Podcasts about cac ltv

Key Series A Metrics Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. Series A fundraises focus on growth. The goal of the fundraising pitch is not to show that you can sell the product to someone, but rather that you can grow the business. Here are some key metrics to evaluate the startups' growth story: Revenue -- this can be done on a month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, or year-over-year basis. Focus on net revenue. Revenue model -- this could be subscription, transaction fees, fees for service, or more. Focus on how much of the revenue is recurring or repeating. Customer concentration -- this measures how much revenue comes from a handful of customers. Compare the revenue from the top 3, 5, 10, and 20 customers to see if there's too much concentration. Gross margin -- measures the difference between the net revenue and the cost of goods sold. The healthier the margins, the more resilient the business. CAC:LTV -- this ratio compares the cost of customer acquisition to the lifetime value of the customer. For a Series A company, this should be 1:5 or 1:7. Focus on these key metrics in evaluating a Series A company.   Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding. Let's go startup something today. _______________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out    For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group    Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

Burn Multiple Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. Burn rate is the amount of cash spent over and above the revenue received. It's typically calculated on a monthly basis. Burn multiple is a metric that calculates the capital efficiency of a startup. To calculate burn multiple divide the monthly burn rate by the net new ARR. It shows how much revenue your startup is generating vs dollars spent. The burn multiple shows the efficiency of the business unlike the CAC: LTV ratio which measures just sales and marketing. In most startups raising venture capital the burn multiple ranges from 1X to 3X. Anything below 1x is fantastic.  From 1x to 2x is good 2x to 3x is a problem Over 3x is a major problem. Very early-stage companies may have a 3X burn rate because the revenue hasn't come up yet. At Series A many companies have a 2X multiple. At Series B the burn multiple should drop down to 1X or less. At break even, the burn rate multiple will drop to 0. Check the burn multiple of startups in your portfolio to see if they are tracking for their stage.   Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding. Let's go startup something today. _______________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out    For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group    Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

Metrics for Tracking Recurring Revenue Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. There are several metrics to track the health of a recurring revenue business. Here are some key metrics to know: Cost of customer acquisition -- this calculates how much sales and marketing spend goes into signing up a new customer. Life-time value -- this calculates how much a customer spends on the product over the lifetime of that customer on average. CAC:LTV ratio -- compares the cost of customer acquisition with the lifetime value to create a ratio. A 1:3 ratio is the floor for a successful business. ARR -- annual recurring revenue measures the revenue based on annual contracts. MRR -- monthly recurring revenue measures the revenue based on monthly contracts. Net MRR -- this measures the amount of additional revenue the company generates month over month. Churn -- the percentage of customers who opt out of using the product by canceling. ACV -- Average Contract Value -- this is the amount customers are paying for the product on average. ARB -- Annual Recurring Billings -- this is the amount all customers pay annually. Track these metrics so you understand the current state of your recurring revenue business.   Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding. Let's go startup something today. _______________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out    For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group    Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

Phil Carter is one of the best growth leaders of the last decade helping world-class companies like Faire, Quizlet, and Ibotta accelerate their growth. Today, Phil is a growth advisor and angel investor who helps Seed - Series C consumer subscription businesses define their growth strategy. In Today's Episode with Phil Carter We Discuss: The Seven Core Levers to Win at Consumer Subscription: How to Optimize Subscription Pricing and Packaging: Step: Single vs multiple subs tiers? Monthly, weekly or annually?  How often should it be revisited? Biggest mistakes companies make with pricing and packaging? How to deliver immediate value through new user onboarding? Target Metrics:  Best tactics for delivering value in the shortest amount of time? Biggest mistakes companies make in user onboarding? Thoughts on the very long surveys companies like Noom make people fill out pre getting access to the product? How to boost paid marketing efficiency by investing in desktop web flows? Target Metrics:  Why is now the time to be investing in desktop workflows? What are the most effective and specific tactics to do so? How to optimize paywall visibility and conversion? Target Metrics:  Why is paywall view rate so important?  What is good vs bad?  What are the most common places to trigger paywall? Thoughts on hard paywall vs consumer value first? Specific tactics to refine paywall design to maximize conversion? Single biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to paywall conversion? How to distinguish and emphasize premium value props? Target Metrics: What are the most effective ways to do this? Who does it best? Lessons from them? How to leverage motivation tactics (stats, streaks, badges, leaderboards, notifications)? Target Metrics: What is the most effective? Do we not have notification overload? What used to work but now does not work? Who does this best? Why them? How to leverage strategic discounts and promotions? Target Metrics: What are the most effective discounting methods used? What are the biggest mistakes companies make when using promos or discounts? Who does it best? What do they do?

Wie können B2B-Unternehmen mit gutem Marketing mehr Umsatz machen, obwohl die Zeichen bei vielen aktuell auf „Marketingkosten runter“ stehen?Wie wird ein LTV = 5xCAC realistisch für Agenturen, Beratungen und SaaS im B2B?Ab wann merke ich, dass eine Marketing-Maßnahme nicht greift?Welche 3 Maßnahmen sollen Geschäftsführer noch heute machen, um ihrenMarketing ROI zu stärken?Wie stellen für XHAUER sicher, dass wir gutes Marketing machen, das die Pipeline füllt und für Umsatz sorgtPraxis-Vorlagen zu B2B-Marketing bekommst du auf unserer Downloads-Seite:► https://xhauer.com/downloads-podcastDiese Folge ist zuerst erschienen im Kanal von Bernhard Frühlinger von Adam:► https://meetadam.io/video Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of "How to Product?", ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Arjav Jain⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, the host talks to Gauri Bansal. This episode covers the following: In this episode we discuss

Je­des drit­te Start-up ver­treibt ein Soft­ware­pro­dukt und fast al­le ent­schei­den sich da­bei für Soft­ware-as-a-­Ser­vice (SaaS) als Ge­schäfts­mo­dell, d. h. sie bie­ten ih­re Soft­ware als mo­nat­lichen Dienst statt als Ein­malkauf an. Die He­raus­for­de­rung: SaaS funk­tio­niert fun­da­men­tal an­ders als der klas­si­sche Pro­dukt­ver­kauf, von dem lei­der vie­le Bu­si­ness-Rat­ge­ber (und Ban­ken) aus­gehen.In dieser Sonderfolge erklären David und Marcel live von der Startup-Woche Düsseldorf, wie SaaS funktioniert und auf welche Kennzahlen Gründerinnen und Gründer optimieren sollten.Links SaaS Metrics 2.0 - A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters - For Entrepreneurs (David Skok Stop optimizing for a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3 (Elena Verna) The Anatomy of SaaS Pricing Strategy (Price Intelligently, 2017)✉️ Feedback und Kontaktemail@skalierbar.fm

The one metric that shouldn't go up and to the right is CAC Payback, and it's doing exactly that.Rather than trying to fix CAC, there's another solution.(00:00) - Introduction (02:53) - CAC Payback (05:59) - Look beyond CAC:PB (09:13) - Drawback of CAC:LTV (10:50) - How do you get there? (15:00) - The other thing is product (19:20) - What have you done for them lately? (21:54) - Aligning newbiz and existing biz *** This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.***Connect with us

Guillaume Cabane is a growth advisor to high-growth SaaS Startups, including Ramp, Spot, Airbyte, G2, Gorgias, Metadata, Madkudu, and others. Guillaume held VP of Growth roles at Drift, Segment, and other successful startups, where he helped them grow from ~50 to 300. Prior, Guillaume spent 6 years at Apple. In Today's Episode with Guillaume Cabane We Discuss: 1. Entry into Growth: How did Guillaume make his way into the world of growth? What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from him time at Segment where he 4x revenue? What does Guillaume know now that he wishes he had known when he entered growth? 2. Enterprise vs SMB & CAC/LTV: Why does Guillaume think it is harder to go enterprise down than SMB up? What are the biggest mistakes companies make when scaling into enterprise? What are the biggest mistakes startups make with product-led-growth motions? Why does Guillaume believe it is impossible to analyse CAC/LTV in early companies? 3. Activation, Engagement and KPI Setting: What are the biggest mistakes companies and teams make in activation? What can growth and marketing teams do to guarantee engagement in prospects? Why are all KPIs not tied to revenue BS? 4. Hiring the Growth Team: What are the core characteristics of great growth hires? How quickly does it become apparent when you have made a bad growth hire? Why do founders make the best profiles when hiring your first growth hire? What are the biggest mistakes Guillaume has made when hiring for growth? 5. Why Growth is Like Venture: What is the secret to building a great growth portfolio? Why is it impossible to scale to $50M ARR with only one good channel? What is the right way to spread resources across channels? When is the right time to add new channels and diversify?

