Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 21, 2021

Switch your focus from product development to sales. Explosive growth to an enterprise normally requires a scalable sales model, a well-documented process with incentives, training, and metrics for tracking and management. Of course, customer relationships, and penetration into new market segments are also critical elements.

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ConversionXL

AUGUST 24, 2021

News declaring it the number one job in sales and marketing, and a median average salary of around $142,000 in the U.S., it’s no surprise that people are looking at how to become a marketing manager. Everything you need to know about the marketing manager role. Others get creative. Others get creative.

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Management Marketing Campaign Social Media 141

ConversionXL

APRIL 13, 2017

As technology continues to make data-driven marketing easier to implement and control, one thing remains constant: it’s all about the effectiveness of your team. Quick Primer on Growth vs. Marketing. In this worldview, there’s nothing fundamentally different about a growth role and a marketing role.

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Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 31, 2016

Just a decade ago, most software/cloud startups used a traditional model where product and marketing were siloed: product teams created the product and marketing drove people to the website to buy it. This means that growth needs to be baked right into the product idea from the start.

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Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

To create this first year in business checklist, I turned to our in-house experts here at Palo Alto Software: Sabrina Parsons, CEO; Noah Parsons, COO; Josh Cochrane, Vice President of Product Development; and Josh Fegles, Academic and Government Channel Sales Director, and founder of gluten-free cookie company Jude’s Foods.

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Forecast Software Review Lean Finance 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

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Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

I strongly believe that the first few hires of a startup should belong to the growth department, whether they’re marketers, community managers, or salespeople (selling your product is the best way to learn how to improve it). 1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth.

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This is going to be BIG.

JULY 25, 2022

Metrics around these efforts. Whether or not you were successful can be measured with not only objective metrics on the outcomes but also on the inputs and the effort. Some efforts don’t have more complicated metrics than just, “Did this work, yes, no, or still in process?”

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Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

A business model guides an organization to create and deliver products/service and make money from it. It describes the product/service, who is it for, what channel sells/deliver it, how demand is created, how does the company make money, etc. Strategy Maps. StageGate Process.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. But that job is changing dramatically, and this brings us to the next major problem facing traditional media organizations: Media companies are failing at marketing. There are too many products clamoring for attention.

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ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Stage 1: Target the right metrics for an effective long game. In today’s market ( 8,000 martech products alone ), it’s easier to attract the right customer with material they value than it is to chase down and convert a prospect who isn’t ready to buy. Metrics for your demand generation funnel.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 29, 2016

First you need to take consolation from the fact that you are not alone, and more importantly you need to implement an active growth and marketing plan to include the following initiatives: Ramp-up visibility and strategic alliances. Continually add new marketing and distribution partners. Real growth always requires real marketing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. And what of the product development team? First of all, they are not selling their product by hand.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes product development in the feedback loop with customers. 2008 09 06 Eric Ries Haas Columbia Customer Development Engineering View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 7, 2016

Sales and marketing spend, no matter how targeted, is always going to be more expensive than hanging on to the customers you’ve got. We also personally work on our chat channel at least twice a week. We don’t have any traditional metrics in our customer support team. But I knew it could be higher.

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Seeing Both Sides

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

By viewing product development and marketing as integrated functions, not silos, leading tech companies like Facebook and Pinterest are rethinking their approach to driving growth and achieving breakthrough results. Second, the Growth Manager needs to help the company to quantify and understand progress against goals.

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Seeing Both Sides

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

By viewing product development and marketing as integrated functions, not silos, leading tech companies like Facebook and Pinterest are rethinking their approach to driving growth and achieving breakthrough results. Second, the Growth Manager needs to help the company to quantify and understand progress against goals.

Management 20

Management Analytics Technical Review Framework 20

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2017

Digital marketing moves at a fast pace. Everyone has railed against these practices ( including us , many times), but it still seems that much of the industry is focused on short term metrics and surface level changes. A profound knowledge in every aspect of marketing and business development is necessary (e.g.

