors want to see real evidence that the dogs will eat the dogfood before they give any credibility to your hockey-stick projection curves. Maximum agility for required pivots.

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Hockey Stick Startup Stealth Agile 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. Maysee now enjoys hockey stick revenue growth. The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino.

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Japan Customer Development Developer Customer 296

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

For a little while, the team can resort to the last defense of entrepreneurs in trouble: the promised hockey-stick. One thing that is often overlooked about the hockey-stick growth shape: its most distinctive characteristic is the long, flat part. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Up and Running

JANUARY 2, 2013

If your financial chart shows “hockey-stick growth,” be sure to explain what happens to cause those inflection points. This post was originally posted on the LivePlan blog on July 11, 2012. Best of luck pitching your business!

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Hockey Stick Exit Strategy Technical Review Due Diligence 164

Up and Running

OCTOBER 8, 2014

When you play unicycle hockey, you typically use a unicycle, an ice-hockey stick and a tennis ball. To cater to a unicycle hockey player’s needs, Unicycle.com, headquartered in the UK, has decided to stock ice-hockey sticks. James Shields uses an ice hockey stick during a serious unicycle hockey competition.

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David Teten

JANUARY 19, 2021

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. . (co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. Of the Inc. 5000 companies, only 6.5%

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Cofounder Technical Review Equity Dividend 78

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 6, 2016

Use multiple social-media channels, blogging, email and voicemail to build the same image and responsiveness as larger competitors. Investors have spread the word that you can’t get “hockey-stick” growth without a large cash infusion. Use your networking to get advice, but all jobs can be do-it-yourself.

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Bootstrapping Hockey Stick Sweat Equity Intellectual Property 120

The Equity Kicker

MAY 3, 2016

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you will know I’m a huge admirer of the way Jeff Bezos has built his business. As you can see from the chart below Amazon has delivered on the proverbial hockey stick that startups put in their business plans, and they’ve done it at serious scale.

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ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 11, 2010

In Jérôme Cukier's presentation, he argued that when he writes for OECD factblog , "his goal in creating a given blog post is to capture the interest of the reader within 10 seconds." The "Hockey Stick" is a Great Story, Don't Get Me Wrong. The "hockey stick" is a pretty familiar visualization for startups.

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Hockey Stick Startup Audience Conversion 120

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. Looking forward to more of your posts, this blog is a favorite of ours right now! Great post!

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

crowdSPRING Blog

SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

Good insight … Navigating The Make-Or-Break Years As You Create Hockey Stick Growth [link]. appeared first on crowdspring Blog. . — crowdspring (@crowdSPRING) September 6, 2017. 10 Tips to Create a Memorable Tagline for Your #Business via @crowdSPRING [link] pic.twitter.com/fejFlheONO. – [link].

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Artificial Inteligence Hockey Stick Small Business Design 48

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Most important slide: hockey stick Micro-scale results Key questions: who is the customer, and how do you know? Get in touch: Twitter Email Facebook Linkedin Additional resources Startup LessonsLearned, All Seasons : Every post from the blog, in one 600+ page PDF. or drive traffic to that profitable destination?)

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Up and Running

JUNE 26, 2013

An anonymous tech entrepreneur—who at his height in the startup world “hit the top of TechCrunch” and landed a prestigious spot in a startup accelerator—has predicted the demise of his fledgling business, and is blogging the collapse as it happens. I didn’t believe the s**t I was selling investors.

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The Startup Toolkit

DECEMBER 14, 2011

I used to blog out of guilt. Every now and then, my investors would sternly suggest I blog more. I’d grumpily obey and then point to the flat traffic graph as clear evidence of blogging’s fruitlessness. Blogging makes money, sort of, eventually. The advertising value of blogging is essentially nil.

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Hockey Stick Affiliate Analytics Bootstrapping 54

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

crowdSPRING Blog

SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

Good insight … Navigating The Make-Or-Break Years As You Create Hockey Stick Growth [link]. . — crowdspring (@crowdSPRING) September 6, 2017. 10 Tips to Create a Memorable Tagline for Your #Business via @crowdSPRING [link] pic.twitter.com/fejFlheONO. — Rachel Thompson (@BadRedheadMedia) September 6, 2017.

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Artificial Inteligence Hockey Stick Small Business Design 48

Professor VC

JUNE 7, 2018

However, a 4-slide demo day pitch deck showing the market (Venn diagram with giant TAM), team (4 pictures with logos of universities and unicorn startups), product (3 screenshots), and traction (hockey stick chart showing 11 days of growth) has gone way too far the other way.

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Silicon Valley Hockey Stick Venture Capital Lean 31

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 31, 2010

"Investors want to know that a company can repeatedly acquire customers for $X and generate more than $X in gross profit from each customer." - Mark Peter Davis Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales recommended community building, Alexis Ohanian says Reddit targeted market leading blogs and Justin.tv

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K9 Ventures

MAY 31, 2012

Some things I've said often enough that they are probably worth committing to writing in a blog post.]. A Series A investor will look at these numbers and will hope that things will continue to trend in the right direction and in the best case scenario will start to hockey stick.