The Jason & Scot Show.  Podcast about e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Editor note: We're trying some fun new AI features for this episode. The following show notes were written by ChatGPT. We're also let AI remove all the "stop words" in our audio, and we've switched from Google to OpenAI for our audio transcription. Let us know your feedback. In this episode of the Jason and Scot show, our special guest is Sean D. Nelson, the CEO and founder of Lovesac. He shares his inspiring journey of starting the company as a beanbag business in his basement and growing it into a successful public company. Sean highlights the key moments of his entrepreneurial journey, including winning a million dollars on Richard Branson's reality TV show and navigating the ups and downs of the business. Sean has upcoming book and podcast, both entitled "Let Me Save You 25 Years: Mistakes, Miracles, and Lessons from the Lovesac Story." Sean emphasizes the importance of being a direct-to-consumer brand and how Lovesac has found sustained success by focusing on customer acquisition costs and offering a high-quality product. He discusses the concept of direct-to-consumer and shares his thoughts on its significance. Sean believes that having a differentiated product that provides value to customers is crucial, rather than simply relying on an online sales strategy. The conversation also touches on the topic of innovation and how Lovesac has been able to push the boundaries of what a furniture company can offer. Sean discusses their Stealth Tech innovation, which incorporates surround sound into their couches, as well as their commitment to creating products that are built to last and designed to evolve. Sean acknowledges the challenges of operating in physical retail and highlights the importance of their showrooms in reducing customer acquisition costs and providing a hands-on experience for customers. He also mentions their partnerships with Best Buy and Costco to expand their reach. The discussion expands to the future of retail and e-commerce, with Sean mentioning the transformative role of AI but cautioning that it takes time for movements to fully evolve. He emphasizes the importance of being patient and keeping an eye on developments in the industry. The conversation concludes with Sean expressing his long-term commitment to Lovesac and his desire to build something meaningful rather than focusing solely on personal gain. Listeners are invited to check out Sean's podcast and website, as well as his upcoming book, which will be released in January. Overall, this episode provides insights into the journey and philosophy behind Lovesac's success and offers valuable perspectives on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the future of retail. Chapters 0:00:46 Introduction and Welcome to the Show 0:08:36 The Journey of Love Sack: From Highs to Lows 0:12:05 Love Sack's Traditional IPO and Company Performance 0:15:49 The Importance of Having a Differentiated Product 0:19:49 The Value and Overhype of Market Movements 0:23:18 Sactionals: Built to Last, Designed to Evolve 0:25:56 Driving a Movement for Sustainable Consumerism 0:31:36 Innovation and the Evolution of Lovesac's Product Line 0:37:07 The Strength of Lovesac's Physical Showrooms in the DTC Landscape 0:40:03 Testing and Learning: Mobile Concierge and Shop and Shop 0:41:52 AI's transformative role in the future of technology 0:50:08 Long-Term Vision vs Quick Profit Episode 313 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, November 9th, 2023. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show. This episode is being recorded on Thursday, November 9th, 2023. I'm your host, Jason "RetailGeek" Goldberg, and as usual, I'm here with your co-host, Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:37] Hey, Jason, and welcome back. Jason and Scot show listeners. Jason, we're very fortunate to have a entrepreneur on the show. I'm the entrepreneur side of our partnership. So I always really enjoy these. Introduction and Welcome to the Show [0:49] We have on the show, Sean D. Nelson. He is the CEO and founder of Lovesack. And a little birdie told me that he recently started a podcast himself. He started Love Sack as a beanbag company in his basement when he was around 18. And now it's a public company and doing relatively large revenues over 600 kind of run rate. If I look at the last quarter, I took a little glance at that. Sean, welcome to the show. Shawn : [1:13] Thank you. Thanks for having me. Great to be with you. Jason: [1:16] We are thrilled to have you, Sean. Listeners always like to kind of get the background. I'm imagining you don't have a deep background before you started Love Sack because you started it so young. But can you, like where were you in life when that brought you to start build your own product? Shawn : [1:34] Yeah, strangely, 25 years in and still running the same company I founded as my side hustle in college, which is exactly what Love Sack was. So 95, all the way back then, I made a giant not bean bag because I thought it would be funny. I literally, 10 days out of high school, got off the couch at my parents' house, having this dumb idea, like, how about a beanbag, like, me to the TV, like, the whole floor, like, huge. Drove down to the fabric store, bought some fabric, brought it home, cut it out, and then began sewing it up, broke my mom's sewing machine, neighbor finished it, took three or four weeks to try and stuff it, originally with beads, but couldn't possibly find enough, so looked around the house, I just found out my parents' camping mattresses chopped up yellow foam, you know, like those yellow slabs of foam you take camping, on a paper cutter in the basement. And eventually, I mean, foam, packing peanuts, old blankets, had this thing stuffed and started using it out and about through university, taking it camping, back of the truck, driving movies. Ended up putting it away for a couple years. And by the way, everywhere I took it, everybody wants one. Like everyone's always like, Oh my gosh, what is that thing? Where'd you get it? I was like, I'll never make another one. It was such a pain in the butt and put it away for a couple of years to go be a missionary for my church. [2:58] And came back to finish up university in 1998. And that's when I founded the company. Cause people kept bugging me to make them one. And it became my side hustle in college. And we tried to sell these things eventually beyond our friends and family and beer fest, May fest, October fest, car shows, boat shows, 10 by 10 booths, how we got started. Tried to sell them to furniture stores and they laughed at us and told us it was a dumb idea. [3:34] Eventually, at a trade show got discovered by the limited to this is like, you would not today as justice like in the malls, like little girls pink and purple fuzzy stuff for their bedrooms and, and clothing. Anyway, they ordered 12,000 little love sacks, not knowing it was me and a buddy and like a woodchipper shredding foam in the back of this furniture place. And, and that forced us to source over in Asia, which is, you know, where I had served my mission. So I speak Mandarin Chinese. There's a whole story there I won't get into it it was just kind of one thing led to another led to another week we built a factory to support that 12,000 sack order we then went out to the furniture stores who again laughed at us didn't want our $500,000. [4:19] Beanbags having completed that order wanting to keep the factory going so we finally opened our own store in a mall that didn't even want us there but finally capitulated let us in because they We had a space to fill for the holiday season, in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it just exploded. We did a good job, carpet paint, neon sign, made it look like a proper mall chain store selling giant beanbags, and it just took off. Like, it worked. People came in, flopped down, music bumpin', big screen TV, playin' movies, had a great time. There was a couch in the corner to look pretty, be part of the decor. People kept asking about the couch, And that led us to eventually, many stores later, many states later, invent Saxionals, which is our modular sofa solution, which now drives almost 90% of our sales today. So we're more a couch company by far today than we are a beanbag company. And there was a whole, listen, I'm skipping over decades of time really, but there was a whole transition where we... We went through after we invented the sectionals and solved all these problems people have with couches not only can you ship it to your house via FedEx which was hyper relevant you know for. [5:32] E-commerce and digital marketing obviously but it's watchable and changeable, and movable and it can be with you the rest of your life that that led us to a whole design philosophy that now. [5:42] Drives are innovation we think is a really cool secret sauce called design for life but. 10, 20, 50, 100, 250 locations now. We came public in 2018 on about 100 million in sales. Right around the time there was just tons of fervor in this direct consumer movement. We had farted around, we'll call it as a furniture store, selling rugs and lamps and bowls and baskets and all the obvious things along the way. And it was really when we purged all that stuff around 2015, seeing the Caspers of the world emerge and Warby Parker's and even Tesla with their showrooms. Could we adopt a more e-commerce-led model with showrooms for people to kick the tires, so to speak? And that transition is really what unlocked the lovesack that you see today and where most of our growth has come since about 2015, 16, when we made that pivot, took the company public, wrapped around that direct consumer story. So we're not a digitally native brand originally, we were actually a retailer that pivoted and became digitally led. And now we don't even operate stores in the traditional sense. We don't, we don't stock things there. You know, you don't walk out of there with your product. They're all really online sales and those showrooms are extremely powerful mechanisms for helping people make up their mind around a five or 10, $15,000. [7:06] Purchase where they want to see the thing and sit on it and, and, and see if it's everything it's cracked, it's cracked up to be online. And so we, we, we believe that we really, uh, through that arc. And then by the way, since coming public, I don't know, six, seven X, the company this year, you know, we'll, we'll be on a run rate to the analysts were a public company. So the analysts show us around, you know, it's called 700 plus in revenue and profitable, very profitable and cash generative. So we think, you know, the direct consumer game, in a lot of respects, Love Sack is one of the unlikely winners of that entire movement. Because I think at that scale, there are very, very few, what I call successful direct to consumer brands. And so we're really proud of that. And it's been a long saga, and we continue to grow and change and adapt and evolve. Jason: [8:01] It's an amazing story. And we definitely want to unpack it. But I want to go all the way back to the beginning for one second. Did that neighbor who helped finish sewing the first prototype get any equity? Shawn : [8:13] No, it was my ex-girlfriend's, mom, so about the time she exited, you know. No, it was just a friendly favor, but the truth is a lot of people helped out along the way, and a lot of people had equity or have equity in Love Sack from along the way, but look, we've been through every high, every low. Somewhere in the middle there, I skipped over it just because of brevity. Not only did I win a million dollars on TV with Richard Branson, The Journey of Love Sack: From Highs to Lows [8:38] his reality TV show on Fox Network back in 2005, if you can believe that, the rebel billionaire. But I also guided the company through a complete chapter 11 reorganization back in 2006, spearheaded by Venture Capital, which was painful and ugly and embarrassing and humiliating. So we've been through every kind of thing over these better than two decades. Scot: [9:01] Yeah, my deep dive question is, when you rented or bought the wood chipper, did you tell them you'd be throwing foam in there, or did they think you were clearing up a tree? Shawn : [9:09] Oh, that's so the original story. Yeah, the original woodchipper actually, you know, if you've ever used one in your backyard or, you know, you shove sticks into these things, that's basically what the original shredder was. And it was in the back room of this furniture factory already. They had used it back in the seventies to shred foam, but it had an electric motor, right? Instead of like, okay. Scot: [9:30] So it's okay to be inside here. Shawn : [9:32] Well, yeah, but I had to rehab it because it hadn't been used in like a decade or two because shredded foam had fallen out of favor in furniture. And then later to do that bigger order, we couldn't afford like a proper German, shredder, so we ended up driving out to farm country to find more of those same kind of shredders and actually found a hay grinder called a hay buster can shred 2000 pounds at a whack. Scot: [9:57] And that's a lot of power. Shawn : [9:59] Yeah, it's powered by a tractor. So we, you know, agricultural loan for tractor and hay grinder. I mean, crazy, crazy story in the beginning. Scot: [10:07] Yeah, as a family, you gotta figure out how to get it done, right? Whatever it takes. Shawn : [10:12] Whatever it takes. Scot: [10:13] I didn't know the Richard Branson thing, so that was interesting. Did he like, was he an active investor, or that's like one of those things where his people kind of take over and you never hear from him again? Shawn : [10:22] No, I mean, it was a weird situation. He had a reality TV show, 2004-5, The Rebel Billionaire, you know, whatever, 16 contestants. It was like The Apprentice, but not for apprentices, for entrepreneurs. So my runner-up on the show was Sarah Blakely of Spanx, gives you an idea. Scot: [10:38] Oh, okay, cool, neat. Shawn : [10:39] Yeah, yeah, so we became great friends, she and I, Richard and I. I ended up also being named President of Virgin Worldwide for a minute as part of the prize, believe it or not. So, worked with Richard, worked with all of his CEOs. Totally weird outcome. And, you know, but huge, huge blessing and a huge piece of story. And he was involved in sort of our VC round that ensued on the tail of that. Scot: [11:06] Okay, and then I think I saw that you guys were on Shark Tank, right? You were like one of those that you know, kind of one of the big success stories. Was that the OG Shark Tank or? Shawn : [11:16] No, we weren't on Shark Tank. A lot of people thought that. There was a Love Sack copycat that's on Shark Tank. Okay, and so they got... Scot: [11:23] I was confused because like Google says you were and then I was like, but then I couldn't find the episode. Jason: [11:28] There's a whole TikTok channel dedicated to Love Sack and Shark Tank and it's super weird. Shawn : [11:36] That's super, yeah, people get confused. Scot: [11:42] Yeah, yeah, super weird. Yeah. And then when you did your IPO, was it a traditional IPO or did you guys get caught up in the SPAC craziness? Shawn : [11:51] No, we did a traditional IPO back in 2018 and you know, our stock has been really volatile for lots of different reasons that, you know, COVID was crazy, but the company performance has been really solid. So we're just trucking. Love Sack's Traditional IPO and Company Performance Scot: [12:06] He, I think, was at Graham that said in the short-term it's an emotional machine, in the long-term it weighs your financials. So you got to, it's very hard, you know, I took a company public, not to the level you have. And yeah, it is, I was like, I'm not going to look at the stock, it's not going to influence me. And then suddenly everyone's like, are we making the quarter? And it's like, okay. And then suddenly it's very hard to get out of that, that short-term mindset. So congrats to you for sticking to it for so long. Shawn : [12:29] Yeah, look, I'm actually a big advocate of it, having lived inside of it now for almost six years. Scot: [12:36] Yeah, the transparency is good, you know, and I like that part of it, I think that's good for, you know, to kind of have to put out everything that you're doing, you know, it's a, the ultimate, yeah, it's like, yeah, transparency tends to be a good thing. Shawn : [12:48] I think it's the right way for companies to be governed and ran. Anyway, we could get into that if you want. Scot: [12:56] Yeah, I like the, you know, and you talked about all the other, we call them digitally native vertical brands, like the Warby's and Bonobos and all that. And yeah, a lot of them have not made it past kind of like that hundred million dollar level. And you guys have obviously, you know, six, seven X that, which is awesome. And then, you know, the big knock on Casper for a long time was as we've actually had this guy, Dan on the show, people were able to pick apart the CAC LTV and they found the average selling price was like, Jason will know these numbers, but it was like 350 and their cost to acquire a customer was 400. And they were like, you know, that obviously wasn't sustainable. So it's pretty neat that you guys have figured that out. Shawn : [13:36] Yeah. I mean, that's at the root of why obviously we've had some sustained success. And I think it's also at the root of why there are almost no other direct consumer brands making any money. End of story, full stop. And it's pretty fascinating to watch the whole thing unfold, because it really has been a movement for almost a decade. Scot: [14:01] Yeah, and I don't want to dig into the information you don't divulge publicly, so this is not a trap or anything but is it because the selection or your products, you've kind of cracked the code on Kakao TV, like what do you, and I don't want to know any methods or anything. and what do you attribute it to? Shawn : [14:18] Look, I think, let's start at the root. I think that many companies, product companies, let's start there, overlook the fact that you need a really good product. I think they pick a category and they say, oh, it could be a direct consumer brand. And the truth is, what does that even mean? Do you mean, because here's the funny thing. When I hear analysts and industry people talk about direct consumer, it has become synonymous over the last decade as it's unfolded today with e-comm. Oh, you mean