Multitasking is a rage in Founders Land and those who don’t do it seems to be tame unambitious lot. Bragging about the 25 things we are doing simultaneously and sleeping 4 hours or less seems to get a lot of ink and attention. However it rarely works. And it is rarely true.
Most of us use CAC and CPA interchangeably – but according to Brian Balfour, founder of Reforge that would be wrong at the least and it could be very expensive mistake. Glossing over details can become a way of life at startups and we all know where the devil lives.
We all make them every day. And most of them are ugly (browse Slideshare for a bit and you will see). I speak with companies and founders, head of sales and CEO’s they all lament about how difficult it is to turn around a slide deck yet Guy Kawasaki gave the formula long back. 10/20/30. 10 slides, 20 mins and 30 point font size. Who is listening?
I was not aware of Cliqz, the initiative from Europe to build a new search engine and browser from scratch headed by Jean-Paul Schmetz (and not riding on Google or Bing or Yandex for example).
There is no question that in the pre product market fit days the Founder has to do the selling, however the problem is much more complex than we give credit for. I found this series of articles by Martin Casado, General Partner at A16Z, which is absolute gold. Do you remember prepping for questions like “why is your solution better than everyone else?” or building the competitive quadrant pitch decks? Martin writes – “founders fill it in with a comparative set that’s often populated with so-called competitors that aren’t likely to be included in an actual sales bake-off ….so what you’re really positioning against is the status quo.”
When you look for ideas to increase productivity you find a lot of instructions, some contradictory. Most not very easy to follow through. Andrew Quinn listed 13 ideas you can implement right away. As a sales professional or as a founder tasked with sales, remember a 1% improvement every day can compound to a huge change by EOY.
Dharmesh Shah knows a thing or two about SaaS. And it takes a lot of wisdom to distill complex ideas into simple truths. I found a 2017 post by him recently where he talks about what is the secret to SAAS success. And it is so simple that once you get it straightened in your mind your entire go to market strategy could follow from there.
That’s the math that David Cummings wrote about in his post of November 23rd. It is quite simple. If you have $1m of new recurring revenue you are likely looking at a 800k gross margin. Invest half in Marketing and half in hiring two sales people. They will add $1m in new recurring revenue. Rinse and repeat.
How many times do you routinely prove that you are human? Retyping texts, matching photos of motorcycles and traffic lights. Ot some such ridiculous things? Have you wondered why? Because most of the Internet we encounter today is Fake.
SEMRush hosted their maiden marketing show in Bangalore which was surprisingly well attended despite being a fully paid event. The very first presentation was by Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing on The State of Content Marketing Report 2019.
