Up and Running

JUNE 28, 2021

Employee retention is one of the biggest and potentially expensive issues for companies. The Society for Human Resource Management reveals three key employee engagement factors that most businesses miss out on training, professional, and career development. Why is this happening, you might ask? Learning experience platforms (LXP).

Employee 83

Employee Developer Software Review Salary 83

The Equity Kicker

MAY 3, 2018

In startups things move fast, and once you get beyond the high level metrics like sales it is often difficult to get good data, particularly at the very early stages. Or worse, the proxy metrics are only directionally right and when managed to with precision they result in bad outcomes.

Metrics 87

Metrics CPA Early Stage Retention 87

Growthink Blog

DECEMBER 27, 2017

Demonstrate your team’s unique unfair competitive advantage, whether it is technology, stellar management team, or key partnerships. This gives the assurance that if management executes well, the company has substantial profit and liquidity potential. Detail your customer retention plan. Don’t just list competitors.

Venture Capital 129

Venture Capital Business Plan Technical Review Private Placement 129

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

For example, in 2021 accounting software platform Bill.com acquired spend management tool Divvy in order to increase its market share. These stages aren’t a strict pathway. But in the early stages of development, you might not have the quantitative data necessary to dig into these questions. Image source.

Marketing 115

Marketing Framework Metrics Channel 115

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

You Manage What you Measure. One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”. Or they go in the opposite direction and spend too much time capturing & measuring data that isn’t used to make management decisions. Retention / Churn.

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

ConversionXL

JANUARY 28, 2021

Whether you’re looking to improve conversions or retention CDP’s can provide a holistic view of both your opportunities and areas for improvement. As we wrote previously : Back to those (early) days when Marketing Automation was just born, the world was web-centric. Image source ).

Technical Review 86

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Technical Cofounder 86

Austin Startup

JULY 8, 2017

I can’t tell you how many times I run into first-time founders who’ve been fed absolute nonsense from ‘advisors’ ‘mentors’ or similarly named people about their ‘secrets’ for managing legal spend. Failed companies never pay the price for poorly managed legal; unless the failure was the result of the legal problems, which does happen.

Startup 48

Startup Salary Early Stage Software 48

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

What I love about my job is getting to see teams of super-early-stage companies develop ideas that while raw have potential to make an impact on the market. For a well-funded seed company I have controversially recommended hiring a great office manager that doubles as an administrative assistant.

Operations 150

Operations Metrics Early Stage Non-Compete 150

David Teten

JANUARY 14, 2019

Many early-stage companies do not have these issues top of mind, because so many founders are pre-children. As a manager, I’ve always tried to maintain a culture of understanding people’s personal calendar needs, e.g., childcare obligations. The manager said, “No problem, that’s a great idea.”

Retention 60

Retention Offshore Management Early Stage 60

Up and Running

JUNE 4, 2014

But for early-stage companies, trying to win them back — and learn from their feedback — is often a better strategy. Particularly for tech, there’s hesitation to insert humans into the retention process. What do you do when a customer threatens to leave your product or service? Keep It Human.

Customer 115

Customer Technical Review Early Stage Retention 115

Up and Running

MARCH 11, 2015

Brad Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado. David Cohen is the founder and Managing Partner of Techstars, the #1 ranked internet startup accelerator in the world. Hunter is a partner at Homebrew and previously led consumer product management at YouTube. Follow Mark on Twitter @msuster. Feld Thoughts.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Technical Review Silicon Valley Cofounder 60

OnlyOnce

AUGUST 3, 2023

(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CPO’s) In most startups, the HR function starts out as tactical, because you have to get people hired and paid, and while you might have a founder or early-stage employee who can do these things, often these tasks are frequently outsourced to a PEO. What’s the right amount of time?

