April 4, 2024 SaaStr : The 21 Top Excuses for Not Closing A Deal

Sales is hard. And not only is it hard, but you shouldn’t be closing every deal you are in. Why? Well, if you’re closing every deal you are in, you’re not being invited to the deals where your product has competition. Where it has gaps. You aren’t being invited to where you’ll want to be to grow, if you magically close every deal you are in. And closing every deal you are in is also generally a sign you the company itself isn’t doing enough marketing. Still, the best sales reps close so much more than mediocre ones. And what you hear a lot from the mediocre ones are … excuses.  But hear these excuses too often from a rep, and you have the wrong rep. Even today, when sales for many of us is harder. Probably, especially today. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, product-market fit, resilience

July 6, 2020 Avi Eyal via Medium : Burn Baby, Burn

Revenue often costs too much.  One will often face a tradeoff between cash flow paid annually at a discount and higher revenues from customers.  Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity …. and Cash is Reality!  Cash upfront helps fuel growth which has a multiplier effect — especially if the business has high gross margins. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, profitability

June 16, 2020 Allen Miller via Medium : The Return of Capital Efficiency

Capital efficiency has long been a desirable trait in early/growth stage businesses. But over the last few years, an abundance of capital combined with a “growth at all cost” mindset, allowed founders to deprioritize efficiency. Ignoring efficiency, however, can lead to making cardinal mistakes like misreading true product-market-fit, over-hiring for the stage you are in and burning through too much money too quickly. Furthermore, growth rate and top-line progress are a function of how much capital a business has consumed to get to that point (i.e. getting to $10M in revenue is less impressive if you spent $50M to get there vs spending $5M to get there.) (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, product-market fit

June 14, 2020 Jennifer Alsever via Medium : Indie vc: Unicorns Are Out, Profits Are In

But the model is now proving prescient. Over five years, Indie.vc has backed 34 companies — half of which are women-led companies and 20% are Black. And while there haven’t been any big exits yet, the companies that receive Indie.vc funding seem to be much more robust than their peers, especially in a challenging economic climate. On average, they’re growing 100% in the first year, and 300% the second year, says Roberts. Plus, the fund’s mortality rate is 10% — compared to about 44% with traditional VC-backed companies. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, valuation

March 9, 2020 Maya Kosoff via Medium : Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding

Perhaps the original mistake of the DTCs wasn’t in their vision, but in their decision to take the venture capital in the first place. Now under pressure to grow even faster and at greater scale than they otherwise would have had to naturally, they are being confronted with what happens when growth slows down, the cash starts running out, and investors are expecting their returns. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, product-market fit, winner take all

February 13, 2020 Tech Crunch : Portfolio bloat: What’s happening to thousands of startups going nowhere fast

Ravi Viswanathan of the venture firm NewView Capital sums up what’s happening out there this way: “Firms and funds are generally coming back to market faster with bigger funds, and they’e investing a lot more, so you’re seeing portfolio bloat across the industry. But [limited partners, the outfits and people supplying money to venture funds] are investing for you to make money, and that means spending time on the needle movers.” (read more…)

CATEGORY: capital, customer acquisition, valuation, VC

May 16, 2018 Kevin Roose, New York Times : The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now. Enjoy It While You Can

The new way to make it in business is to spend big, grow fast and use Kilimanjaro-size piles of investor cash to subsidize your losses, with a plan to become profitable somewhere down the road. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, valuation, VC

October 12, 2017 YCombinator : The Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King

Toutiao launched in 2012. The app uses machine and deep learning algorithms to source and surface content that users will find most interesting. Toutiao’s underlying technology learns about readers through their usage – taps, swipes, time spent on each article, time of the day the user reads, pauses, comments, interactions with the content and location – but doesn’t require any explicit input from the user and is not built on their social graph. Today, each user is measured across millions of dimensions and the result is a personalized, extensive, and high-quality content feed for every user, each time they open the app. (read more…)

CATEGORY: customer acquisition, growth, product-market fit