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Conversion Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Analytics 48

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

- simply because I left the large, famous MMO company I was working for to prepare a quiet startup) Personally, I got lucky and started in an area (online games) where I found channels such as MUD-DEV (and early GDCs) for meeting, listening to, and speaking to other people where people were taken how they were found.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Even more importantly, you can start to experiment with feature set, positioning, and marketing - all without building a product. Use Google Optimizer to try different landing pages (even radically different landing pages) to see if any particular way of talking about your product makes a difference to your conversion rates.

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 12, 2010

It’s human nature to prioritize the metrics that get measured, so the simple act of keeping track is often enough to have a significant positive impact. You can also use this space to keep track of innovators (R&D personnel) and rainmakers (sales & marketing personnel).

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Intellectual Property .Net Valuation Distribution 223

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 25, 2016

It’s easy to be intimidated if you believe you must constantly come up with big, market-disrupting inventions. Increase your On-Time Delivery (OTD) metric by 1 percent. If this exercise is successful, make it a regular innovation channel and solicit, evaluate, and implement more solutions to today’s business issues.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

It provides a basic introduction to analytics as they apply to Lean Startup, including sections on what metrics to use and how to interpret them. For instance, Ben lists out the worst of the “vanity metrics,” a term that describes appealing but meaningless or misleading numbers. Alistair: There are plenty. Consider a restaurant.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

She has a separate team, with its own culture and office, and a mandate straight from top management to innovate without regard to the company’s historic products, channels, or supply chain. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. So far, so good.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Brandanew

APRIL 25, 2016

As you’re aware, we have a fully online content marketing workshop available at Brandanew. Content marketing with limited resources seems to be a common paint point for many. QUESTION: How Can I Start Content Marketing With Limited Resources? Find your focus channels. Hire external writers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 16, 2010 Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium (Normally, I do not write about companies that are doing a marketing launch. First, SlideShare is a fantastic product (that I use on a regular basis) and an impressive company example of Lean Startup practices in action.

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San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service. A description of your target market or the different market segments you’re targeting. In the tactics section, list your sales channels and describe how you will be selling your products.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Today, Id like to spend some time on two techniques: the problem presentation and learning what channels of information reach customers. In particular, Ive focused on the two channels of communication that were most commonly suggested in the first survey: conferences and books. Lets start with what I learned last time.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

This is another sub-optimization caused by incentivizing the wrong metric. Given that most recruiting channels are pay-for-performance, its usually cheaper, too, because it has a lower conversion rate. This can be especially challenging for HR professionals who measure their success based on the number of jobs they fill.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

But instead of channeling all my energy towards building new features, I channel roughly 80% of it towards measuring and optimizing existing features. The user activation flow is the most critical path towards achieving initial user gratification or product/market fit. I am not advocating adding no features at all.

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ConversionXL

AUGUST 30, 2018

It slows product development. The key is to connect user research to an improved user experience and, in turn, an increase in customer retention, leads, or any other metric for which C-suite members are accountable. A non-scientific approach that bases product decisions on the opinions of one or two users is useless.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. the fatigue rate of customers in that notification channel 2. Thoughts?

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2018

#CXLLive speaker @HanaAbaza talking change and driving growth thru better marketing @Shopify #digitalmarketing #betterleadgen pic.twitter.com/mZhn60TUW2. Marketing can polish a turd. Positioning isn’t something marketing makes up, it’s something marketing uncovers. Assign content & channels for each experience.

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Retention Artificial Inteligence Channel Email 106

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

On the other hand, it’s a whole universe and you’d need an interesting perspective on why you should go attack that market and face all that competition and noise and everything that’s in the market. So when you’re thinking about marketing positioning to me, that side of it is the interesting side of it.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

Many marketers became more concerned with 10x growth hacks they read about online than strategy and growth process. Is the way it’s commonly talked about useless? ” April, 2012 – Andrew Chen writes Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing , which goes viral (2.4K They need products that are really working in the market.

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