notes-business-startups-startups-stTodo

Contents

todo

" rdl 23 hours ago

It seems kind of crazy to me that people talk about startups and try to apply completely the same model for everything to:

1) A social app like this, which is essentially hype-based and self reinforcing. Success seems entirely down to virality and adoption, followed by monetization.

2) Some very vertical market focused SAAS offering which can be developed with minimal outside capital, own a niche, and where capital can then be applied to expand to other verticals, accelerate the sales process, etc. (Say, a scheduling application for vets)

3) A capital intensive project in a well understood field (IAAS, hardware, lab stuff, etc.)

4) Entirely new technology deployment (not discovery, which tends to be hugeco or lab, but first commercialization)

Clearly there are some commonalities, but there are a lot of areas like employee vesting periods, how you recruit, etc. which probably should be different in these different kinds of companies, but tend to be the same.

reply

DaniFong? 23 hours ago

Spot on. A lot of what's very challenging for today's web startups, like hiring, is easy for startups in cleantech, since there's so few funded startups. Conversely, it feels an order of magnitude more challenging to raise the money in clean tech...

reply "

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-01-21

integrate my genericBusinessAdvice notes

integrate my soYouWannaStartASoftwareCompany notes to self

http://www.shouldiworkforfree.com/

https://www.quora.com/As-CEO-and-non-tech-co-founder-what-should-I-be-doing-before-we-launch

links:

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https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/marketing-checklist/

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https://insimpleterms.blog/2017/08/07/the-tech-leads-new-project-checklist/

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example pitch deck

https://medium.com/@barmstrong/the-coinbase-seed-round-pitch-deck-50c8ec91d40b

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examples

https://www.indiehackers.com/

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learning how to learn

"Took the course. A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. The techniques suggested are things many people are already familiar with: recall, deliberate practice, interleaving, spaced repetition, Einstellung, Pomodoro, Feynman Method, Cornell notes or similar (to force recall), exercise regularly, sleep well, focus on concepts not facts (chunking), etc. A composite of these dramatically enhances the learning process....The key premise of the course is that the brute force approach people usually take to learning is highly inefficient and ultimately ineffective (you'll forget)." -- sp527

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" patio11 91 days ago [-]

The falls out of the fundamental equation for SaaS? and other subscription business models:

LTV = prospects * (conversion rate to paying) * (average price point) / churn

This makes a 5% increase in prospects, conversion rate, or price cause a 5% increase to LTV (and, eventually, to the enterprise value of the company). A 5% decrease in churn (measured against one's current churn rate, e.g., 5% -> 4.75%) has a slightly more than 5% impact to LTV / enterprise value.

So many decisions about running a SaaS? company fall directly out of this equation. Competent SaaS? operators memorize it or, for less mathematically oriented operators, can at least summarize the relationships implied.

dfee 91 days ago [-]

If you're measuring the LTV of your pipeline, then yes.

The challenge is measuring duration (retention length) -- especially early on when campaigns are typically run single threaded and have an outsized impact on LTV of individual cohorts. I.e. My company is 18 months old - what's my LTV?

One approach is factoring in the period-churn-rate (if measuring MRR then considering monthly churn). But again, modeling isn't always super defensible.

brockf 91 days ago [-]

Survival modeling is exactly what's needed for these situations. It allows you to (a) consider censored data (i.e., active customers who you know stay for at least X months) and, (b) use flexible survival distributions beyond the standard exponential distribution assumed in the typical monthly churn rate calculations.

Source: Run a data science company and we work on a lot of customer lifecycle modeling projects with companies much younger than yours.

dfee 90 days ago [-]

I've done a bit of survival modeling, but my purpose was to understand retention across cohorts with certain attributes (typically, sign-up date, though occasionally campaign).

I'm interesting in how you've used this to model churn. Is there a blog post or resource you recommend to learn more about this? "

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" jasonkester 91 days ago [-]

Yeah, that's the Churn Equation. The thing us SaaS? folks spend most of our time worrying about (whether we know it or not).

Given a constant influx of potential customers at a known conversion rate, along with a known churn rate of existing customers, you can find an exact dollar figure that you will eventually plateau at.

It sucks. Especially when you're starting out because the "In" side of the equation is small and there's not much you can do about it.

Fortunately, as the article points out, there are a few knobs you can tweak. Churn is a nice one, since all it takes is a good product. Conversion is harder, because it involves dark magic like sales and psychology and web design skills.

Once you get it figured out, though, there's another formula you can use to determine how much you're allowed to spend to pour one new user into the top of your Trial funnel. If you can get that up to a level that justifies advertising, you can open the valve as far as your budget allows and start moving that plateau point upwards.

EDIT: I've been writing about this stuff lately, if anybody else likes geeking out on it:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/Arti "

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" I had spent 25 minutes showing a content team the many ways Airstory would improve their lives when their manager looked at me and said:

    But you guys aren’t funded.

It was then — in that moment — that I realized this: I suck at demos.

I knew that to be an absolute fact because I had spent nearly 15 years as a copywriter before starting Airstory — I? can tell a legit objection from a shit objection with my head underwater. Poor sales copy leaves the reader with BS objections like “it’s too expensive.” Poor demoing leaves the viewer with BS objections like “you’re not funded.” "


"#1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it." [1]

rmdoss 1 day ago [-]

Too much content without addressing the real problem with most startups:

They do not solve a customer problem.

Solve their problem, make their life better and you will do well.

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tobemined

https://qotoqot.com/blog/founder-skills/

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