Setting the Startup Accelerator Pedal
Startups frequently make one of two mistakes: spending too much money, or spending too little money. A key job of the CEO is knowing where to set the startup accelerator pedal. In a recent series of three blog posts published …
Customer Acquisition: Maximizing your Funnel
This blog post focuses on how B2B companies can optimize their customer acquisition funnels using a customer-centric methodology to analyze and remove blockage points.
Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with …
What drives great entrepreneurs
If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.”
I recently …
Lessons Learned from Dropbox and Xobni
Readers of this blog will likely really enjoy the following two presentations that discuss lessons learned by the founders of both DropBox and Xobni. There are lots of great lessons to be learned here.…
How Sales Complexity Impacts your Startup’s Viability
There is no question that success for the entrepreneur starts with a breakthrough (or at the very least great) product or service. Yet too often, entrepreneurs fall into the “field of dreams” mentality (in the words of Terence Mann, AKA …
2013 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey
We worked together with Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a specific focus on SaaS, to survey 155 SaaS companies on a variety of topics such as growth rates, CAC (cost to acquire a customer), gross margins, churn …
SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
This blog post looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down layer by layer to expose the key metrics that will help drive success. Metrics for metric’s sake are not very useful. Instead the goal …
Customer Acquisition & Monetization
Presentation describing how Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) and Monetization (LTV) are they key elements to get right for a successful business model. Also describes the latest techniques for reducing CAC, including Inbound Marketing, and the author’s own methodology: Building …
Designing Metrics for Success
Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. And great management teams know that the only way to improve a process is to start by measuring it. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In …
SolidWorks 3: The best VAR management program in the world?
In my first two entries, found here and here, I talked about things we did at DS SolidWorks between 2003 and 2008 to increase the performance of our Value Added Reseller (VAR) channel. SolidWorks grew from $135M to $400M …
SolidWorks 2: The best VAR management program in the world?
In my last entry, we talked about a series of investments SolidWorks made in expanding and developing our Value Added Reseller (VAR) channel between 2002 and 2008. Now, let’s talk about how we actually pulled this off.
Where to
…SolidWorks: The best VAR management program in the world?
How SolidWorks grew to $400m a year in revenues by helping their VARs become world class business leaders.
SolidWorks was started back in 1993 with the vision of bringing solid modeling for mechanical design to the masses. Before SolidWorks entered …
Pacific Crest’s 2011 SaaS Survey
Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a strong focus on SaaS, has surveyed a 70 SaaS companies with very interesting results. There is some great data on topics such as growth rates, cost of customer acquisition, churn/retention, expense models, …
Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition
In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. …
Lessons Learned – Viral Marketing
A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: …
