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. Every startup demands logical changes along the way. Don’t forget to focus on the value of you and your team.

Entrepreneur 162

Entrepreneur Social Media Examples Metrics 162

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 418

Startup Venture Capital Sales Technical Review 418

socalTECH

JANUARY 14, 2011

Its primary goal is to focus on identifying what is truly driving demand, analytically, so that our customers can optimize their activities. We have a very sophisticated, analytics and software platform that over half the Fortune 50 are now using, to help guide how they invest in marketing and sales activities and investments.

Social Media 235

Social Media Demand Activity Marketing 235

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 4, 2015

Switch your attention from product development to sales. Second-stage growth usually requires a formal sales model, an experienced and disciplined sales team, and a well-defined process to meet your new goals and demands. These only come with the proper training, investment in tools, and focus on customer relationships.

Startup 108

Startup Sales Metrics Entrepreneur 108

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 13, 2017

Switch your attention from product development to sales. Second-stage growth usually requires a formal sales model, an experienced and disciplined sales team, and a well-defined process to meet your new goals and demands. These only come with the proper training, investment in tools, and focus on customer relationships.

Startup 56

Startup Sales Metrics Guide 56

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 3, 2013

Switch your attention from product development to sales. Second-stage growth usually requires a formal sales model, an experienced and disciplined sales team, and a well-defined process to meet your new goals and demands. These only come with the proper training, investment in tools, and focus on customer relationships.

Sales 96

Sales Metrics Startup Entrepreneur 96

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

I suggest you use social media, blogging, crowdfunding, or documented research to quantify a real demand from people who can afford it, and don’t have a better alternative already out there. This is the point where you must manage to metrics, work on the culture of the organization, and look for partner-based growth.

Ideas 94

Ideas Slides Technical Review Patents 94

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

This financial leader could well have come through the finance org at another startup or at a larger company but they often also can come from strategy consulting (Bain, BCG or McKinsey) or through investment banking (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.). and we were met with weak demand, slow growth and high costs.

Startup 286

Startup Technical Review Customer Custom 286

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

If you invested in the first angel round of a startup company it is usually very hard to sell your stock – usually for many years if ever at all. The earlier you invest the higher the chances the company won’t work out and thus you pay a lower price than later-stage investors. Private markets for stocks are the opposite.

Startup 336

Startup Pricing Technical Review Marketing 336

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 8, 2016

Investors look for sales at full price, to people you don’t know, to validate demand, price, and margin. Show an aggressive marketing and sales plan. The smart ones identify and budget innovative approaches, and use metrics to tools to monitor effectiveness. This is why investors invest in the team, rather than the idea.

Entrepreneur 58

Entrepreneur Ideas Pricing Customer 58

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

And finally, Scott demonstrated his internal management tool for managing the metrics of his business. Company plans to use the capital to build out sales and marketing and r&d. -a Spread through word-of-mouth as the company has no sales team, all engineers. Investing much of new cash to build presence in Android platform.

Zag 248

Zag Truecar Venture Capital CarsDirect 248

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

What would it take in investments to acquire and retain traffic to support these businesses? billion in sales and thus controls less than 10% of the market. The metrics were good but we wondered how much better they would be when we expanded our product. What is the CPM of ads in this industry (should I even be ad supported?).

Startup 150

Startup Marketing Study SEO 150

InfoChachkie

SEPTEMBER 23, 2013

Indecisive prospects diffuse a startup''s focus and slow down its sales velocity. The first step to increasing your company''s sales velocity is to eliminate the word “Pilot” from your salespeople''s lexicon. The key to accelerating revenue generation in a phased agreement is to document the success metrics of the landing phase.

Sales 215

Sales Outsource Development Metrics Resource 215

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2010

Spark Capital is relatively new to VC (founded in 2005) yet has become one of the hottest new VCs having invested in Twitter, Tumblr, AdMeld, Boxee, KickApps and many more companies. Company grew by more than “400% each year” for past few years [assume growth metric = revenues]. Our guest was Mo Koyfman of Spark Capital.

Venture Capital 217

Venture Capital Capital Metrics Competition 217

socalTECH

JULY 10, 2019

What we learned, is there is so much more demand from existing retailers and platforms that sell directly to consumers, and discovery platforms like Foursquare, who wanted to user our IP as a layer, versus a standalone product. Three years later, there's no looking back, and we've now raised around $2M in total funding.

Pricing 113

Pricing Startup North Hollywood Platform 113

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2011

When I described to people why I initially invested my calls went something like this, “He’s taken kicks to the face for nearly 2 years and is still standing. They dropped their number one selling product and switched to a competitor’s product while managing not to lose a single sale. I know this guy is a money maker.

Startup 292

Startup Venture Capital Blogging Summary 292

InfoChachkie

MARCH 2, 2010

We pooled our resources and each invested $50 into the adVenture, which we named Capital Cards, due to our proximity to Washington, DC. We were happy to accommodate his request, as the money derived from the sale of the sets allowed us to purchase vintage cards via our weekly newspaper ads. free weekly Infochachkie articles!

Pricing 138

Pricing Advertising Marketing Startup 138