I love metrics ! Allez, ça fait bien un mois ou deux que je n’ai pas tapé sur l’un de mes clous préférés : les métriques, les chiffres, le reporting, et tout et tout. La dernière fois, c’était avec un tableau pour suivre ses avancées en tant que startup, de manière chiffrée, sur tout un tas de métriques. Cette fois-ci, back to business avec cette petite liste, non exhaustive de choses que vous devriez regarder de près (genre, une fois par semaine minimum) et ce dès le début de votre aventure. si vous comprenez quelles métriques sont importantes, vous aurez compris votre businessplus vous prenez une habitude tôt, mieux c’est (et plus c’est facile)vous allez vous mettre la pression pour débloquer les scores des métriques « bloquées à zéro »et on ne peut être bon que si l’on s’évalue, c’est trop facile de dire « c’est trop tôt, on regardera les chiffres plus tard » et surtout très dangereux… Quoi qu’il en soit, c’est une très, très bonne habitude à prendre… Et vous, vous faites comment ?
Petit point technique sur les levées de fonds Je rencontre pas mal d’entrepreneurs avec qui je dois passer quelques minutes à reprendre les explications « techniques » à la base pour ce qui concerne tout ce qui entoure une levée de fonds. Comme je le fais toujours avec plaisir et que je me dis qu’il doit y avoir pas mal de monde dans ce cas-là, voilà une idée de post toute trouvée, surtout qu’on rentre dans une période active pour les investissements de premier tour et que les seconds tours vont bon train actuellement (les VCs ont la main chaude, profitez-en !) Valorisation, termes employés... C'est vite un casse-tête ! N’hésitez pas à compléter ou informer en commentaires ! Valorisation pré-money et post-money Cette histoire de pré/post-money est sûrement l’un des noeuds les plus fréquents, et pourtant pas grand chose de difficile ici. Plus mathématiquement, cela donne : ValeurPostMoney = ValeurPreMoney +MontantInvesti ValeurPostMoney = (NombreDePartsSocialesApresInvestissement / NombreDeNouvellesPartsEmises) * NouvelInvestissement
Blogging Innovation » Ten Rules for Starting a Business I’ll never forget the very first day of Heinz Marketing. It was just me, a laptop and a (pending) business license. I had a meeting with a new client in downtown Seattle in the morning, and a prospect in the afternoon. My mid-day office? The public library. It was exciting. I think sometimes about what I would have told myself then, based on what I know now. So to remind myself and possibly to help others, here are my ten recommendations when starting a business. 1. My first business cards were freebies from VistaPrint.com. I still don’t have a brochure. 2. Three years before I started the business, I begin more actively networking. This might not help those who have already started a business, but for anyone anywhere with even the twinkling that you may someday want to do it, start building a network. 3. No matter what you’re selling, this is the most important thing you’ll do. Value isn’t defined by you, it’s defined by the customer. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. You can’t work all the time. 9. 10.
Blogging Innovation » 50 Awesome Quotes on Possibility “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” – St. Francis of Assisi “The Wright brother flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.” – Charles Kettering “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll “In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.” – Miguel de Cervantes “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.” – Henry Moore “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible!”
chris dixon's blog / Notes on raising seed financing Last night I taught a class via Skillshare (disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor) about how to raise a seed round. After a long day I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but it turned out to be a lot of fun and I stayed well past the scheduled end time. I think it worked well because the audience was full of people actually starting companies, and they came well prepared (they were all avid readers of tech blogs and had seemed to have done a lot of research). I sketched some notes for the class which I’m posting below. 1. 2. 3. 4. By far the biggest influence on investors’ opinions of a startup is the opinion of other investors. 5. Make sure you have good Google results (this is your first impression in tech). 6. Read TechCrunch, Business Insider, GigaOm, Techmeme, HackerNews, Fred Wilson’s blog, Mark Suster’s blog, etc (and go back and read the archives). 6. 7. 8. 9. Have a short slide deck, not a business plan. 10. 11. 12.
