Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 20, 2023

These founders all seem to be pushing their technology, rather than highlighting their solution to a painful need. Nice to have does not motivate a revenue stream. Technologies that cure world hunger may find that that hungry people don’t have money, and government agencies as customers are a very long sales cycle.

Customer 276

Customer Sales Cycle Social Media Viral 276

Steve Blank

MARCH 17, 2020

Next, take a look at your actual revenue each month – not forecast, but real revenue coming in each month. Subtract your monthly gross burn rate from your monthly revenue to get your net burn rate. All your assumptions about customers, sales cycle and most importantly, revenue, burn rate and runway are no longer true.

Burn Rate 436

Burn Rate Startup Valuation Sales Cycle 436

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 27, 2019

by Manish Dudharejia, President and Founder of E2M Solutions Inc. According to a study conducted by Lucidpress , inconsistent brand messaging can lead to conflicting perceptions that negatively impact sales. It can hurt your credibility, make it harder to stay competitive, and create a loss of revenue due to slower sales cycles.

Social Media 113

Social Media Media San Diego Sales Cycle 113

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 18, 2024

With her expertise, she’s boosted hundreds of agencies to millions in revenue, attracting premium clients willing to pay 50-600% fees. Key Takeaways Mandi Ellefson, founder of Hands-off CEO, shares her journey from overwhelming debt to multimillionaire status by transforming consulting agencies into self-sustaining enterprises.

Framework 62

Framework Sales Cycle Sales Hiring 62

Hunter Walker

JUNE 7, 2014

Not because they’re all operating in stealth or pre-product – in fact some already are earning $1m+ in revenue per annum. Founders are building small, focused teams based on people they worked with previously and referrals from their networks. Word of mouth spreads faster and sales cycles are shorter.

Technical Review 117

Technical Review CTO Hire Finance Stealth 117

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

We founders unwittingly focus on how to make the best customer experiences better , rather than making the worst experiences less worse , and sometimes this is a mistake. Another thing we can do is literally measure customer “happiness&# and intercede before it goes from bad to 32B. Even the one you turn away could become a fan.

Technical Review 236

Technical Review Software Review Reputation Sales Cycle 236

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Cracking the Code

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Earlier this year, I was on a panel with Guy Podjarny, Snyk’s founder, at SaaStock Remote to discuss how the team’s community-driven freemium approach led to the company’s stellar growth. With COVID, we’re getting into a world with tighter budgets and likely longer sales cycles. A year in, we had great usage and no revenue.

Early Stage 62

Early Stage Open Source Development Team Review Security 62

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 16, 2011

The founders, Sunil Guttula and Abinasha Karana, are experienced IT professional with 15 years of experience between them solving various enterprise IT problems. In fact, they generated $100k in revenues over the last year, since they first pitched at one of our roundtables. And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

India 123

India Bootstrapping Non-Compete Entrepreneur 123

Austin Startup

JANUARY 20, 2021

It is so important that not a week goes by without a successful investor/founder extolling the benefits of moving quickly. In 2006, I joined Yelp as employee #20 when the company had $1M in annual revenue. It can also rapidly iterate your sales motion, build your sales team, help you win deals, and grow revenue more quickly.

Sales 64

Sales Startup Sales Cycle Revenue 64

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 23, 2022

Gavin Braman, Co-Founder @ Drifting Creatives. Salesforce, for example, increased its revenue market share to 18.4% Just like Peep, other marketers from hypergrown products, such as David Cancel (founder at Drift) argue that product-based differentiation is vanishing. The small group roundtable discussions were amazing.

B2B 94

B2B Marketing Curation PPC 94

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 19, 2020

These founders all seem to be pushing their technology, rather than highlighting their solution to a painful need. Nice to have does not motivate a revenue stream. Technologies that cure world hunger may find that that hungry people don’t have money, and government agencies as customers are a very long sales cycle.

Technology 317

Technology Marketing Sales Cycle Social Media 317

Small Business Force

AUGUST 27, 2017

During this initial period, not one sales person was there longer than seven months and most had less than four months on the job. The company didn’t have great results over this time, with only two sales, generating minor revenue. The CEO and founder, who hired and fired the staff, blamed the lack of sales on two things.

Sales 30

Sales Sales Cycle Product Technical Review 30

ConversionXL

APRIL 28, 2020

In that unannounced meeting, Brett Hurt, our CEO and co-founder, laid it out for us. To have the future we wanted, we needed to shift away from monetizing our open-data community and toward enterprise sales. To do that, we built a demand funnel that took us from nothing to 44X revenue growth in a single year. Image source ).

Demand 101

Demand Revenue SQL B2B 101

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

At Hustle Fund, we back both first time founders as well as repeat founders. One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Sales cycles matter though. This is obvious. Marketing first.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

At Hustle Fund, we back both first time founders as well as repeat founders. One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Sales cycles matter though. This is obvious. Marketing first.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

From Lean Startup Machine , Lean LA and San Diego Tech Founders , to countless speeches and workshops, I have seen the impact that their leadership has had first hand. Or will you need to staff and finance a whaling ship to be out at sea for months at a time to catch two or three whales (enterprise sales model)?

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

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. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Where to Play

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Adrien Briod , the co-founder, envisioned how a collision-tolerant drone would assist in managing such dangerous situations. They call it Elios. The Challenge. The idea to develop a caged drone was born after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The overall challenge was therefore estimated as ‘low-mid’.

Agile 54

Agile Technical Review Sales Cycle Distribution 54

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 12, 2017

A frequent metaphor I use in customer acquisition, fundraising, or any kind of deal making is that you as the founder and promoter should present the finished meal on the dining table and not drag your counterparts into the kitchen. Is third-year revenue of $10M good or bad? A price of $2 per share means nothing in itself.

