Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

As a startup in this phase you often raise capital, get press, hire staff and everything feels possible. As an early-stage VC I love this phase. I always push companies to hire “an operationally focused CFO” during this phase because in order to systematize you need somebody who brings economic rigor to decision making.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

Hearpreneur

OCTOBER 25, 2023

The expansion of e-commerce should also bring about seeing returns as a strategic lever, similar to how companies used faster delivery to drive customer experience and revenue. First and foremost, consider hiring an attorney to assist you in setting up your business structure, drafting contracts, and establishing store policies.

eCommerce 143

eCommerce Omaha Entrepreneur SEO 143

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 30, 2022

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Hire more help than helpers.

Mezzanine 368

Mezzanine Private Equity Bandwidth Metrics 368

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 14, 2012

To learn more about how your startup can find, hire and keep the top talent and quality workers it needs to succeed, download this free ReadWriteWeb Report: The Talent Wars: Today’s Toughest Startup Challenge. And you need to do it sooner rather than later. So what does it actually take to build a kickass startup team?

Technical Review 159

Technical Review CTO Hire Software Review Startup 159

The Startup Magazine

MAY 22, 2018

Early stage. At this stage, the hiring of employees who are customer focused is paramount. New hires will be part-time and will be dedicated to helping customers. You can start by tracking the quality and volume of requests coming in, together with revenue related metrics e.g

Customer 80

Customer Early Stage Churn Rate Startup 80

OnlyOnce

AUGUST 3, 2023

(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CPO’s) In most startups, the HR function starts out as tactical, because you have to get people hired and paid, and while you might have a founder or early-stage employee who can do these things, often these tasks are frequently outsourced to a PEO.

Hiring 62

Hiring Metrics Leadership Early Stage 62

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 31, 2022

This early stage is often called the idea stage, best populated by people who see the need for change early, or always have a vision for unmet opportunities, or a better way to do things. Some people are very good as defining metrics, roll-out programs, and reward systems for marketing and sales programs.

Metrics 272

Metrics Early Stage Finance Programming 272

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Between January 2015 and January 2016, we grew our platform Slidebean from $1K to $20K in monthly recurring revenue. Getting the first tracks of revenue is one of the toughest processes of building a startup. This is when metrics come into play. 1x hacker in charge of product/development. Dec-15: Developer (product team).

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

NZ Entrepreneur

SEPTEMBER 29, 2021

Addressing real world problems, they thrive in uncertainty, generating new jobs and new revenue streams in new markets. experiments to build a product, find customers, test business models and hire amazing people. Agenda items will focus on key metrics illustrating value creation, particularly in software as a service companies.

Technical Review 90

Technical Review Software Review New Zealand Due Diligence 90

Steve Blank

MARCH 17, 2020

Next, take a look at your actual revenue each month – not forecast, but real revenue coming in each month. If you’re an early stage company, that number may be zero. Subtract your monthly gross burn rate from your monthly revenue to get your net burn rate. What are the new financial metrics? How do you know?

Burn Rate 436

Burn Rate Startup Valuation Sales Cycle 436

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 1, 2019

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Hire more help than helpers.

Mezzanine 244

Mezzanine Private Equity Startup Bandwidth 244

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

Early-stage investors in technology startups are only looking for growth-oriented companies that can achieve an “exit&# someday – either via selling your company to a larger company or via an IPO. million post-money valuation with no revenue. It was early 2000. I raised my A round at a $31.5 That was market.

Pre-Money Valuation 336

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Silicon Valley Stock 336

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 16, 2014

Still… Now Slack has been valued at over a billion dollars, less than a year after launch, every month adding more than a million dollars of annual recurring revenue. What does it actually mean that metric X is better than average and metric Y is below? “It’s not fair,” we all said to ourselves.

Metrics 246

Metrics Early Stage Retention Revenue 246

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

An investor had few hard metrics other than the actual financials, and little technology to make the process scaleable. Over the past few decades, better metrics became available, and investors could take a more analytical, data-driven approach. FounderSuite * helps early-stage companies in their fundraising process. .

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Blog About Log in Register Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In a follow up post, I will use this technique to walk through the design of a set of metrics for a SaaS company.

Metrics 55

Metrics Design Entrepreneur Startup 55

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 17, 2007

Since then it has become much harder to find people and while we are talking about hiring relatively small numbers of people, the typical sources of candidates dont seem to be working. Early Stage Marketing and Branding – Farida Fotouh. ► February (2) CTO Founders / Cofounders Part-Time Startup CTO?

Los Angeles 150

Los Angeles Technical Cofounder Southern California CTO Hire 150

Occam's Razor

MAY 2, 2017

There is no golden metric for everyone, we are all unique snowflakes! :). and tell you what are the best key performance indicators (metrics) for them. In the past I’ve shared a cluster of metrics that small, medium and large businesses can use as a springboard…. Every ecommerce site has to obsess about Revenue.

