Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 4, 2008

Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Monday, February 04, 2008. A few times per year, Bessemer organizes a CxO event for our portfolio companies and we decided to focus our first session of 2008 on Software-as-a-service (SaaS).

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing launched a virtual portfolio management game on Facebook in January 2008 and a similar version shortly thereafter on kaChing.com. To acquire new money managers, the company makes traditional sales calls, which means they’ve interviewed many, many professionals and gotten a strong sense of their needs. says Rachleff.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. We try to take advantage of that phenomenon twice if possible.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, December 7, 2008 The hackers lament One of the thrilling parts of working and writing in Silicon Valley is the incredible variety of people Ive had the chance to meet. December 8, 2008 7:40 PM Allen Rohner said. Ill be mindful of your advice. :-) Allen December 8, 2008 9:30 PM Amy said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. As the experiments progressed, day-in-day-out we werent making sales. The bare fact of our failing to make sales forced us to peel back the onion, step by step, until we realized just how big a problem we had. that justify decisions already made. Expo (and a call for he.

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Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

MARCH 10, 2010

My plan, based on all the Internet marketing advice I studied from the experts to “create a product&# , was to start by releasing an ebook to test the waters as my first product. I will release the book for sale later in the year, however I have some good news for you if you want a copy now. I loved what I was doing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. But here’s where a truly great sales artist comes in. They are closing orders.

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Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

JUNE 19, 2010

I had a lot of fun learning what the internet could do for me. In fact, my first website I can’t show you, because I don’t think we have internet access, but I had a Geocities website in 1999 for a card game I used to play called Magic the Gathering. I haven’t been to the desert in Australia, but it’s about the equivalent of that.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. I’ve often wanted to wire up a bell to sales data, so that when we make a sale, we literally hear the cash register ring. When the incidence rate is small, emails or text messages are a great mechanism.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, October 11, 2008 Three decisions to make on virtual goods I was invited to the Virtual Goods Summit yesterday, and got to see quite a few interesting speakers and panels. Sales depend on being right (whereas in UGC we can pretty much try anything, and promote the winners). Hi, great post!

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Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

MAY 20, 2015

[Tweet "How Aussie Entrepreneur Lauren Shuttleworth Went After The Stationery Market #entrepreneur"] How Lauren Became A Force For Good Lauren began her journey as an entrepreneur in the online space in 2008 by selling jewellery to a wholesale market via three different group buying sites.

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Hearpreneur

JANUARY 7, 2017

I am also in a few select boutiques and Hotel Gift shops including the famous Mohonk Mountain House and a design collective in Australia) My collection features unexpected combinations of raw and polished gemstones, opulent pearls, precious metals, custom clasps, and exotic minerals from the world’s treasure troves. Image Credit: Gail Levy.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. The net result was powerful: within six months of starting the company, we were able to get a basic version of our product into open beta.

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Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

AUGUST 27, 2010

How much money you earn is considered one of the most private things you don’t tell even your friends or family, let alone the entire planet through the Internet. In Australia the tax year runs from July to June, and in the 2008-2009 tax year I made over half a million dollars in revenue doing what I do online.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Of course, the real thanks should go to a startup - Gogo Inflight Internet - that I was lucky enough to meet at a recent workshop. Similarly, government purchasing is a frustrating series of hoops, even compared to enterprise sales. (Its impossible to resist the urge to plug Virgin America as much as possible. Thanks guys!)

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Because this language may lead you to believe this concept is for enterprise sales only, I thought Id walk you through an example from the world of consumer electronics. It connects to the internet to automatically download the necessary codes. One of my favorite gadgets at home is the Harmony Universal Remote.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And thanks to the radical transparency enabled by the internet, the quality of these proposals is actually constantly rising, to the point that it’s almost impossible to judge the quality of the final product – because all the proposals look polished and professional, even the terrible ones. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Here was our experience at IMVU, which I have seen replicated at many other consumer internet startups. In most situations, this fear is misplaced.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

This is usually exacerbated by zealous sales persons who oversell the features, or even more typical, promise completely new features. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, October 30, 2008 John Doerrs 10 lean startup tips I just saw video of John Doerrs talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn&# roundtable event. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

This makes lean supply chains more robust in the face of the unexpected: if sales suddenly dry up, they are stuck with less unsold inventory and simultaneously have less debt to service. Lean vs. debt In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it.

Technical Review 168

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

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. December 17, 2008 2:04 PM Alex Horovitz said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

To imagine that this person does so only to get attention, or only to harass others, or only to harass you are to play into the hands of this geek autocracy on the Internet that just isn't viable anymore. However, you have opened yourself onto the internet with some really great points that are so wonderful to see written.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Meanwhile, individuals and smaller companies emailed by the hundreds to say that they wanted the features of custom channels, but the sales model—arranged like a media buy—didn’t make sense to them. -Eric] Big companies said they liked the idea, but SlideShare found it hard to close deals.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Then, the company spends no more than a few hundred dollars marketing the product through search engines and to the contacts in its sales database and LinkedIn. Then, the company spends no more than a few hundred dollars marketing the product through search engines and to the contacts in its sales database and LinkedIn.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Without a basis for comparison, you first have to drive home the need, then you will have an easy time making the sale (after all, youre the person who they trust to bring it to their attention). Toughest part of the sale is to get agreement that you really can deliver benefits that they didnt previously know were possible.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

We got instantaneous feedback on the validity of the idea and started our sales process concurrently. LOIs, while clearly not as good as signed sales contract, do have meaning and are valuable. We got instantaneous feedback on the validity of the idea and started our sales process concurrently.

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