article thumbnail

10 Popular Business Strategies That Most Often Fail

Startup Professionals Musings

Viral marketing costs real money, and your support staff and hosting systems cost even more. It’s never too early to start marketing, since it usually takes as long to build marketing momentum as it does to build a product. Marketing should start before product development. Offer free solutions to bring in more customers.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Here, the key metrics are Acquisition and Referral, combined into the now-famous viral coefficient. If the coefficient is > 1.0 , you generally have a viral hit on your hands.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

10 Common Startup Mistakes That Are Rarely Admitted

Startup Professionals Musings

Viral marketing costs real money, and your support staff and hosting systems cost even more. It’s never too early to start marketing, since it usually takes as long to build marketing momentum as it does to build a product. Marketing should start before product development. Offer free solutions to bring in more customers.

article thumbnail

Selling to the enterprise: “Sell to few” vs. “sell to many”?

Version One Ventures

And often, enhanced business services – such as custom product development or professional installation and consulting – are involved to complete the sale. Based on the lower price points, these employees often pay for the product with their credit card, without asking IT for permission or assistance with implementation.

article thumbnail

[Review] The Lean Startup

YoungUpstarts

Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean 193
article thumbnail

Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

In a previous post , I covered the three main drivers of growth: Paid, Sticky, and Viral. A minimum viable product in this category must answer the question: does my media content or channel command the attention of a valuable audience? Let’s look at a viral growth company, like Facebook. As soon as possible!&#

Customer 156
article thumbnail

10 Startup Mistakes You Can't Afford To Make Again

Startup Professionals Musings

Entrepreneurs who under-estimate cash requirements or focus on product development while someone else pays the bills are doomed to fail over and over again. Being too aloof or busy to lead and communicate goals and status to the team is a sure way to reduce motivation, morale and productivity and set the wrong culture.