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Hockey Stick Seed Stage Framework Early Stage 112

David Cohen

JULY 29, 2015

The hockey stick doesn’t emerge quite like you thought it would. In some cases, they just exit with an acquihire and get themselves a nice compensation package without any material return of capital to their investors. Startups are hard. Rarely does the first year or two go exactly as planned.

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Hockey Stick Seed Capital Founder Startup 48

K9 Ventures

MAY 31, 2012

Some things I've said often enough that they are probably worth committing to writing in a blog post.]. A Series A investor will look at these numbers and will hope that things will continue to trend in the right direction and in the best case scenario will start to hockey stick.

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Seed Stage Hockey Stick Framework Early Stage 101

Growthink Blog

AUGUST 24, 2016

And as an investor, I know that the only way to earn outsized profits is to identify businesses early , before they go through their "Hockey Stick" growth phase, and most of these kinds of companies are to be found in fast growth industries like those listed above.

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Hockey Stick Artificial Inteligence Venture Capital Hosting 48

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 19, 2016

You get more traffic, more conversions, more money – in an endless hockey stick shaped cycle. A guest writer on Moz’s blog put it this way : “From an SEO perspective, when you delete an image of my face that was outperformed by a cute model, you create a void for Google. Of course, it’s not so simple.

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SEO Algorithm Technical Review Software Review 48

Bryce Dot VC

APRIL 13, 2016

A somewhat mysterious story appeared on a small cycling blog a month or so back. Too often the hockey stick graph became proxy for the health of the business. It exposed a POV I found enlightening an well as troubling. With many, the experience is still raw but the high level take aways are eerily consistent.

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Hockey Stick Startup Valuation IPO 40

Austin Startup

DECEMBER 7, 2010

As consumer technology companies begin to get off the ground and make forecasts, there is the inevitable user adoption hockey stick that rockets the local user count to ridiculous heights with no market budget but significant “viral effects&# and “social media.&#

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Growthink Blog

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

HIT is comprised of BIG sectors: -- Practice Management Systems (PMS) - a $2.9 billion/year business growing at 8%/year -- Electronic Health Records (EHR) - a $5.3 Companies like eClinicalWorks, eMD's, Allscripts-Mysis, Intuun, Spring Medical Systems, Ingenix, and MedSynergies.

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Small Business Force

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

Most of my blog posts are focused on keeping you out of trouble.This one is focused on that "oh, s**t" moment of extraordinary success that, hopefully, some of you will someday have. Sure, you've got a business plan and it shows the proverbial "hockey stick" of growth. Success is often a two-edged sword.

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Hockey Stick Dilution Viral Demand 37

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

A startup in a New Market (enabling customers to do something they never could before,) might be unprofitable for 5 or more years, (hopefully with the traditional hockey stick revenue curve,) while one in an Existing Market might be generating cash in 12-18 months. Blog at WordPress.com. Are you bigger, faster, cheaper?

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Small Business Force

JUNE 29, 2013

Most typically, the financials, have that "magic hockey stick," seemingly so necessary in every plan, probably, either developed by the entrepreneur's accountant with or without the entrepreneur's input, and they all tie out nicely. As I've noted in several other blog posts, investors invest in the people, not just the business.

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Hockey Stick Finder Due Diligence SEC 37

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

I’m at jordan.cooper@gmail.com or blogging here: jordancooper.wordpress.com Reply Alain Raynaud , on November 12, 2009 at 4:42 pm Said: Or maybe it’s just the last slide that convinced the VCs. You already have the hockey stick and exponential growth. This is my new favorite post on your blog.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 216

The Startup Lawyer

MARCH 11, 2010

Each time a new set of docs get released, I don’t cringe because it means I then have to remove the hockey stick from my revenue projections. That’s one of the reasons why I started this blog in 2006. When an issue like this occurs at your startup, you’ll be glad your documents are “complicated.&#.

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Delaware Hockey Stick Preferred Stock Open Source 49

The Startup Lawyer

MARCH 11, 2010

Each time a new set of docs get released, I don’t cringe because it means I then have to remove the hockey stick from my revenue projections. That’s one of the reasons why I started this blog in 2006. When an issue like this occurs at your startup, you’ll be glad your documents are “complicated.&#.

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Delaware Hockey Stick Preferred Stock Open Source 45

Professor VC

AUGUST 26, 2011

The objections range from "its hard", "nobody believes them" to "all hockey sticks look alike". Byron Deeter has a good blog post on SAAS metrics. Wanted to make sure it was going to catch on.You can follow me @professorvc , and hopefully will comment more frequently than this blog. Blog Archive. My Blog List.

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Silicon Valley San Jose Hockey Stick Venture Capital 35

Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 26, 2023

And I was like, well, I have my, I've got blog posts, , I don't know, I've got my emails. I never learned to roast a chicken and I never had kids and my career trajectory has been very windy as opposed to a straight hockey stick that it's supposed to be. I guess kind of that's really hit me in that moment.

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Hockey Stick Software Review Email Cofounder 64

Up and Running

MARCH 11, 2015

The post Webinar Recap: 14 Tips on How to Pitch and Get Funded appeared first on Bplans Blog. If you’re sure … Peter I think you need to mute yourself again. You want to explain those inflection points. I look forward to hearing from you over the years through our Twitter account, and I just wanted to say thank you all again.

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Technical Review Software Review Due Diligence Exit Strategy 60