Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 25, 2021

Today’s customers are overloaded and overwhelmed by too much information, so making a decision is a challenge. You may think this is only important to your marketing and sales people, but in reality it doesn’t matter how great your product or technology might be, you won’t succeed if you don’t understand your target customer decision process.

Custom 136

Custom Customer Sales Social Media 136

TechCrunch LA

MAY 3, 2022

Upgrade’s e-commerce marketplace has two sides: one that enables consumers to choose a vetted stylist and have their wig colored or customized based on their desired look. A hairstylist can help a woman feel better about themselves. All of the stylists are independent contractors and set their own pricing. Remember Mary J.

Tool 179

Tool Custom Customer Marketing 179

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 23, 2021

Yet, as a business consultant, I often find minimal focus on improving employee engagement and assessing their customer-facing performance. For example, I commonly see metrics to keep track of revenue per employee, overtime, and absenteeism, but I don’t often see measures of overall customer satisfaction with individual employees.

Custom 147

Custom Customer Technical Review Metrics 147

Tech.Co

APRIL 20, 2020

Wix has announced a limited-time half price sale on its website builder plans, with a 50% off deal beginning today and ending on Wednesday. The half price sale is open to new users and anyone currently using Wix's free plan. With the deal, budding website owners will be able to save 50% on all Wix pricing plans. About our links.

Pricing 138

Pricing Sales Template Technical Review 138

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 25, 2022

I’m sure you have all noticed how today’s customers have changed the way they shop, but I still find, as an advisor and consultant, that many of you aren’t sure how to deal with the new mode, or are still waiting for things to get back to the old normal. Convenience is in the eye of the customer, not your company.

Demand 126

Demand Custom Customer Startup 126

socalTECH

MAY 28, 2013

In real life, you can just about bargain a price for anything you want to buy--a car, a house, even that new stereo from your local electronics store. Joe Marrapodi: GreenToe is a name your own price marketplace for products. It''s very similar to the Priceline.com model, where you name your price for a flight or hotel.

Pricing 273

Pricing Product Help Sales 273

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 7, 2014

I spend a lot of time with startups and thus hear many companies talk about their approach to sales and their interactions with customers. From these meetings you can really tell the leaders that care deeply about their customers and those the look down on them. We were talking about raising money from LPs.

Custom 341

Custom Customer Venture Capital Software Review 341

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

I actually really enjoyed many of the points Muhammad made about marketing in general and I found myself nodding through the entirety of the article except for it’s core premise. I believe growth hacking is about all of this. I’d like to make the case that the article is wrong. I’d strongly encourage you to read it.

Technical Review 384

Technical Review SEM SEO Marketing 384

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 31, 2012

If you haven’t read Adam Lashinsky’s awesome new book about Apple , you should. It takes on many of the lessons MBA programs and Corporate America have been teaching about business for the past 50+ years and questions whether lessons from Apple might be more applicable in thinking about the future.

Startup 319

Startup Sales Course Competition 319

InfoChachkie

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

Software as a service (SaaS) is a popular business model because it facilitates the delivery of incremental value to customers, while allowing the vendor to adjust their prices over time. However, such price increases generally occur after new utility has been provided to the customers. Focus on Existing Customers.

SaaS 215

SaaS Pricing Sales Custom 215

Berkonomics

JANUARY 26, 2017

The rest of the purchase price was concocted from a brew of zero coupon bonds (where the face value is many times the invested amount until the reduced cost bonds mature thirty years later), and borrowing using the target company’s accounts receivable and other assets as collateral for a loan to purchase the company. What power!

Pricing 120

Pricing Sales Tool Equity 120

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 18, 2021

Customers are people too, so customers tend to take their relationship with a brand personally. Fiske, in their classic book “ The Human Brand ,” humans are very perceptive, from early survival evolution, and make quick judgments about other people’s intents toward them (warmth), and the capability of carrying out intents (competence).