you're an e-comm company and in many cases you do half of your sales through wholesale. So what does it even mean? I mean, if you want to talk about a direct consumer brand, LoveSack may be the most direct. We don't have any wholesale. I'm talking zero, and we only sell through our own channels, whether it's our website or our showrooms. And we have these partnerships, for instance, where we operate our own showrooms inside of a Best Buy or a Costco. [15:26] But you know, so this whole phrase even, direct-to-consumer, I think is really kind of silly. You mean you're a company that sells stuff online and maybe in showrooms and maybe in wholesale? So you're a company that sells stuff. So let's start with stuff. And you have to make, I think, if you want to be successful in the world, it's not a new concept. You have to have... A great product or or you have to have some other really. Hiller efficiency The Importance of Having a Differentiated Product [15:52] and i think what most have discovered it was a list again over this long decade of direction sumer evolution is that without a really differentiated product. You're just another company with a clever name lots of funding and if you throw lots of money at anything it's gonna grow. But you need to be differentiated. So Love Sack, you know, start with the giant beanbags. They were unique, especially in their day. There's tons of copycats out there now. [16:24] Sactionals are extremely unique. The problem is they photograph just like any other sectional sofa. Like if you took an image of Sactionals and an image of one of, you know, out of any competitor that sells couches, ours looks a lot like theirs. But the difference, the differences are myriad in terms of their washability, changeability, quality, and modularity, and many of those aspects, especially on the modular side, are patented at LoveSac. And so once you dig into it, you find that that's the number one driving factor, is we have a product that's truly differentiated, truly gives more value to the customer, and therefore, we can extract more from the market. It's really that simple, right? And that's at the root of why our CLV to CAC ratio it was so high and sustainable and cash-generative and profitable. And then we could go down all kinds of other paths. We could talk about our website, execution and stuff like that. And all of it needs to be there. Look, running a business is multifaceted and difficult. But at the root of it is that. Jason: [17:27] For sure. One of the things I sort of admire about your company is the original premise was not to have a particular go-to-market strategy. It was to have this great product that people wanted to have in their lives, right? And it feels to me like that, the whole quote unquote D to C movement, like this notion that before you solve any other problem, you're just gonna put a flag in the ground, like this is how you're gonna go to market, that just, it just seems silly because that may not be how the customer wants to acquire your product. Shawn : [18:00] Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that, so I think that whole movement that we're a part of, so I don't mean to like bag on the movement. I'm just an observer as well. Like I've been living in it, right? And we put, and I'm being really transparent, we put on those clothes very intentionally. [18:16] Because people that planted those flags were getting funded. People that planted those flags were being understood at the time. And these movements come. Right now, I could hold up a flag that said AI on it and go out there and raise a bunch of money and do something. And in the end, 99 out of 100 of those, flags are going to fall by the wayside after having tons of money thrown at them and Probably 1% of them will go on to you know be the next Googlers or who knows what right? But these movements come and go and and and I'm and this is what I'm saying You gotta be careful. I'm not bagging on the movement because these movements are useful these movements drive economic activity these movements drive innovation But they're often way overhyped, not as, I think, not as, so, you know, I mean, we could get into AI, you guys are, I'm sure, tracking it just like I am. What does that even mean? Oh, you mean like software? You mean like software that, that does stuff in an automated fashion? Like is that, is that, is it really that new? But it doesn't matter. It's a story that's being heard. It's a story that's being understood and it's where the momentum is. And so if you're able to wield, take advantage of these movements in the marketplace to your end, that's what, and that's exactly what LoveSack did. We put on those clothes, we took a concept that had been around for a long time, our concept. [19:42] And look, in the end, the thinking and the development and even like, let's say the web services and all the things available to that movement that The Value and Overhype of Market Movements [19:49] were spun up because of that movement, we benefited from. The money raising pricing aside, momentum, going public, whatever, all these things aside. So that's why I'm saying I think that there is value in these movements, but fundamentally, you still need to have a great business, a great product, something that's truly differentiated, because anyone with some funding can go out, buy a logo, buy a name, and look like they know what they're doing. Jason: [20:20] And yeah, for sure. And to your point, there's a, there's a funny data by going around in, in our industry this week that like over a hundred million dollars or I'm sorry, Amazon's GMV is, I'm sorry, a hundred billion dollars of Amazon's GMV is from AI. And you hear that and you're like, oh my God, that's huge. And then you find out it's product recommendation tiles that they launched in 1997. Shawn : [20:45] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jason: [20:47] Which, yeah. Yeah, so I do just want to like kind of wrap up this section, but put it in context. When you open that first store in a mall, like the mall competition for furniture stores was like Expressions Furniture, right? Which no one on this call would even remember probably. And then like by the time you really, after your IPO and really caught fire, you were competing directly against all these D to C companies that were expanding in malls. You were probably competing for leases. Shawn : [21:18] Yeah. Jason: [21:19] It's quite the, quite the journey. Now, Scot mentioned at the beginning of the show that you had recently started a podcast and I'm two part question. How the heck did you have time to start a podcast and tell us what the premise behind the podcast is and what you're talking about? Shawn : [21:36] Sure. Yeah. Just to comment first on what you pointed out, there is this whole strip in the malls now out there right now. But by the way, in these shopping malls that I was told were dead, you know, I could read the headlines of shopping malls are dead back in 2001 when I was opening my first shopping mall and I was forwarded those kind of emails by friends and family who were concerned. And here we are in 2023 and while these things change, they take decades to change. Meanwhile, they've evolved and you have all of these direct consumer players now and it It just cycles through, you know? What the players inside of these shopping centers happen to rotate, and I've watched it all evolve, and by the way, they're rotating again, because a lot of those players are not viable. Some of the best ones, biggest ones, you know? Like, concepts like Peloton, who I think is amazing as a concept, you know? They have their struggles, and so we watch these things evolve. In terms of, the podcast is relevant to this. Let me explain why. We had the chicken, I'm going to go, given the nature of what your podcast is, I'll give you a much broader picture than just, hey, why am I recording a podcast on my own and writing a book? [22:55] It works like this. We had the chicken before the egg. Sactionals being the chicken, we discovered, as we observed and had success with it, we believe are so successful because they are are built to last a lifetime and designed to evolve. Like those two attributes in our product are quite unique. And those two attributes underpin what we call our designed for life philosophy. Sactionals: Built to Last, Designed to Evolve [23:21] I did not found Love Sack to make products that are super sustainable, sustain hyphenable. In other words, things that actually sustain. Who's talking about that? I was just trying to survive. I made a big beanbag, people liked it. Made a couch because people were asking about couches. who has solved all these problems, observed the success, and that success was rooted in the fact that things were built to last, designed to evolve. Now that's led us to this whole philosophy that will inform our innovation on every product going forward, and it's why I'm so confident that we can continue to succeed, is because of this design philosophy that I'm sharing with you openly. Because it's one thing to say it, it's another thing to execute to it. That's the hard part. It's the execution that's the hard part, you know? Now, that said... [24:08] I'm trying to drive a movement. I believe that there are many people that are sort of aware now that we have been conned into buying too much crap. New season, new collection, the merchandising hamster wheel, new iPhone, now it's got a titanium band. Really? Everyone knows. No, it's not even hidden. It's not even like a secret. it. This whole hamster wheel called planned obsolescence that was not an accident, it's absolutely an economic strategy to lift us out of the Great Depression and onward. And it has roots all the way back to Louis XIV. What's my point? The world has just, I guess, accidentally, not so accidentally, fallen into all kinds of rhythms that are unhealthy, unsustainable, and not good for anyone, not good for the environment, not good for people, you know, we're frenetically chasing out. Now my jeans are too tight, now they're too loose, now they're too long, now they're short, now I got, now they got to show my ankles, now they got to drape over my, like, this is not an accident. This is a self-propelling machine that we have created. What's my point? I believe we can drive a movement amongst people to reject that. And I believe factionals is one of the embodiments of that. Things built to last a lifetime are designed to evolve. So that movement is actually my long-term strategy. [25:33] In the near term, I need to... One of the ways that we will reach people besides buying advertising and using it to drive a strong CLV to CAC ratio is through... I don't know, even podcasts like this is through people finding our brand, finding out about me, finding out about the company through... Whether it be me, whether it be through the goodwill of our customers, sharing this or that, the other. And so I wrote a book called Let Me Save You 25 Years. It's our clever story Driving a Movement for Sustainable Consumerism [25:59] at Love Sack. It's really great. I think it launches in January. I spun up a podcast called Let Me Save You 25 Years where I share my own entrepreneurial mistakes, miracles, and lessons of the Love Sack story. That's the subtitle of the book. That's the spirit of the podcast. I talk to successful people, some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and successful people about these concepts. And it's not an interview podcast. We go really deep into some of these concepts. So my long-term goal ultimately, is to write another book that can help drive this consumer movement that I'm describing because I think if we can get a little bit of luck and get people thinking about these things and then eventually seeking out. Products that can do this, and just a lifestyle that is supported in the way that I'm describing. Buy better to buy less. Buy better stuff so you can buy less stuff. Well, obviously, LoveSack will benefit from that as a company that makes better stuff. And so, look, it's a long, long, long, long way around, but you asked the question, and I'm totally serious about that. Scot: [26:58] Yeah. So I'm gonna guess you're not a fan of fast fashion. Shawn : [27:03] No, I mean, that's obviously gonna be I made the topic of the book, you know? Scot: [27:06] And I'm not. Jason's a huge Xi'an fan, so you just really hurt his feelings. No, I'm just kidding. Jason: [27:11] Hey, I wore a Patagonia, a used Patagonia jacket in honor of tonight's show. What are you talking about? Shawn : [27:18] You are speaking my language, man. And look, it's not even about being a tree hugger. I think that people have a brain. And people, I think, are waking up to the idea after the iPhone 15, that holy crap, Apple probably should have been forced to innovate a long, long time ago. Biggest company on planet Earth because they sell us the same thing every year or two. Had we not allowed them to do that, they would have had to use their enormous treasure and enormous skill base to innovate into other categories and and change the world. Instead, we've allowed them to sell us the same thing every year. Scot: [28:06] That's an interesting ethos. Having built a company, about how many people are in your company at this point? Shawn : [28:12] Total about 1,500. It's about 400 at the headquarters and another 1,000 out in the field-ish. Scot: [28:19] Yeah, you're at that phase where there's people at the company that you've never really met before. And it's awkward because they always expect you to know their name and they all know your name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when you get a company to that scale, how do you keep innovating? And, you know, one of the ones that I really love that you guys have done is the Stealth Tech. I think that's genius because I love AV and like having a really immersive experience. And I'll let you explain what it is, but, you know, my wife hates the big black speakers that I try to put all over the house. So I think it kind of solves like six problems in one. So A, maybe let listeners know a little bit more about what we're talking about. And then be I'd love to hear like how do you guys you know it's really hard to kind of you know ideas are easy and execution is hard on execution. It's really hard to like you know nail what you're doing and you have a lot going on and then like keep innovating. How do you how do you like get the org functional that way? Shawn : [29:16] Yeah. I mean, I think number one is you have to, you have to really want it, you know, not, not just like, Hey, I want to, I want to get, I want to get more business. I want to sell more stuff. Obviously there's that. But this ethos that I just kind of unpacked for you that, that we tripped stumbled into does the design for life ethos animates this organization. Like, it is a lot of, it is very motivating to think about, holy cow, now that we know our purpose, and it's been identified, right? Inspiring humankind to buy better so they can buy, you know, everyone's like, it was purpose, purpose, purpose, and hire some consultant, you know what I mean? But for real, if you have something that's truly unique, and it's meaningful, it's not just like words on the wall, it really is motivating, it's exciting. Scot: [30:11] And you bake baked in the products have to get better too, right? Like you, that's not well, so you have to support it. Shawn : [30:17] That's exactly right. Like, yeah, like we have to make stuff that's built to last a lifetime and design to evolve, which is really hard because if it was easy, everyone would do that. And here I am telling you openly about it. Like that's what we're going to do. And I'm not afraid to tell you because most companies won't do it because it's just freaking hard. Like it's a lot easier. Like why doesn't love sack? You know, you brought up stealth tech. So Stealth Tech is full Harman Kardon surround sound, no quality sound loss audio. Perfect audio emanating from your couch through the phone through the next layer of fabric and through the decorative layer of fabric that's washable, changeable, removable, tuned down to the color of that fabric so that the audio is perfect rear, front, center, subwoofer, invisible, beautiful, because you don't see it, it looks just like a couch, and it has all that packed in there, it's radically successful. It's been, it's now a huge piece of our business. And nobody saw that coming, because what would they expect a couch company to do next? A couch beanbag company. An end table, a coffee table, a rug, a lamp, you know, decorative accessories, get into the bedroom, who knows, right? Like the obvious stuff. Scot: [31:32] Meatballs. Shawn : [31:32] And what, yeah, right? Why did we do that? We anyway, we saw the opportunity and we also invented it. So one is, Innovation and the Evolution of LoveSack's Product Line [31:40] to answer your question, a lot of play. We are constantly at our innovation lab playing. So it's not just consumer-led insights, which is a big piece of what we do, but it's also a lot of inventions. You gotta have teams to invent. You gotta have engineers. You gotta have, so you gotta support that. So there's a cost structure there. And that's why LoveSack is quite profitable, but not as profitable as it could be in the future, because we are investing in innovation. And there's a lot of heads. there's a lot of engineers, there's a lot of designers doing things. Now they're not just all running around playing, they also have a very disciplined approach to executing on innovation, like launching Stealth Tech a couple years ago, and bringing that to market, which is a heavy lift because it's our invention, it's our patents, and it was not easy for this beanbag company to get into home electronics in a real way. [32:29] We've done, I think, more than 100 million in home electronic sales and making us a pretty, a pretty big player in that space, believe it or not. Already, and I don't think most people even, you know, would think that. But we're, you know, totally serious about it. So, innovation, wrapped around an inspiring path to innovation, I think is the key. Do you have an inspiring path, or are you just trying to make more stuff? Because if I wanted all those things I mentioned, like I'm over here in Asia right now, I'm in Hong Kong. And if I wanted a whole line of living room furniture with our logo on it to make myself feel good, I could have it in four weeks. The suppliers will do it for