Growth - Brian K Balfour · Traction vs Growth Traction The traction phrase is where more startups are. GoalThe one and only goal should be to find product-market fit among some audience segment. Part of this is understanding how large that audience segment is to make sure you can build a compelling business. MetricPlain and simple your eye should be on retention. VolumeThe primary goal is to just turn on the faucet and get a steady/consistent stream of users coming in the front door. In addition, your CPA will likely be greater than LTV. ChannelsTry a few to find that steady stream, but once you find one that provides that stream focus in. OptimizationFocus on large macro optimizations. TeamYou should have one person leading growth (probably a founder) who is thinking about it 80%+ of their time. Transition The transition phase is like the awkward teenage years. GoalThe primary goal in the traction phase is to identify, define, and understand the growth levers for your business. VolumeNow is the time to start turning up the faucet.
Groupon Vs. Zynga: Which Company Will Be More Valuable Post-IPO? ‘Tis the season of the IPO. So far, 2011 has seen companies like LinkedIn, Pandora, Yandex, Zillow, and RenRen come to market. As you’ve heard, Groupon and Zynga are next up in the IPO pipeline, with both companies arriving on public markets within weeks of each other. Groupon, barring some catastrophic event, will begin trading publicly on NASDAQ November 4th, with shares set at $20 a pop at a valuation of $12.7 billion. Zynga, too, is expected to trade on NASDAQ beginning the week before Thanksgiving, and according to its revised S-1 filing with the SEC, a “third party” has valued the company at approximately $14 billion. In the same ballpark as Groupon. So, the question becomes this: Notwithstanding their potential overvaluations at the time they go public, which of the two companies stands to be the most successful and the most valuable in the long run, post-IPO? The Big Picture (i.e. Of course, everything sounds picture perfect if you put a full stop there. Who Has The Tech?
There's only a few ways to scale user growth, and here's the list Scaling growth is hard – there’s only a few ways to do itWhen you study the most successful mobile/web products, you start to see a pattern on how they grow. Turns out, there’s not too many ways to reach 100s of millions of users or revenue. Instead, products mostly have one or two major growth channels, which they optimize into perfection. These methods are commonplace and predictable. Here are the major channels that successful products use to drive traction – think of them as the moonshots. Paid acquisition. These channels work and scale, because of two reasons: They’re feedback loops. It might seem like it’s best to crack one of these channels right away, and then ride then into glory. New products often only have months, or a year, to live, so these strategies are often not a real option. High-risk, high-reward Attacking one of these scalable channels is high risk but also high reward. This essay by Paul Graham gives us a clue, as he writes about Startups = Growth: Good luck. PS.
How to Write an Elevator Pitch If you're like most entrepreneurs, you think an "elevator pitch" is a one- to three-minute sales pitch that you could presumably give during a very long elevator ride. If that's what you think, I'm sorry: You've been completely misled. Let's start with the basic fact: Nobody listens to sales pitches. (Do you listen to them? I don't. To make matters worse, when most entrepreneurs give their "elevator pitch," they talk really, really fast so as to cram as much as information as possible into a short a time as possible. In professional sales, this is known as the "spray and pray" method. That being said, you're crazy if you don't have an elevator pitch, providing you realize that it's not a sales pitch, but a way to turn a casual conversation into a sales opportunity. What It Should Really Be The original idea behind the elevator pitch was to have something that you'd say to a potential customer whom you happen to meet by chance. 1. 2. 3. No need to get fancy. 4. It's that simple.
What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?: CEO, Culture, Growth Stage Successful startups go through three broad phases as they scale, and a startup CEO’s job changes dramatically in each phase. A CEO’s first job is to build a product users love; the second job is to build a company to maximize the opportunity that the product has surfaced; and the third is to harvest the profits of the core business to invest in transformative new product ideas. This blog post describes how to become a great Phase 2 CEO by focusing on the highest leverage tasks that only the CEO can accomplish. Your First Creation is a Product, Your Second Creation is a Company A CEO’s first job is to build a great product and find a small group of people who love it and use it enthusiastically. Most startups fail because they are not able to create a product that users love enough to abandon existing alternatives. As a Phase 2 CEO, you need to transition from “Doer-in-Chief” to “Company-Builder-in-Chief.” Three Tasks That CEOs Can’t Delegate 1. 2. 3. Pixar provides a helpful example.
How a few simple push notifications helped data shrinking app Onavo go viral One of the great things about Onavo, the hot mobile app that compresses your iPhone’s data, is that most of its magic happens in the background. But while that makes Onavo a breeze to use, it also makes it easy for users to forget that they’re receiving the benefits of the app. The company’s solution: simple push notifications, powered by the mobile services company Urban Airship, that keep Onavo users in the loop with the app’s data saving progress. After implementing the push notifications, Onavo reported a 75 percent increase in awareness and 50 percent increase in overall satisfaction from its users, according to a case study released by Urban Airship today. “Being a utility app that runs seamlessly in the background can be a doubleedged sword: users can easily forget about your service,” said Onavo director of marketing Dvir Reznik in a statement. Onavo is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has raised a total of $13 million from Horizon Ventures and Motorola Mobility Ventures.
The 7 Best Times to Start a Company Now that you know my belief that starting a company is your best hope of living the life you want, here's the next logical question: When should you get started? 1. You're young The best time to start a company is when you are young. Blogger Michael Arrington recalled a conversation with a venture capitalist last year that "entrepreneurs are like pro basketball players. I don't agree with the blanket statement, but I do agree that it's easier to pour your life into a company when you're young, creative, fresh, and fired up. When I graduated from Northwestern in 1996, my primary asset was time and passion. Starting a business killed two birds with one stone. I've never met an entrepreneur who said, "Wow, I wish I hadn't started so young." 2. Life is too short to sit behind a desk and be miserable. I've always believed that misery loves company for a reason. 3. There's nothing like a good ol' fashion layoff to turn you from a worker into an owner. 4. 5. 6. 7.
7 Undeniable Truths of Employee Pay Your employees are your business, so ignore the following truths at your peril: 1. Policy, schmolicy: Employees talk. Many companies actively discourage staff from talking to each other about their salaries. I even know companies that require employees to sign agreements stipulating they won’t disclose pay, benefits, etc. to other employees. Doesn’t matter. Never assume raises, bonuses, starting salaries, perks—basically anything related to compensation—will stay confidential. 2. Employees think about pay all the time. Each week spend a little time thinking about ways you can improve employee pay and benefits. 3. Then the employment honeymoon wears off and the employee feels you took advantage. Never take advantage of a naïve or desperate employee. Plus it’s just wrong. 4. Pay scales—and pay practices—are important to you, but they’re largely irrelevant to an employee who, often with good reason, views them as arbitrary rules you came up with one day. 5. 6. We all want more. 7.