Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer. It always reduces risk to plan your business first.

Intellectual Property 309

Intellectual Property Technical Review Venture Capital Startup 309

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 12, 2018

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer. It always reduces risk to plan your business first.

Intellectual Property 134

Intellectual Property Technical Review Startup Incubator 134

ReadWriteStart

MAY 30, 2022

In this article, you’ll learn how bootstrapping makes you a better business – a leaner, smarter, more agile company that can roll with the punches. Bootstrapping Minimizes the Number of People Cashing in on Your Success. Bootstrapped founders don’t have these concerns. Secondly, just how badly do you need that funding?

Bootstrapping 147

Bootstrapping Startup Equity Silicon Valley 147

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 18, 2020

It’s more possible to bootstrap today than a few years ago, as the cost of entry continues to go down. It’s equally easy to go online and incorporate your new entity, register some intellectual property and have some fun with social media for marketing and interacting with customers. Favor profitability over revenue and user growth.

Hockey Stick 423

Hockey Stick Bootstrapping Sweat Equity Intellectual Property 423

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building? How many are there? Can it scale?”

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 24, 2017

One characteristic remains: the products subscription businesses can provide, ranging from magazine subscriptions to literally anything, can appear on a customer’s doorstep every day, week, month or year. Subscription business brings recurring revenue. The term itself sounds confusing, so should I even bother?

Churn Rate 149

Churn Rate eCommerce Business Model Bootstrapping 149

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 8, 2015

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer. It always reduces risk to plan your business first.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 120

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 1, 2020

The primary source of your funds should be your paying customers, i.e., your business should generate enough revenues and profits to fund the growth and expansion. Any custom manufactured IoT device would require software development as well as hardware customization. Bootstrapping. Sources of funding. ?

Startup 150

Startup Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch Seed Stage 150

SoCal CTO

MARCH 1, 2010

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. Great stuff. This post looks at the implementation details of HTML 5 video.

Acquisition 150

Acquisition Cofounder Technical Cofounder Cost 150

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Up and Running

MAY 28, 2015

We recently had Tim Berry, Palo Alto Software founder and business planning expert, present our Bplans audience with his latest advice on lean business planning. Start your lean business plan today: Download our Free Lean Plan Template one-page-pitch-download.pdf. I’m going to start with what’s a lean business plan.

Lean 60

Lean Business Plan Video Software Review 60

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Based on the Startup Environment Index from the Kauffman Foundation and LegalZoom a while back, personal money, or bootstrapping, continues to be the primary startup funding source. At least wait until later, when you ready to scale, and have some “leverage” based on a proven business model, some real customers, and real revenue.

Bootstrapping 276

Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Startup Burn Rate 276

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 6, 2016

It’s more possible to bootstrap today than a few years ago, as the cost of entry continues to go down. It’s equally easy to go online and incorporate your new entity, register some intellectual property and have some fun with social media for marketing and interacting with customers. Favor profitability over revenue and user growth.

Bootstrapping 120

Bootstrapping Hockey Stick Sweat Equity Intellectual Property 120

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 24, 2015

By bootstrapping, bartering, reducing overheads (rental and manpower), and leveraging technology (especially the web), one can start one’s own business almost on a dime without being beholden to creditors or venture capitalists. This spanned the following areas: #1 Generate Higher Revenue. c) Selling more to existing customers.

Technical Review 100

Technical Review Software Review South Carolina Startup 100

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

From a narrow niche of IT professionals who were our early target market, we now have a wide variety of customers.”. Bootstrapping can be fun, you get to iterate quickly, turn on dimes, invent new features on the fly. I think we’ve done a good job at this and it shines through in Simple’s product and customer experience.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 9, 2019

Tech startups are, in contrast, focused on rapid growth, potential, and top-end revenue. Goal setting is essential to the success of any business, and is critical to the growth of a tech startup in the bootstrapping stage. Small businesses are, in most cases, driven by stable long-term growth, value, and profitability.

Technical Review 80

Technical Review Bootstrapping Startup Finance 80

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

In 2012 I got together with Alexander Osterwalder , Henry Chesbrough and Andre Marquis to think about the Lean and the future of corporate innovation. What CEOs, management teams and shareholders care about is growth —revenue growth, greater user adoption, increased market share, bigger margins, etc. in developing these new models.

Lean 326

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 326

Gust

DECEMBER 7, 2014

Based on the Startup Environment Index from the Kauffman Foundation and LegalZoom a while back, personal money, or bootstrapping, continues to be the primary startup funding source. At least wait until later, when you ready to scale, and have some “leverage” based on a proven business model, some real customers, and real revenue.

Bootstrapping 191

Bootstrapping Entrepreneur Startup Burn Rate 191

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

In other words, you must start bootstrapping an online startup , because the future of the global business world is online. Before we look at ways to bootstrap a startup, let’s consider a comprehensive definition of what a startup is. Ways to bootstrap a startup. Implement the “lean startup” philosophy. What is a startup?