Term Sheet 48

Term Sheet Technical Review Due Diligence Merger 48

NZ Entrepreneur

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

The statistics show that even though most founders bet their time and resources that their startups will be the best in the world, 90% of those new startups won’t be in operation in 10-15 years. For example, “How will unit cost affect our capital requirements and how will product pricing affect revenue?”

Startup 69

Startup Sales Cycle Down Round Revenue 69

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 20, 2014

These founders all seem to be pushing their technology, rather than highlighting their solution to a painful need. Nice to have does not motivate a revenue stream. Creators of technologies that cure world hunger may find that hungry people don’t have money, but government agencies as customers are a very long sales cycle.

Technology 286

Technology Startup Sales Cycle Social Media 286

David Teten

APRIL 6, 2015

Both founders and researchers in healthcare are spending far too much of their energy in areas where they’re not going to make maximum impact. I think I understand why a lot of entrepreneurs in healthcare are pursuing the areas that also attract research dollars: there are lots of revenues associated with new drugs and treatments.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Technical Review Non-Compete Philadelphia 60

Hippoland

AUGUST 16, 2018

But outcome-differentiation is probably lacking – people who use Mailchimp use it to increase revenue by selling more products / services via their emails. 3) Your business model seems flawed OR is not the right fit I talked a lot about unit economics and sales cycles in my last post. That’s a feature difference.

Sales Cycle 54

Sales Cycle Differentiation Early Stage Bootstrapping 54

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

by Rachel Strella, founder of Strella Social Media. Sometimes it can require months — or even longer — of relationship-building to acquire major clients with large-scale revenue possibilities. Rachel Strella is the founder of Strella Social Media , a social media management company serving dozens of clients nationally.

Social Media 113

Social Media Sales Cycle Audience Media 113

Duct Tape Marketing

JUNE 4, 2015

However, now that we know that your visitors are looking for these experiences and transforming into brand advocates because of these experiences, we can expect to see results in the sales cycle and in revenue flow. Yana Nirshberg is the Co-Founder, Managing Partner and Creative Director at ParadigmNEXT, Inc.

Web 28

Web Technical Review Sales Cycle Cofounder 28

Hippoland

AUGUST 16, 2018

But outcome-differentiation is probably lacking – people who use Mailchimp use it to increase revenue by selling more products / services via their emails. 3) Your business model seems flawed OR is not the right fit I talked a lot about unit economics and sales cycles in my last post. That’s a feature difference.

Sales Cycle 48

Sales Cycle Differentiation Early Stage Bootstrapping 48

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 19, 2016

These founders all seem to be pushing their technology, rather than highlighting their solution to a painful need. Nice to have does not motivate a revenue stream. Technologies that cure world hunger may find that that hungry people don’t have money, and government agencies as customers are a very long sales cycle.

Sales Cycle 120

Sales Cycle Social Media Viral Technology 120

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 13, 2015

Average Revenue Per Customer. Customers that converted in the last year that had a sales cycle of less than x weeks. Revenue potential – Many SaaS companies segment customers based on current revenue, but that’s missing a huge opportunity. Their metric was revenue: Image Source. Total Customers.

Conversion 48

Conversion Retention Acquisition Metrics 48

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Sales intelligence platform Cognism cut their lead generation efforts by 90% in 2021. Then they increased their revenue from $2M to $6M in six months. In this article, you’ll learn how to build a demand generation funnel that fuels the pipeline, shortens the sale cycle, and generates revenue.

Demand 124

Demand B2B Distribution Channel 124

This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

Slow sales cycles. There is a lot of talk about needing to be a technical founder. The company sells to local governments, real estate management companies, educational institutions--anyone responsible for public or private infrastructure. That alone is enough to make a lot of VCs throw up a little in their mouths. Ugh, right?

Sales Cycle 121

Sales Cycle Government Revenue Sales 121

infochachkie.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

For instance, if a consultant proposes to help you with public relations, pay them a commission equivalent to the greater of a flat fee per story placed or a percentage of revenue generated from the PR coverage. If a consultant claims they can enhance your marketing efforts, pay them based on their direct impact on your incremental sales.

Equity 40

Equity Silicon Valley Cofounder Technical Review 40

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 7, 2022

This is due to factors such as maturity, sales cycle, product value, purchase frequency, and customer lifespan. Strong customer relationships fuel loyalty, which results in more sales and recommendations. Calculate LTV as: Average revenue per customer / churn = Customer lifetime value. customer retention ).

Acquisition 22

Acquisition eCommerce Cost Customer 22

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Too often, I see companies treat their sales efforts as the bastard stepchildren of their organizations. They don't have a good sense of what factors impact the sales cycle, where they're getting their best leads from, or how to resource their efforts appropriately.

Sales 99

Sales Sales Cycle Metrics Reputation 99

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

More than two-thirds of buyers have researched your solution (and others’) before talking to sales. Plus, 60% prefer not to interact with sales reps at all. To fuel your pipeline and shorten the sales cycle , you have to create demand naturally. Sales are less likely to be forced with outbound methods.

Demand 115

Demand Affiliate Audience Leadership 115

Duct Tape Marketing

FEBRUARY 22, 2017

While big ticket products might carry longer and more complex sales cycles, high-end buyers are just as lazy as the rest of us, so they use the same methods: Google, social media, and yes, their inboxes. Step 2: Determine your targets’ revenue floor and ceiling. How can you estimate total yearly revenues if they’re not public?

Curation 44

Curation Lead Generation Technical Review Email 44