Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 18, 2013

Most startups, and many big businesses, still don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their business. Create an action plan with metrics. Good action plans include a listening plan, channel plan, SEO plan, and a content creation plan, with activities and metrics. Marty Zwilling.

Social Media 102

Social Media Media Product Metrics 102

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 18, 2018

New product process. It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the kay to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Failure is the best teacher.

Entrepreneur 64

Entrepreneur Coach Metrics Competition 64

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 3, 2019

Image via Pixabay Most startups, and many big businesses, still don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their business. Create an action plan with metrics. Good action plans include a listening plan, channel plan, SEO plan, and a content creation plan, with activities and metrics.

Social Media 96

Social Media Media Marketing Metrics 96

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 22, 2021

Happy customers quickly become your biggest advocates, today reaching far beyond friends and family, and they make traditional marketing efforts pale in comparison for growth, loyalty, and new customer acquisition costs. Use metrics to assess needs and growth economics.

Customer 114

Customer Custom Satisfaction Metrics 114

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 3, 2021

To keep you on a positive track with potential investors, I recommend the following logic principles, to balance your passion in presenting your vision of a new business: Make sure your plan includes some business metrics. For example, if you have ever watched the Shark Tank show on TV, they always ask about the cost of customer acquisition.

Entrepreneur 162

Entrepreneur Social Media Examples Metrics 162

TechCrunch LA

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

In today’s highly competitive ad environment, both content and data are kings. DTC entrepreneurs are more focused on immediate impact, because if they’re not selling product, there’s no large brand propping them up. It won’t be a fit if there’s no real unique value prop for the product.

Commerce 211

Commerce Content Marketing Startup 211

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 12, 2015

New product process. It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the key to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Set milestones and meet them.

Entrepreneur 101

Entrepreneur Startup Coach Metrics 101

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 13, 2022

Exposure instills the fear and urgency you need to deliver the right competitive solution. But it is an important metric for firms in pursuit of explosive growth. Wessel measures a 39% acquisition advantage to being in-state. Exposure is another key ingredient. What will set your business apart? Personal relationships do count.

Technical Review 123

Technical Review Oracle Software Review Ideas 123

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 14, 2016

New product process. It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the kay to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Failure is the best teacher.

Coach 64

Coach Metrics Competition Ideas 64

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 7, 2020

By being proactive, and empowering and rewarding your frontline employees for improving processes, you will enhance your business productivity and growth in both the short term as well as the long term. You need to be constantly assessing mergers and acquisitions, as well as divestitures. Build and model a high-performance culture.

Technical Review 124

Technical Review Layoffs Social Media Metrics 124

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

An alternate outcome that I also unfortunately observe in some cases are companies who had extreme early success with an initial product adoption but failed in key areas that limited the growth and therefore the ultimate financial outcomes. How profitable is my product or service? As an early-stage VC I love this phase.

Startup 286

Startup Technical Review Customer Custom 286

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 27, 2018

Apple needs a product that jumps to the next curve. I will suggest to you as a business owner and entrepreneur that focus on certain key behaviors will drive innovation without waiting for the next competitive crisis: Be outspoken in communicating proactive required change. Isolate new product teams from decimation by daily crises.

Metrics 58

Metrics IBM IBM Competition 58

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 1, 2017

Most startups, and many big businesses, still don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their business. Create an action plan with metrics. Good action plans include a listening plan, channel plan, SEO plan, and a content creation plan, with activities and metrics. Marty Zwilling.

Social Media 62

Social Media Media Metrics SEO 62

InfoChachkie

JANUARY 16, 2018

Without taking a dime of outside capital, the company has achieved impressive success in a competitive, SaaS market segment, landing companies such as Nike, Intuit, NASA, AutoDesk and PBS. I have always worked on early stage products. Some of the products I’ve helped validate and launch include GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting and AppFolio.

Venture Capital 115

Venture Capital Entrepreneur Santa Barbara SaaS 115

socalTECH

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

We caught up with co-founder Joey Flores on the story behind the company's brush with death, and its recent acquisition by You42, which was announced last week. Joey Flores: Yeah, we spend the earlier part of 2014 exploring acquisition options, because we had a pretty hard time raising money. Joey, thanks for the time today.

Software Review 100

Software Review Startup Metrics Content 100

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 9, 2019

Exposure instills the fear and urgency you need to deliver the right competitive solution. But it is an important metric for firms in pursuit of explosive growth. Wessel measures a 39% acquisition advantage to being in-state. Exposure is another key ingredient. What will set your business apart? Personal relationships do count.

Startup 97

Startup Technical Review Oracle Software Review 97

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 27, 2012

Most startups, and many big businesses, still don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their business. Create an action plan with metrics. Good action plans include a listening plan, channel plan, SEO plan, and a content creation plan, with activities and metrics. Marty Zwilling.

Social Media 91

Social Media Media Metrics SEO 91

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 18, 2014

When we look at companies, the simplest way to think of it is product-market-fit. When a company either has revenues, if that''s the primary metric, or if it''s a consumer application, high user acquisition and engagement, we know there is some degree of product-market-fit. That''s why we work really closely with them.

Incubator 187

Incubator Southern California Startup Ideas 187

socalTECH

MARCH 6, 2017

Los Angeles-based Maple Media (maplemedia.io) recently announced a big, $30M funding from Shamrock Capital, to assemble a collection of mobile applications in the utility, productivity, games and entertainment verticals. A lot of what we've been looking at are the metrics. We have a huge acquisition pipeline.