Hiring 62

Hiring Metrics Leadership Early Stage 62

Mucker Lab

AUGUST 27, 2014

After stints as a technology investment banker, a dot-com entrepreneur, and a product manager in Silicon Valley, I moved to Los Angeles in 2006. It’s probably not too controversial to say that the median level of sophistication of early stage entrepreneurs in Los Angeles is lower than that of Bay Area. Ability” vs. “Knowledge”.

Los Angeles 138

Los Angeles Southern California Silicon Valley Technical Review 138

The Startup Magazine

DECEMBER 19, 2018

Clients rely on us for all types of solutions, including in the areas of analytics, mobile, case management, and overall business process transformation. We’re helping a large university system use analytics to target students for early intervention to maximize retention. Our talent provides leverage. Trust the good people.

Louisiana 137

Louisiana Founder Virgin Islands South Africa 137

David Teten

DECEMBER 16, 2015

The reason is that the real value of the board deck is not (ironically) for the board; it’s for management to track their own performance. So I want to see that management is using a dashboard every day, not just for board meetings. The most common financial metrics ffVC asks companies to compare vs. budget are: Gross Revenue.

Metrics 60

Metrics Analytics Balance Sheet .Net 60

Up and Running

MARCH 19, 2019

If your business has an online component, and almost every business does, optimizing the path to a purchase conversion and building a strategy for customer retention is essential. You’re looking at allocating budget, time, and resources to conduct tests on everything you can to figure out what works best. Gather more data for analysis.

Customer 77

Customer Early Stage Retention Conversion 77

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 8, 2009

This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs. R : Retention - do they come back & re-visit over time? These are captured fairly well by his slide: The beauty of what he's defined is the relationship between retention and referral efforts and lifetime value.

Metrics 225

Metrics Startup Retention Acquisition 225

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 25, 2013

Following are other ways mentors can assist in career development efforts: • Helping to identify an employee’s long-term career goals: Professionals in the early stages of their work life often fail to consider how they want their careers to develop over time. They don’t have to be your most senior managers.

Retention 170

Retention Employee Developer Programming 170

View from Seed

APRIL 8, 2020

He helps early-stage startups with sales, marketing, and general “go to market” topics. Take some of that outbound effort, and task salespeople to account manager efforts. Have them focus on retention and growth in your existing accounts that have seen success. Understand Your Customer and Their Timelines.

B2B 156

B2B Angel Investor Vertical Early Stage 156

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 18, 2021

Especially in the early stages of growth, standing up to competition means that your business also needs to minimize the cost of acquiring new customers. We’ll cover the following strategies: Retargeting and remarketing Partner programs A/B testing Customer retention Automated processes. Retargeting and remarketing.

Acquisition 127

Acquisition Cost Affiliate Customer 127

Hunter Walker

MAY 11, 2021

There will then be jobs that can continue to be fully remote, but DocuSign will leave those decisions up to senior managers. Plus, given the current retention environment (what this entire post is about!) But she envisions most other jobs being “flex jobs” where employees can choose to work remotely at least 50% of the time.

Hiring 109

Hiring Matching Early Stage Retention 109

Austin Startup

AUGUST 20, 2017

Early stage startups have to survive one day at a time and are often presented with limited choices of the moment that enable them to continue. At early stages you probably don’t have an assembly line and can’t clearly define any particular job. Compensation decisions obviously affect hiring and retention.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Software Review Cap Table Securities and Exchange Commission 48

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

What should an early-stage startup founder focus on if they want to implement PLG? But for early stage founders, I think there are two particular scenarios where PLG can be really helpful. So for early-stage founders, those are the two scenarios where PLG might be a great fit. That's the foundation.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

The Next Web

JUNE 20, 2013

The firm, which offers cloud-based employee management and training software, boasts 11 million users in 189 countries. The company has a 98 percent voluntary retention rate (which doesn’t count terminated employees), and Miller attributes part of that success to not having to deal with the poaching that goes on in the Valley.