me. They've been doing it for 30 years over here for all the biggest brands you can think of, you know? And we could give them some designs and give them some ideas and let our, I mean, it's so easy to just source stuff. I'm talking about, you know, product land. Now we're talking fashion, talking furniture, talk any category you want, the same is true. But to truly invent stuff's a lot harder. And that's why I think we've had success, that's why I think we will continue to have success. Jason: [33:35] Yeah, you know, so I am interested, I mean, obviously the product has to be the lead in solving that real problem for a customer. But I do think another helpful aspect to your business is that in order for those products to be successful, like, they have to be demonstrated somehow. Like, per your point, the catalog for the StealthTech sectional looks just like the catalog for a generic sectional. And so I'm thinking you having your own showrooms was a big advantage for being able to tell the story. And ironically, I'm not sure you opened that first showroom because you recognize that problem. It sounds like you opened that first showroom because you had no other way to get distribution. Shawn : [34:21] Oh yeah, yeah. And that's why I'm not taking any claim as some kind of marketing genius. We just kind of tried to survive in the beginning. And opening a showroom was actually a reaction to being rejected by the big furniture guys, because they didn't, you know, want our product, they didn't believe in us, whatever. They couldn't see it. And so thankfully, it went that way. And by the way, they weren't showrooms, they were stores. We were a furniture store for a decade and a half. And we did all the furniture store things. And we sold merchandise, and you pulled your car around and we loaded you up, believe it or not, or we shipped to you. And it took us a long, long time to, after copycatting all those furniture stores and hiring merchandisers and window dressers and all those kinds of things from our competition to do that stuff in our stores. [35:14] To make that pivot to the direct consumer model that we operate on today that obviously looks very prescient in today's model. Now, the reason I think we've been so successful at it is because we had those 15, 20 years to get really good at operating now 250 locations across every state, almost in the United States of America, where people are fighting and bickering and hiring and firing and touching each other, whatever it takes. The point is operating physical showrooms is not something you get good at in a day or a week or a year just because that seems like the next thing to do. We have a website, now people need to see our stuff, to your point. And that's the approach I think a lot of the direct consumer brands have taken. And I don't think that they realize how hard it is to be profitable at retail and how many pitfalls there are. Where if I want to get a little better at digital marketing, which I think we're pretty good at now, but I can hire that. I can agency that, I can platform that. And so I think that the physical side of things is really underestimated. And so thankfully, our very long haphazard history has played out in our favor in that realm. And I think it's a huge strength of ours, because by the way, now that the economy's pulling back and this and that, we're 250 locations ahead of most that are just really coming around to the marriage of physical with digital and not realizing that, You know, it's not something you can just turn on and be good at. Jason: [36:44] Yeah. And I think it's you, you rightly pointed out that like the whole landscape of DTC hasn't been particularly successful. There's not a lot of wins, but the, the people that are outperforming the average, even one thing they all have in common is they all have some kind of physical footprint to, to reduce CAC, right? So they're either have their own stores or they, they are white selling through wholesale, or they're, they're in front of customers in some way, The Strength of LoveSack's Physical Showrooms in the DTC Landscape [37:09] other than, than Facebook ads. Yeah, I, I did. I think there's a super interesting new evolution. I thought I read about though. So like Amen stores and showrooms are super complicated. People wildly underestimate how many mistakes you can, you can make owning and operating a retail store. And now, now that you seem to have that clicking, you guys are bringing the retail store to the customer's driveways. Is that true? Like talk to us about the mobile concierge. Shawn : [37:37] Yeah, so just like we're innovating in product, we're also always innovating go to market. So whether it's mobile concierge, which is a lovesack trucks, where you can, you know, from the comfort of your home, have us pull up in the driveway and show you our products, which we've which we've dabbled in, and have tested into. And we'll see, you know, where that goes. I think that that has its own just like retail has its own complications, but also more, I think, more. I guess scalable already is Shop and Shop. So our showrooms right now in shopping malls, they're only like 800 square feet. So obviously the metrics are great, right? We're selling very big ticket items out of very tiny footprints with a small staff. There's just good metrics. And I don't hide from that. That's been a big part of our success, right? So we chose a good category in that way. We chose a terrible category in the sense is that the home category has all kinds of other issues. Jason: [38:38] Not the easiest category to deliver the product. Shawn : [38:41] Yeah, I mean, there's delivery, but there's also just the cyclical nature. You couple that with the idea that, look, we are selling you something that we are intending you to have for decades. My sectionals in my home are 16 years old, some of them, made with brand new pieces, made with Stealth Tech. That's pretty cool. On the other hand, unless we give you Stealth Tech and other reasons to come back, like, you know, you've got your satchels and you've made your investment. And so look, we deal with cover. So we're innovating on product, we're innovating on go to market, shop and shop. So these thousand square foot showrooms have been very useful for us. We have 200 square foot showrooms inside of Best Buy's or Costco's, where our people are basically checking you out and allowing you to kick the tires on the product. And then look, whether you buy there or whether you go back and buy online, we don't care. We built an agnostic platform where we just want you to be in the family. So I think these are things that have evolved over time and you've got to test and learn, whether it's mobile concierge, as you described, whether it's shop and shops. And these tests and learn activities can take years to play out and really take to scale and stuff like that. And so I think in this day and age of, hey, I'm gonna go raise a ton of money and build my company to X revenue and exit for X multiple, which is I think Testing and Learning: Mobile Concierge and Shop and Shop [40:05] what drives a lot of entrepreneurial activity. [40:09] That kind of mentality just doesn't have the staying power necessary. And that's why you see so many of these brands reach a point where they have to be retooled, like some of them are going through now. And look, they've made someone rich. Sometimes these founders find ways to squeeze a bunch of money out of it, or private equity tosses the hot potato to the next guy and they make a ton of money out of it. But in the end, what's left? a brand that is at scale, doesn't make money, and can't go anywhere. So my point is you gotta have the stomach to grind it out, to spend the time, to really slow cook some of these things, and to be flexible when they don't work, and shut them down and move on to the next. And so constantly innovating on go-to-market, constantly innovating on product, and really putting in the time and energy it takes to refine concepts, you know. Scot: [41:03] I know we're running up against time, and you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this. I know your goal is to bring this ethos out, but if you think about retail and e-commerce, what do you think the next five years hold? You talked about AI. There's a lot of this stuff that's temporal, but anything you think that you believe is going to change the way we shop and buy, either in-store or online? Shawn : [41:29] Yeah, look, I think that it will just continue to evolve, and so I think AI is real. I think it will play a transformative role, and I think everyone's trying to figure out exactly what that is, and nobody really knows yet. I wish I could just give you a clever answer, but I think I've witnessed, AI's transformative role in the future of technology [41:53] you know, that's What's the benefit of having a 25-year perspective is it's like I was saying about shopping malls. The mall is dead, headline from 2001. TV is dead, headline from 2008. Here we are with both of them still intact. By the way, TV advertising is still a big piece of our marketing spend. I know that's kind of mind-blowing because it seems like everybody's cut the cord or gone to this extreme. And I'm just telling you, these movements take decades. And so while it's great to be ahead of a movement, you don't, unless you are trying to drive that movement, like unless you are trying to take advantage of that AI, boom, to go raise money and wave that flag or whatever. [42:40] I've found it's okay to be a laggard. It's not always beneficial to, unless you're trying to build your concept around that and take advantage of that movement itself, let the movements evolve. So I can't give you a great prediction of exactly what's going to happen. AI is important. But how, where the winners will actually be and what the effects will actually be, I think it's way too early to tell. But I do think it's important to keep your finger and keep watching and eventually, you know, to find the connection and lean into that to affect your business. You have to be a little bit patient, I think. Jason: [43:27] Yeah, well, certainly 25 years in, I think you've earned your patience creds, by the way. Shawn : [43:35] Maybe too much. Jason: [43:37] Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to both. Urgency can be useful in certain circumstances, but short time horizons come with a lot of problems, as you have rightly pointed out. That did lead me to one sort of thought question. And you, you referenced some of your, your CAC economics and side note, we've, we've one of the, our favorite guests on the show is this professor Dan McCarthy. Who's, who's a huge advocate for cohort analysis and customer lifetime value based businesses. And so he would be thrilled that you're on, because I know you guys disclose some of your cohort metrics in, in your financial statements, which he loves. And to me, you're in a really interesting category to do that because although your product has invented a reason for customers to come back and you've sort of turned a product into a system, it's not like a fast cycle, right? Like, and so like when you're thinking about like a time horizon for LTV, and you guys have a very good return on your CAC, but compared to most companies, your CAC still is really high, right? Like, you sell a lot of product to compensate for that. Shawn : [44:57] Yeah. Jason: [44:58] So how, like, you know, you're spending five or six hundred bucks to acquire a customer and then you're earning thousands of dollars on each of those customers. Like, was it difficult to sort of have the financial discipline to have a long enough time horizon to see those sorts of high CLVs come back for that initial customer acquisition? Shawn : [45:23] Yeah, I mean, you could call it discipline. In our case, again, it was just survival, being really transparent. You know, we were just trying to find a way to make this business work, and we weren't profitable right out of the gate. It took us many years to get better at retail, to get better at e-commerce, to have a shopping cart experience that was commensurate to the product, because that's really hard with our product. Our product is really weird and complicated. And so that's something that's overlooked with Lovesack. And I think a lot of our copycats and competitors are realizing that. You can't just use a Shopify checkout if you're going to sell something as dynamic as, let's say, factionals where, you know, you can buy a bunch of these and a bunch of those and combine them in a million different ways. How do you, how do you shopping cart that? How do you Amazon that, you know? And so, and so these are superpowers that we've developed over a long time and thankfully given it enough time to become profitable. So to answer your question about, you know, patience, I think part of it is just been our lot in life to, to be, to have patience forced on us. But secondly, real discipline around. [46:32] Our CLV and CAC metrics. So we are, we are, and have been for a long time, carefully monitoring them, tracking them, constantly innovating and refining on the marketing side, these things that I mentioned, whether TV, you know, over the top, linear, nonlinear, digital marketing with its 500 heads, you know, like I'm talking about species of digital marketing, it's such a big word, right? I have to be constantly and tirelessly refined and risk taken and stuff tried and stuff failed and all rolled it and it all rolls up into that CLV to CAC ratio that you can hope you can keep moving and then couple that with innovation so that people can come back and buy more. And so thankfully, look, we chose a category with a high ticket and that drives the lion's share. That first purchase drives the lion's share of that CLV to CAC relationship. But our long-term point of view now is not only to find other ways that we can do more of that, maybe even in other categories and adjacencies. [47:32] But also give like StealthTack, give people a reason to come back and add on. And then by the way, when they do come back, then they face the consequence of, well, what do I do with some of these things that I need to, let's say, I get StealthTack and I got to swap out two of my sides. Well, okay, the obvious answer is I don't want to throw those in the trash. We don't want them throwing them in the trash and they may not need another couch in another room. So it's leading us to services, trade in, trade up, recycle, you know, all kinds of things that will again, give us more reasons to reach out and touch that customer. And so I think that if you relentlessly pursue. [48:13] A good concept with good intentions being driven by good philosophy and purpose like I've described, it's been my experience that the universe kind of unfolds for you, but it doesn't do it overnight. And you can't just have a, at least in my experience, you can't just have a master plan and be like, we're gonna do this and then that and that. You have to iterate to it. You have to observe, you have to live some, like when we launched Stealth Tech, we just, you know, it's easy now to look back in hindsight and be like, well, of course people are gonna want to or trade in their sides or do whatever. But some of those things aren't always so apparent. And you need to plunge yourself into the pool, see what comes of it, and then react to that. And some of those reactions can take years to unfold. Like some of these services that I just described and whatnot, they'll take us years to manifest. [48:59] But the nice thing is, the core business can generate profits that will carry us to that and we'll invest some of those profits in that innovation that I'm describing. But it's like, it's just relentless, man. It's tiring. It's like you have to have the stomach to go the distance. And that's where the time horizon, look, I'm a big advocate of it. Culturally, you know, like when my whole organization knows, like the theme of our manager fest a month ago, this is where we all get together once a year, was 25 and 25 more. And I'm not kidding. Like my personal point of view, if I'm allowed to be here as a public company CEO, if I do good enough to stay in the seat, which is inherent, and that's why I love the structure. It forces you to be awesome, you know? [49:45] If I can do that, but the fact that my organization knows that I'm in for another 25, you know how grounding that is and stabilizing that is, as opposed to, man, when's Sean's gonna sell his stock and bail and go start his next company? That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? That's how I become a bazillionaire, isn't it? I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in building something. And I think that that, I don't know, desire is actually kind of rare these days. Long-Term Vision vs Quick Profit [50:14] I think everyone just wants to be a bazillionaire as fast as they can. Jason: [50:17] Oh, for sure. Yeah. Everybody's assuming you're going to cash out and invest in your first rocket. Shawn : [50:24] Yeah, whatever. And I think it's sad. Look, I'd love to make a ton of money, whatever. That's all great. But whatever happened to the ambition of let's build something awesome, no matter how long it takes. And that's where I'm at. Jason: [50:41] Yeah. Well, Sean, it's been an amazing run so far. This is going to be a great spot to leave it because we have used up our allotted time, but I know listeners are going to appreciate you saving them the first 25 years, and we're going to be super excited to watch what happens in the next 25. Shawn : [50:57] Thank you. Thank you. Scot: [50:59] We really appreciate it, Sean. I know you're in Hong Kong, you're in the middle of your day there, and we appreciate you coming on the show. If folks want to check out your podcast, where would you point them to? Shawn : [51:09] Yeah, wherever you love listening to podcasts, Let Me Save You 25 Years is the name. LetMeSaveYou25Years.com. You can find me on social media, Sean of Lovesack. I'm all over that and love to be connected, slide into my DMs. I mean, I love talking to customers, friends, peers, being very accessible and looking forward to building the movement. Of course, Lovesack.com. We're easy to find. Scot: [51:33] Trey Lockerbie 41 Yep. And the book's coming out in January and I assume it's going to be in all the usual places. Shawn : [51:37] Sean O'Toole 41 All the usual places. Yeah. Let Awesome. Jason: [51:45] Thanks again and until next time, happy commercing!  