Custom 109

Custom Customer Commerce Social Media 109

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

Today’s customers are much more in control of their buying decision, as they have more choices and more information than ever before. Bloom’s classic book, “ The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers.” These decisive moments, and how to respond, are outlined in Robert H. Build a relationship and trust quickly.

Custom 124

Custom Customer Startup Course 124

Berkonomics

NOVEMBER 6, 2014

One way to fall into the time bankruptcy trap is to release a product too early, and pay the price by forcing the architect and most skilled developers to drop off of their important tasks to put out fires in the field and fix problems one at a time. Depending upon others Surrounding yourself with talent'

Resource 176

Resource Outsource Development Metrics Custom 176

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

What price? I’m not saying that lawyers were my screening process – simply that they knew about deals early on and they had voted with their time and pocketbooks so I knew I had a degree of filtering. no, I''m not talking about SVB, Comerica, Square1 and the like. What kind of deals should I be doing? What stage?

Startup 361

Startup Venture Capital Pricing Technical Review 361

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

<== Our conclusion was that this isn’t a temporary blip that will swiftly trend-back up in a V-shaped recovery of valuations but rather represented a new normal on how the market will price these companies somewhat permanently. We often knew about the teams before they actually set up the company or left their employer.

Venture Capital 416

Venture Capital Marketing Technical Review Seed Funding 416

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

The big price increase : 5 out of 5 stars. Some customer segments value the DVD business and these may be more price sensitive. Some customer segments value the convenience of instantly available films. Netflix needs to segment their customers and charge each what is appropriate. Not a freakin’ blog post.

Netflix 287

Netflix Custom Customer Pricing 287

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

When Ethan was considering leaving Google we talked about it. And because I wanted Ethan to be able to attract a great team, build & iterate a product, test it with initial customers and refine his strategy before having to take the wrappers off of his company. What do we like about OpenTable?

CTO Coach 359

CTO Coach Google CTO Hire Yammer 359

Berkonomics

MAY 30, 2019

And the best way to do this is with the placement of a case study, a story told about and by a satisfied customer with something to say about how your product solved their problem or pain. But it must be told about and by the customer, with your product as the tool of solution, not the focus of the story.

Case Study 120

Case Study Study Custom Customer 120

SoCal CTO

MARCH 1, 2010

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. Great stuff. This post looks at the implementation details of HTML 5 video.

Pricing 150

Pricing Acquisition Custom Customer 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 26, 2010

The “competition slide&# of your investment deck is such a great opportunity to talk about how you’re positioned (premium product vs. economical product? which features do you believe your customers care about and where you’re try to differentiate? It is a great place to talk about your future roadmap.

Venture Capital 313

Venture Capital Slides Competition Education 313

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 16, 2019

Today’s customers are overloaded and overwhelmed by too much information, so making a decision is a challenge. You may think this is only important to your marketing and sales people, but in reality it doesn’t matter how great your product or technology might be, you won’t succeed if you don’t understand your target customer decision process.

Custom 107

Custom Customer Sales Social Media 107

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 14, 2014

In fact 61% of all mobile searches where a customer contacts a business it is via a phone call (source: Google). People don’t want to speak to customer service reps. I don’t want to speak to customer service reps!! 61% of mobile searches in which a customer contacted a vendor, a phone call was generated.

Email 339

Email SaaS Venture Capital Google 339

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 11, 2022

Nobody cared about our valuations any more. If they didn’t care about him they certainly didn’t care about me or Jason Lemkin or Jason Calacanis or any of us. In those years I learned to properly build product, price products, sell products and serve customers. Until we weren’t.

Venture Capital 466

Venture Capital Startup Marketing Pricing 466

InfoChachkie

APRIL 13, 2015

Avoid a simple pricing mistake which could sink your startup. Vendors often respond by discounting their prices at the 11th hour, in the hopes a lower price will spur a purchase. However, if you never offer price discounts to anyone, you can resist all such requests by deferring to your company “policy.”