Blogging Innovation » 10 B2B Sales & Marketing Metrics Worth Tracking The fine folks at Focus.com let me do a Webinar on this topic several months ago, but I wanted to summarize what I consider to be ten fundamental B2B sales & marketing metrics here as well. You can get an on-demand recording of the full Webinar here, but below (with some qualifying thoughts & questions) are the ten metrics. Quick Disclaimer: Just because you can track it, doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can track it, doesn’t mean it’s important. Choosing the right metrics that will give you clarity and drive action in your business is most important. So without further adieu… 1. You absolutely must track leads through to close and beyond. 2. What are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer? 3. First off, how are you defining a lead that’s in a “nurture” category – someone who’s somehow qualified but not yet ready to buy? Bonus points if you can use this insight to predict future revenue from your nurture database over time. 4. 5. 6. 7. Are some deals not worth pursuing?
Entrepreneurs: Ideas are Worthless, Execution is Gold | ElegantBanners Blog Over the last few months, I’ve come into contact with a bunch of budding new entrepreneurs (like myself) hungry to start a startup and it’s very surprising to see the attitude they approach the challenge with. Too often, new entrepreneurs put way too much effort and focus on the idea. They think that the value of a business is solely behind the idea it’s built on, but there’s little to no truth in that. Let me explain. Yes, ideas are important. For example, let’s take a look at one of the hottest startups around at the moment, MailChimp . If MailChimp had not executed so well, they would simply be just another mailing list SaaS in the sea. So yes, think of great ideas, it’s essential you do so – but do remember that in the end, the success of the startup lies in your execution of that great idea. ElegantBanners.com is a service that designs high quality custom creatives for your ad marketing campaigns online. is an avid blogger, freelancer and banner designer for ElegantBanners .
Startup Metrics A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs. Normally, when I am talking to the founder of any startup trying to figure out what they need to do, one of the things I always try to do is understand their business at its core. In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models. Define the early proof points for the company. What Dave McClure's presentation does is point to some additional metrics that are useful to think about and consider: A: Acquisition - where / what channels do users come from? These are captured fairly well by his slide: What's my business model? Great stuff.
Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior 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 this post I hope to help show how to figure out which metrics matter the most, and how to design them in such a way as to drive behavior that will lead to the results that you want. This post is applicable to any kind of business. Think of your company as a machine One way to look at how companies work is to imagine them as a machine that has Outputs, and Levers that you, the management team, can pull to affect it’s behavior. Weak management teams have only a limited understanding of how their machines work, and what levers are available to affect performance. When we look to design metrics, we are looking to deepen our understanding of the machinery, and how it works. Example of a bad Board Meeting Why that happened? Example of a good Board Meeting
What Makes an Entrepreneur (2/11) – Street Smarts I started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity. 2. Street Smarts - OK, so you’re a tenacious person – you never give up. Because they’re street smart, most great entrepreneurs tend to prefer getting out and talking with real customers rather than sitting in a cubicle all day doing beautiful PowerPoint slides. I often tell people that I’m looking for people that weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths. If I were writing about the most important attributes of a VC (hmmm) one of the things that would make my list is “ability to spot patterns.” So I had written this whole series the week of Thanksgiving, but virtually every day I wake up and see examples. On social conventions: Two years ago I was in New York and I called the little brother of one of my wife’s best friends from Wharton. He asked each sales / biz dev person to call customers and tell them they had to change their contracts. I loved that story because it’s so true.
s $1M Fundraising: Lessons Learned about Pitching Investors from a First-Time Entrepreneur at Udemy “Raising Capital for Startups” on Udemy Udemy recently closed a $1 million financing from a syndicate of angel investors. I couldn’t be prouder of the Udemy team. For those of you unfamiliar with us, Udemy is a website that enables anyone to build their own online course. Some background – One year ago, when I first joined Udemy, we were nothing. This is the story of how it happened and what we learned from our experience. Update: StartupDigest has now launched a new course on Udemy about raising capital that provides significantly more detail on how to fundraise. The Short(er) Version Udemy went out to raise money in February-March 2010. Udemy focused hard on traction and launched the product in May 2010. I connected with a lot of friends and great CEO’s before fundraising to get intros. Keith Rabois, one of the first people we re-met with, agreed to lead the round. We leveraged AngelList to get additional momentum and investors for the round. Money (users) talk, and we had neither.