Learn the business economics - the metrics that matter - for your business. Matt Reynolds dives into macroeconomics and microeconomic or unit statistics, healthy rates, and how to calculate these statistics. You don't know the health of your business if you don't know these metrics. Business Economics: Know the Health of Your Business You cannot go off how you feel about your business to know if your business is doing well. The reality is real, and if you fail to know the economic realities of your business, the economic realities will confront you when abject failure slaps you in the face. It's okay, though. Even if the metrics are bad or trending in the wrong direction, have a true, clear picture helps you identify problems and where you need to put your energy and effort to turn things around. If your waist goes up month after month, you're getting unhealthier, whether you're measuring it or not. These metrics give you an objective measuring standard to assess your business' health. Business Economics: Metrics that Matter for Your Business Matt goes through each metric one-by-one. First, though, here are the metrics, organized into macroeconomic or business-level and microeconomic or unit-level. Macroeconomic (business-level) top line revenue cost of goods gross margin or gross profit operating expenses net profit Microeconomic (unit-level) churn rate (or retention rate) number of subscribers average ticket price lifetime value of client (LTV) per gross revenue per gross margin/profit customer acquisition cost (CAC) CAC:LTV ratio (as gross margin) monthly recurring revenue (MRR) Business Economics: Macroeconomic Metrics that Matter The first and easiest metric to calculate is top line revenue. This is the money that is coming in over a period of time, typically calculated monthly (and eventually quarterly and annually - though quarterly and annual numbers matter more for larger businesses). Whether you're looking at Stripe, ACH, the business bank account, this is simply calculating all the incoming money in a month. The cost of goods is the cost to produce the good itself. So, for producing a product, this is the cost of materials you purchase that go into the item and costs such as shipping. For a service business such as Barbell Logic, this looks like the pay to the 1099 contractor coaches per client. You calculate gross margin or gross profit by subtracting the cost of goods from top line revenue. Next, you need to identify operating expenses. These are things that are required for the business but not directly related to producing the individual service or good. This might be payroll for full-time employees, printer ink, paying for a new computer, squat racks, or taking a client to lunch. The last critical business-level metric to determine is your net profit. You calculate this by subtracting your operating expenses from your gross profit. This is truly how much money the business is making each month. If you're a one-man team, then you get paid from this. If you lose money, you don't get paid. As the owner or CEO, though, while you get paid last you also get fired last. Business Economics: Microeconomic Metrics that Matter Calculate your churn rate. This is the percentage of clients you lose each month. The retention rate is the opposite (100% - churn rate). Next note your number of subscribers. Matt says subscribers, because a customer who makes a one-time purchase (a one-time coaching session or purchases one widget) does not lead you to know what your recurring revenue is. You don't have recurring revenue in this situation. Next know your average ticket price. What are your subscribers paying each month on average. The number of subscribers multiplied by average ticked price equals your monthly recurring revenue (MRR). An important statistic to calculate is your lifetime value of client (LTV - especially at gross margin). The first thing you need to do is calculate the average customer lifespan. Divide 100 by the churn rate. So, for example, if you have 10% churn your average customer lifespan is 10 months. Below are more business economics metrics. MRR x average customer lifespan = LTV (at gross revenue) LTV (at gross revenue) x gross margin = LTV (at gross revenue) Calculate your customer acquisition cost (CAC) by adding together all efforts to acquire customers. This includes marketing, sales, ads, and content you produce to market (e.g. you create a weekly newsletter, podcast, or maintain a YouTube channel). The CAC:LTV ratio is important. 1:2 ratio is considered unhealthy or unsustainable. 1:3 is considered healthy. If your ratio  is significantly less than 1:3 (e.g. 1:28) you should likely spend more money to acquire customers. These are the metrics that matter to your business. These are your business economics. Get Matched with a Professional Strength Coach today for FREE! No contract with us, just commitment to yourself: Start experiencing strength now: https://store.barbell-logic.com/match/ Connect with the hosts Matt on Instagram Niki on Instagram Andrew on Instagram Connect with the show Barbell Logic on Instagram Podcast Webpage Barbell Logic on Facebook Or email podcast@barbell-logic.com