Cloud 118

Cloud Southern California Los Angeles New York City 118

Version One Ventures

JULY 13, 2015

Now, inspired by our friend Christoph Janz at Point Nine Capital who created a KPI dashboard for early-stage SaaS , we have put together a KPI template for marketplaces. We hope that our version of a Marketplace KPI dashboard helps founders manage their business and pre-empt those due diligence questions in a fundraise.

Due Diligence 60

Due Diligence Retention Metrics Revenue 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

David Teten

JULY 10, 2017

Many large corporations face three seemingly disconnected challenges; they want: – Better returns on their balance sheet and underfunded pensions; – Access to the innovation economy to stay on top of the early-stage companies attacking their business; and. This would be especially important in public companies.

Employee 60

Employee Balance Sheet Syndicate Syndication 60

Up and Running

DECEMBER 1, 2015

More often than not, equity compensation is an attraction and retention tool, rather than a replacement to salary. Consider your other options, and tread carefully in the early stages of business! Equity compensation is when you offer your employees equity in your business (a “share” in company ownership).

Equity 60

Equity Employee Stock Options Vesting 60

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 26, 2014

In that article I talked about how PR drives: recruiting, employee retention, biz dev deals, funding and even M&A and that often “attribution” to your PR activities is unknown. It’s like “direct” traffic to your website that seems to magically appear. So be careful.

PR 319

PR Venture Capital Hiring Seed Capital 319

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

Retention cohort analysis. Unfortunately, they are disinterested in doing the hard work to help early stage entrepreneurs and companies. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Funnel averages over time. You can read the article to find out why. 3comments: Charles Crawford said.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

ConversionXL

AUGUST 13, 2019

And while that figure is promising, early-stage SaaS companies need a ton of growth to survive. Are you trying to grow an early-stage startup? ReferralCandy Growth Manager Darren Foong said the company found itself in a unique position when they launched their second SaaS startup, CandyBar , in 2017. Image source).

Metrics 117

Metrics SQL Retention Churn Rate 117

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 26, 2022

For other mistakes to avoid as a product manager, check out my recent Linkedin post on the top 10 mistakes product managers make and read everything you can by Marty Cagan. A board meeting should be a discussion, or even a white board session, where the founder and management team can have a sounding board on strategy and tactics.

Founder 187

Founder Startup Valuation Pre-Money Valuation 187

Transformify

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Our guest today is Andrew Alexander who manages a remote team of employees on 3 continents (United States, South America, Europe). Andrew, lots of businesses consider going remote but most of them are not courageous enough to embrace remote working as managing a remote team is not for everyone. million readers.

South America 49

South America Management Founder United States 49

Haystack

NOVEMBER 25, 2018

Look at Docusign, as one shining example — a company many folks thought would be a $1-2B outcome for a feature (e-signatures) transformed into a $10B+ document management platform. Here’s why: 1/ Pro-sumer Trend Has Legs In Enterprise: The freemium pricing model ushered in a new wave of business applications and services.

Technical Review 127

Technical Review Open Source Software Review Venture Capital 127

Professor VC

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Manage seasonal demand through pricing - Weather on the Oregon coast can range from gorgeous to downright nasty and can change from one of the other in a matter of minutes. Also, if the weather gets really bad, they offer a full refund voucher good for your next trip - all about customer retention.

Oregon 28

Oregon San Jose Angel Investor Silicon Valley 28

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

Chris Devore & Andy Sack have created Founder’s Coop with the goal of funding, incubating & launching more early-stage ventures in Seattle. These kinds of connections seldom emerge from middle management who view the immediate threats more than the long-run benefits. The advantages of moving are more obvious.

Seattle 317

Seattle Silicon Valley Technical Review Los Angeles 317

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2015

But as the company grows, it’s important to make the transition from acquisition to retention. A continued focus on acquisition isn’t an optimal strategy from a financial standpoint due to the costs involved, and it can also negatively affect brand management since dissatisfied former customers can dampen sales.

Customer 100

Customer Startup Software Review Acquisition 100