Metrics 143

Metrics Acquisition eCommerce Analytics 143

K9 Ventures

JUNE 5, 2015

In addition, the competition for and the cost of hiring people, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, has gone up dramatically. I still wanted K9 to be the first institutional money in a company and work with “frighteningly early-stage” companies. Your early stage investment portfolio may no longer really be early stage.

Seed Stage 48

Seed Stage Venture Capital Early Stage Valuation 48

Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

To win in business you need to follow this process: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act. We are far too enamored with data collection and reporting the standard metrics we love because others love them because someone else said they were nice so many years ago. That metric is tied to a KPI.

Metrics 157

Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 157

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 13, 2017

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Hire more help than helpers.

Mezzanine 141

Mezzanine Private Equity Startup Bandwidth 141

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 3, 2013

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Hire more help than helpers.

Mezzanine 240

Mezzanine Private Equity Bandwidth Metrics 240

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 23, 2021

If they’re the kind of infinite learner who uses their past experiences to make their decision-making better, they have a huge advantage when it comes to everything from hiring to strategy to sales, making them an even better bet the second time around. The metrics from the dashboard are the key inputs for collective decisions.

Venture Capital 50

Venture Capital Metrics Investment Bankers Framework 50

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

It’s easy to get lost down the rabbit hole of metrics for your business. When it comes to getting the most out of your website performance, only certain metrics are what you can consider key performance indicators. For websites, this can include “sales volume,” “number of visits,” “average cart value,” and a variety of other metrics.

Metrics 121

Metrics Acquisition Conversion Revenue 121

ConversionXL

MAY 27, 2022

Only around 10–15% of B2B leads turn into paying customers, and it’s because tactics optimizing for the early stages of the funnel only cater to early-stage goals. It’s their job to implement a holistic approach to growth that encompasses both marketing and sales and looks at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Demand 95

Demand Management B2B Campaign 95

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

Certain VC’s like the new class of Super-Angels and small VC funds specialize in the early stage of a startup where you are searching for a business model. And some larger funds that specialize in later stage deals may have a partner or two who likes to invest at this stage. Have they heard about Customer Development ?

Founder 232

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 232

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Another advantage of the early stages is that most dont have to juggle too many competing priorities. Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. And if you neglect maintenance, you may not have a business left at all. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis. I am chugging along.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 22, 2020

If you’re going to try to pitch metrics and momentum as the main feature of your pitch—make sure they’re as great relative to other startups as you think they are. It shows that if you hired a salesperson and optimized the process, it makes sense to raise money to hire salespeople. That’s why we invest in a portfolio.

Early Stage 117

Early Stage Venture Capital Founder Sales 117

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 4, 2015

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. Hire more help than helpers.

Mezzanine 120

Mezzanine Private Equity Startup Bandwidth 120

Cracking the Code

JANUARY 14, 2014

I hope you will enjoy the read Simple CAC ratio As many companies are finalizing their 2014 financial plan ( feel free to use the Accel template ), I thought it could be a good time to write a short post on the CAC ratio - a simple metric that I defined in a blog post in 2008 (time flies!) This is a rough approximation.

Cost 97

Cost Acquisition Customer .Net 97

K9 Ventures

APRIL 9, 2014

Threshold for an IPO is higher Ten years ago, if you had $20M in revenue you were ready to go public. If you have <$100M in revenue, you’re probably going to stay private. Hiring costs are up dramatically The cost of hiring top quality talent in the bay area has gone up dramatically.

Mezzanine 134

Mezzanine Seed Stage Early Stage IPO 134

Up and Running

JULY 22, 2019

A telling success factor for new businesses looking to make an impact in their industries is whether they can attract investment at an early stage of development. . More specifically, companies are able to see notable success when they allow investors to engage early on. It’s still critical to attract upfront capital.

Canada 78

Canada Early Stage Valuation Finance 78

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Business model viability, in the majority of startups, will come down to balancing two variables: Cost to Acquire Customers (CAC) The ability to monetize those customers, or LTV (which stands for Lifetime Value of a Customer) Successful web businesses have long understood these metrics as they have such an easy way to measure them.

Acquisition 103

Acquisition Cost Customer Entrepreneur 103

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

What should an early-stage startup founder focus on if they want to implement PLG? But for early stage founders, I think there are two particular scenarios where PLG can be really helpful. So for early-stage founders, those are the two scenarios where PLG might be a great fit. That's the foundation.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2010

They also know that most founding CEO’s don’t scale past the early stage. The goal of your business model can be revenue, or profits, or users, or click-throughs (or even just to get the technology into production) – whatever the founders and their investors have agreed upon. That’s the source of the trouble.

Vesting 265

Vesting Liquidity Event Venture Capital Founder Vesting 265