On the podcast: Spinning off a new product from secondary product market fit, the journey of getting into YC, and the give and take of raising venture capital.Top Takeaways

מה המשמעות של יעילות במרקטינג? איך אפשר למדוד אותה? ומה הדרך לעשות את זה בסטארטאפים בשלבים שונים? הרבה דובר בשנה האחרונה על השינויים בשוק, שהביאו איתם גם את השינוי בגישה מצמיחה בכל מחיר, לרצון לראות רווחיות מהירה יותר. למשוואה הזו נכנס מדד נוסף, יעילות. באזורים מסוימים במאנדיי, כמו למשל במרקטינג, יעילות הייתה מדד שניטרנו ופעלנו לפיו עוד מתחילת הדרך, עובדה שאפשרה לנו להמשיך להוציא כסף על מרקטינג גם בתקופה שבה הרבה חברות אחרות נאלצו להוריד הוצאות, עקב המצב בשוק. באזורים אחרים אנחנו עוד לומדים לעשות את זה, ומנסים למצוא את המטריקות שיעזרו לנו לזהות בצורה הטובה ביותר את ההשפעה שיש לכל דולר שאנחנו מוציאים.   השבוע, בפרק השני בסדרה, אנחנו צוללים לדרך בה הבאנו יעילות למחלקת המרקטינג, ובאופן ספציפי - איך אנחנו מוודאים שכל דולר שאנחנו משקיעים במרקטינג מבצע את האימפקט שרצינו שהוא יעשה. בפרק, דריה ורטהיים מדברת עם תומר קרמרמן, Head of analytics to the CEO ועם נעמי רוזנוולד, Operations & Analytics Group Lead, על הפרקטיקות שמאפשרות לנו להישאר יעילים, המשמעות של היחס בין CAC ל-LTV, ואיך אנחנו יודעים תוך פחות משבועיים האם קמפיין שהעלינו הוא טוב.  ---  פרקים נוספים בנושא:  83: יסודות - SaaS Metrics 03: הכל על CAC - עלות רכישת לקוח 85: יסודות - SaaS Metrics 04: מה זה LTV ולמה זה חשוב? --- מוזמנים להצטרף אל קבוצת הפייסבוק שלנו ולהמשיך את השיח - www.facebook.com/groups/startupforstartup/ ניתן למצוא את כל הפרקים ותכנים נוספים באתר שלנו -   https://www.startupforstartup.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, we meet Jamie Roller, Associate Director of Growth Channels at Dr. SquatchDr. Squatch is a men's natural personal care brand, best known for its soaps and deodorants. In this episode, Jamie shares a deep dive in how Dr. Squatch, a $100M+ soap brand is approaching and managing the Amazon marketplace channel.  Other topics covered in this episodeTransitioning from DTC to OmnichannelThe growing role of AmazonOffensive and defensive Amazon strategiesMarketplace pricingKey TakeawaysPaid Youtube and Tiktok ads to DTC drive brand search volume on AmazonRetail and Amazon are difficult to measure Brands should consider PPC ads on Amazon to define their search positionsMake sure to test and learn to figure out what works for your brandInvestments in Amazon merchandising drive growth in customer LTVIn addition to CAC / LTV ratio look at the payback periodPlease let us know your thoughts about the episode!Where to find Jamie Roller:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamieroller/​Website: https://drsquatch.com/Where to find Kait Stephens:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kait-margraf-stephens/Website: www.brij.it SUBSCRIBE TO THE OMNICHANNEL MARKETERwww.theomnichannelmarketer.com

