article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. But its not really viral growth, even when its exponential.

article thumbnail

Engagement loops: beyond viral

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. This is essentially a version of the viral loop.

Viral 140
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

The unprofitable SaaS business model trap

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Marketo filed for IPO with impressive 80% year-over-year growth in 2012, with almost $60m in revenue. Even with a great retention rate (e.g. time to earn back the revenue to cover all your customer acquisition expenses) 75% annual retention. Use viral growth to offset cancellations. Except, they lost $35m. Just wait!

article thumbnail

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

In a previous post , I covered the three main drivers of growth: Paid, Sticky, and Viral. Let’s look at a viral growth company, like Facebook. If you are building a large, viral, ad-support consumer internet property, you just want to go big! They’re off to cross the chasm. As soon as possible!&#

Customer 156
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The metrics and levers of engagement.

Startup Lessons Learned

This is a common problem that results from viral-loop optimization. By copying the exact same registration flow as every other successful viral app, many viral apps completely lose their positioning. At IMVU , we would routinely find retention effects that would stem from registration changes and have impact days or weeks later.

Metrics 88
article thumbnail

The pioneers of Silicon Valley’s fast culture on how to grow quickly, not recklessly

Reid Hoffman

And from a financial perspective, any investor would be better off buying stock in Amazon than buying and share of a corner bookshop; if you invested $100 in Amazon’s 1997 initial public offering (IPO), those shares would have been worth about $120,000 in 2018. Blitzscaling is a strategic technique for moving faster, not a reckless gamble.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Q&A with an actual reader

Startup Lessons Learned

Revenue is always my preferred measure, but you can use anything that is important to your business: retention, activation, viral invites, or even customer satisfaction in the form of something like net promoter score. If an optimization has an effect at the micro level that doesnt translate into the macro level - who cares?