Media 153

Media Mobile Startup Acquisition 153

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

When they look at buying your company they often think in terms of “how long will it take until I earn back the profits to pay for my acquisition price?” They have have raised $2-3 million, built a product that has some amount of market traction and got to annualized revenues of around $1 million. ” The Details.

Startup 418

Startup Venture Capital Sales Technical Review 418

socalTECH

JANUARY 14, 2011

By linking the activities to P&L--not click rates, or cost per sale, or cost per lead, or brand awareness, which are all soft metrics--we are able to give our customers ammunition to take to their board or to finance, and prove the true effectiveness of their marketing and the true effectiveness of the agencies involved. READ MORE>>.

Social Media 235

Social Media Demand Activity Marketing 235

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

So when Sam Rosen came to me with the idea of disrupting storage with a product that is priced cheaper than existing incumbents and he could build a product that is a better service I was intrigued. The metrics were good but we wondered how much better they would be when we expanded our product.

Startup 150

Startup Marketing Study SEO 150

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 16, 2015

Exposure instills the fear and urgency you need to deliver the right competitive solution. But it is an important metric for firms in pursuit of explosive growth. Wessel measures a 39% acquisition advantage to being in-state. Exposure is another key ingredient. What will set your business apart? Personal relationships do count.

Startup 109

Startup Technical Review Oracle Software Review 109

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 2, 2017

Exposure instills the fear and urgency you need to deliver the right competitive solution. But it is an important metric for firms in pursuit of explosive growth. Wessel measures a 39% acquisition advantage to being in-state. Exposure is another key ingredient. What will set your business apart? Personal relationships do count.

Sites 59

Sites Startup Technical Review Oracle 59

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 7, 2013

Exposure instills the fear and urgency you need to deliver the right competitive solution. But it is an important metric for firms in pursuit of explosive growth. Wessel measures a 39% acquisition advantage to being in-state. Exposure is another key ingredient. What will set your business apart? Personal relationships do count.

Startup 102

Startup Technical Review Oracle Entrepreneur 102

socalTECH

SEPTEMBER 27, 2013

How about mergers and acquisitions? For a similar company, with the same metrics and stage, valuations had been tiny. They have to be sensitive to competitive dynamics, but, if you are in ad-tech, and WPP or Google is the best buyer for your company, why not spend some time with a VP at Google? That''s paramount to a great exit.

Southern California 124

Southern California SoCal Commerce Invest 124

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 2, 2018

It probably had more to do with the fact that they had doubled their sales annually for several years, and still managed to squeeze out a profit of $11M in their year of acquisition. They are looking for solutions that will reduce their costs by 20%, or double productivity, or cut traffic accidents by a third.

Customer 19

Customer Custom Acquisition Entrepreneur 19

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

If you buy into the argument that a strong board can actually help you then this post will lay out how to help you have more productive meetings by preparing properly in advance. Often board members themselves don’t do the work to say “what metrics would we like to see.” This is part of a broader series on Board Meetings.

Startup 226

Startup Slides Metrics News 226

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 6, 2021

In reality, too many choices actually dilutes customer interest in your existing market, and makes your job of production, marketing, and support much more complex. New entrepreneurs, especially technical ones, are excited by early adopters, and tend to focus on their feedback, which will always suggest more product features and options.

Technical Review 160

Technical Review Technical Advisors Startup Mentor 160

socalTECH

NOVEMBER 25, 2008

Explain what your products do? Who are the typical customers for your products? It's a month-to-month rental, although many of our customers buy the product--but they can do it on an operations budget. I think we've got a great team, with the right product, at the right time in the market. Congrats on funding.

Startup 113

Startup CTO Hire Resource Venture Capital 113

Tech Zulu Event

MARCH 25, 2014

Joergen Aaboe – Momentfeed , combining life foot traffic with reduced customer acquisition costs. Sonny Vu – Misfit Wearables , developers of the world’s most wearable sensor products. Alex Taub – Social Rank , Twitter metrics and engagement tool. Big ups to the Twitch.TV guys for making it happen!

Entertainment 99

Entertainment Google Entrepreneur Course 99

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 8, 2015

Many startups and mature businesses have not yet accepted the fact that customer satisfaction and loyalty in this “always connected” age are about more than product and service quality. Marketing-driven customer acquisition. Word-of-mouth driven customer acquisition. The challenge is to measure resources spent against return.

Customer 100

Customer Custom Satisfaction Social Media 100

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2010

Company grew by more than “400% each year” for past few years [assume growth metric = revenues]. Competition: Chegg (has raised $144 in debt and equity)—estimated by Steven Carpenter ( TechCrunch ) to be 10x more unique visitors than BookRenter (during peak book renting seasons) with nearly $140mm in revenues for 2010.

Venture Capital 217

Venture Capital Capital Metrics Competition 217

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Many startups and mature businesses have not yet adapted to the fact that customer satisfaction in this “always connected” age is more than product and service quality. Marketing-driven customer acquisition. Word-of-mouth driven customer acquisition. Traditional marketing efforts (advertising and promotions) are still important.

Customer 97

Customer Custom Satisfaction Social Media 97

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 23, 2012

Yes, it’s true that FOMO (fear of missing out) is driving some irrational behavior and valuations amongst uber competitive deals and well-financed VCs. Try charging customers for your product when you have 12 competitors giving the product away free finances by $20 million of VC. The Exit Problem.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Capital Technical Review Startup 347

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. Our first big institutional round was $16.5

Entrepreneur 308

Entrepreneur Startup Venture Capital Conference 308