Gaurav Singh Kushwaha, Founder & CEO Bluestone with Amit Somani, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.Listen to the podcast to learn about03:00 - When Starting Up: Defensibility & Differentiation11:00 - Online is Much More Than a Sales Channel20:00 - First Click, Last Click: Building the Right Attribution Models30:00 - Don't Let Your Biases Define Your Metrics35:45 - CAC/LTV Fallacy: VCs & EntrepreneursClick here to read the full transcriptWant to learn about about building a global SaaS business from India? Listen to this episode with Khadim Batti, Co-Founder & CEO Whatfix where we talk about Finding PMF & The Right Customer Segment, Pricing & Product For Enterprise, Building Sales Cycle & Sales Force in US, Four Pillars of Category Awareness and a lot more. Enjoyed the podcast? Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe wherever you are listening to this.Follow Prime Venture Partners:Twitter: https://twitter.com/Primevp_inLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primevp/ This podcast is for you. Do let us know what you like about the podcast, what you don't like, the guests you'd like to have on the podcast and the topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes. Please share your feedback here: https://primevp.in/podcastfeedback

On the podcast I talk with Sylvain about the top subscription app insights you should be thinking about, how important cohorting is when looking at growth metrics, and why good advice can turn bad if you apply it at the wrong stage.Top Takeaways