Pricing 100

Pricing Startup Sales SaaS 100

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

recently wrote a post talking about how some VCs meddle in operating company decisions or some executive teams are too reliant on VCs to jump in and make hard calls for them. We CEOs like to be heroes and with the power to push through pricing or product we have unfair advantages over the normal process. ” Those were the rules.

Startup 150

Startup Sales CTO Coach Course 150

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

Most leaders agree that poor customer service is a business killer today, in terms of lost customers, reduced profits, and low morale. Yet the average perception of customer experience has not improved. You have to start with hiring only people who are willing and able to make serious customer service happen.

Competition 99

Competition Services Startup Training 99

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 28, 2018

less than 18 months from when the company was created so I thought it was probably a good time to weigh in on the questions I get asked most frequently and why we’re so excited about Bird. How could Bird really be worth the reported $2 billion valuation that I read about in this press? That’s what we all thought about Uber, too.

Santa Monica 256

Santa Monica Funding Startup Course 256

TechCrunch LA

APRIL 28, 2020

And despite the collapse in fossil fuel energy prices, Shao said that Amply’s value proposition still makes sense. “Raw electric energy is half the price on average as fossil fuels,” Shao said. The lowest price of extracting a barrel of oil right now is $20… and then you need to add processing and distilling.”

Funding 267

Funding Pricing Los Angeles Custom 267

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 15, 2017

Have you ever noticed that some of your business owner friends get all the bad customers, and yours all seem fairly reasonable? I’m always amazed that, in my role as a business advisor, bad customers somehow seem to gang up on certain businesses. For your business to prosper, don’t associate good service only with high-price products.

Custom 89

Custom Customer Demand Pricing 89

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 4, 2019

Is your marketing focus product-centric or customer-centric ? With a wealth of products now available, customers look for the most memorable experience , not just the best product. These days, a fun shopping experience, or no-question returns, often tips the scales over extra product features or a lower price.

Custom 85

Custom Customer Product Metrics 85

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 9, 2018

In today’s totally interconnected world with its abundance of information, choices, and marketing, how your customers buy has drastically changed. Whether you are an executive, an entrepreneur, a marketer, or a salesperson, it’s time to look beyond how you sell, and focus on how your customers buy.

Custom 94

Custom Customer Social Media Startup 94

Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Most CEOs want to obtain information about their competitors in the most subtle and non-obvious ways. A fair example In my former industry, I became an informal centralized source for knowledge about the revenues of each of the many competitors, with a special skill for asking just the right questions to obtain the information.

Examples 156

Examples Guide Conference Course 156

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

On the other hand, the biggest winners will turn out to be much larger than the prices people paid for them and this will happen faster than at any time in human history. We can’t wait for customers to use the product for 12–18 months and do customer interviews or look at purchase cohorts. dot-com bonanza.

Venture Capital 471

Venture Capital Writing Invest Pricing 471

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 17, 2022

I’m not talking here about a small pivot. I’m talking about the kind of change that moved Apple from personal computers to music distribution to consumer electronics, and Amazon from books to e-Commerce to cloud computing services. Prices begin to decline quickly. Customer acquisition gets harder and more expensive.

Startup 106

Startup Pricing Cloud Computing Custom 106

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 4, 2017

Not so long ago, every business assumed that the keys to success were the highest quality product, the best value for the buck, and the best customer service. Now all we hear about is providing the best “customer experience.” You have to hear your customer’s dreams, goals, passions, and aspirations.

Custom 85

Custom Customer Product Marketing 85

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 28, 2022

Employees and customers alike are looking for meaning, not simply employment and commodity prices. I can think of at least five ways that this benefits the business, as well as customers: Products in a purpose culture more readily sell at a premium price. Doing good opens the door to a broader customer base.

Organization 143

Organization Startup Pricing Custom 143