Bootstrapping 85

Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Typically, people who are going to watch these videos are already customers or at the very bottom of the funnel. It’s a great way to bring value to your customers, but you’re missing out on the leverage that YouTube provides. We’re a bootstrapped company that started with more time than money. lower views) in our data.

Channel 129

Channel Metrics Algorithm Video 129

The Next Web

DECEMBER 30, 2012

We create the best experience for creating personalized books, cards and calendars then our customers pay us for these products. We continually improve these experiences to build more value for our customers. Diversifying revenue streams at Wave. In other words, advertisers pay to present special offers to our customers.

Business Model 133

Business Model Technical Review Advertising B2C 133

Up and Running

JUNE 4, 2018

This is clear when you do anything from checking in your baggage for a flight, to contacting a large company’s customer service department! It’s easier to bootstrap. It’s important to note that while the likes of Facebook and Dell are often referred to as bootstrapped, that’s actually a bit of a myth. These include: 1.

Bootstrapping 66

Bootstrapping Colorado Internet Software Review 66

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. Step 1: Start with a lean plan. A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

No wait, I forgot, actually the question is: What happens when employee #2 makes off with your code and roadmap and marketing data and customer list, moves to Bolivia, and starts selling your stuff world-wide at one-tenth the price? You don't have an "edge" just because you're passionate, hard-working, or "lean.". Like what??

Software Review 325

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

Duct Tape Marketing

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Key Takeaways Jason emphasizes the importance of maintaining customer focus, embracing change, learning from failure, building a strong team, and staying true to your values when scaling a business. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today! John (02:33): Yeah.

Chicago 49

Chicago Campaign Software Review Software Engineering 49

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 1, 2012

Sacha demonstrated the benefits of selling many copies of an eBook at a low price, while Jarrod pointed out the advantages of higher prices, bringing in more revenue with 1/6th the number of units sold. Company A has 1,000 customers each paying $10/mo. Company B has 10 customers each paying $1,000/mo. Which is better?

Customer 320

Customer Revenue Acquisition Cofounder 320

Up and Running

JULY 10, 2017

To determine whether freemium is right for you, do the simple math: Figure out how many paying customers you need to run the company. If you charge every user $50 and spend $10K to pay the business bills, you need at least 200 customers to break even. In our example, it’s 20K non-paying customers. Duolingo lingot store.

Startup 110

Startup Non-Compete Viral Software Review 110

Austin Startup

JUNE 26, 2019

The Whole Enchilada For those of you interested in more than The Skinny, keep reading… Countless conversations have been had with key users, customers, advisors, mentors, family and friends. and * on a bootstrapped budget* : We first engaged in customer surveys and validated a huge problem?—?several What did our customers think?

Silicon Valley 54

Silicon Valley Startup B2C Sweat Equity 54

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 24, 2012

I bootstrapped it on my own. So, I guess it’s just a long way of saying, if you want to focus on who your perfect customer is and someone who will give you money because they have this pain so bad, that yeah, they’re going to part with dollars to see it fixed, you don’t need many customers to make money.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley Software Review Internet Technical Review 204

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Intellectual Property At the next class I said, “You all ought to get out and start talking to customers on day one, and get early feedback on your idea. Don’t share the details of your manufacturing process with customers until you’ve locked up your intellectual property.” Bootstrap for years! Just get out of the building.”

Vertical 149

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 149

OnlyOnce

JULY 9, 2013

The book has been described by a few CEOs who read it and commented early for me along the lines of “The Lean Startup movement is great, but this book starts where most of those books end and takes you through the ‘so you have a product that works in-market – now what?’ questions”.

Startup 95

Startup Advisory Board Elevator Pitch Forecast 95

The Startup Magazine

DECEMBER 10, 2019

Instead, putting all our focus into a business that was yet to exist, had no customers and no revenue. But we have made it this far and are ever the more energized to keep bootstrapping and tenaciously fighting to nurture and grow our fledgling business. I worried about how we would execute before we even had customers!

Startup 93

Startup Bootstrapping Lean Social Media 93

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. Jason: So how many of those 20,000 people are paying customers? Edwin: Okay, I have different types of customers.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

ConversionXL

JANUARY 29, 2014

of businesses are actively seeking & collecting customer reviews on an ongoing basis. Customer loyalty expert Fred Reichheld also reports in his book “ The Ultimate Question ” that businesses saw an average of 2x revenue growth by simply increasing their overall brand advocacy by only 12%. image source.

Software Review 126

Software Review Stock Video Advertising 126

Hippoland

FEBRUARY 12, 2018

I’ll give you an example with my own startup LaunchBit and how our understanding of the problem and the customer became more refined over time: V1: Helping online marketers get customers profitably. V2: Helping online marketers who have previously bought ads in email lists get customers profitably. But the execution is hard.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage Business Model B2B Email 48

Hippoland

FEBRUARY 12, 2018

I’ll give you an example with my own startup LaunchBit and how our understanding of the problem and the customer became more refined over time: V1: Helping online marketers get customers profitably. V2: Helping online marketers who have previously bought ads in email lists get customers profitably. But the execution is hard.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage Business Model B2B Email 48