Mike Duboe is a Partner @ Greylock where he sits on the board of Builder, Inventa, Novi, Pepper, Postscript. Prior to entering the world of venture, Mike was the first in-house growth hire at Stitch Fix, where he built and led the Growth organization helping take the company through to their IPO. Before Stitchfix, Mike was the first growth hire at Tilt, where he built and oversaw multiple teams, including analytics, marketing, community, and growth product. He also served on YC's growth advisory council and was a growth lecturer at Reforge. In Today's Episode with Mike Duboe We Discuss: 1.) Entry into the World of Growth: How Mike made his way from consulting at Bain to leading the growth team for Stitchfix? What did Mike believe about growth 5 years ago that he no longer believes? What does Mike know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of growth? 2.) When and Who To Hire: How does Mike define the term "growth team"? What is their core role and responsibility? Should the first growth hire be a senior growth lead or a more junior analytical lead? What data foundations should founders have in place prior to their growth hire joining? What are the most common ways founders fail to prepare for their first growth hires joining? When does Mike believe is the right and crucial time for growth hires to be made? Should these growth hires join existing teams or be put in standalone "growth teams"? 3.) The Hiring Process: How to Detect and Win the Best: How should founders structure the interview process for their first growth hires? What are the best questions to ask to reveal the quality of a potential growth hire? What are the right case studies and tests to do to assertain their quality? What are the different levels of comp package for different growth execs? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make in the hiring process? 4.) Mastering Paid Marketing: Lessons from Stitchfix: Why is CAC/LTV a BS metric? What should be used instead? When is the right time to start really engaging with paid marketing? How should marketing and growth teams determine budget on a per channel basis? How much is the right mix between paid vs organic? What are Mike's biggest lessons from making paid work so well at Stitchfix? What are the single biggest mistakes Mike sees founders make today with paid marketing?  

Durante este jueves de Itnig, contestamos a algunas de vuestras preguntas en vivo: ¿Qué skills debo adquirir para trabajar con ustedes? ¿Qué ocurriría si el día de mañana una macro-empresa de fuera se pone a hacer lo mismo que vosotros? ¿Cómo veis el tener un equipazo pero no una idea? ¿Qué le dirías a tu socio si no quiere recibir inversión por miedo a perder control? ¿Cómo prever o adelantarse a la competencia fuerte para que no te barran del mapa? ¿Cuánto varía el CAC/LTV y paybacks a medida que se fuerza el crecimiento? ¿Cuándo es necesario contratar un D&O insurance? ¿A partir de qué ronda es imprescindible? ¿Cuando erais 100 en el equipo, qué proporción eran developers y qué proporción mkt y ventas y success? Síguenos en Twitter: • Bernat Farrero: @bernatfarrero • Jordi Romero: @jordiromero • César Migueláñez: @heycesr EVENTOS Pitch to Investors (Todos los jueves 19h) - https://itnig.net/events/ Itnig Talks - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs... SOBRE ITNIG Twitter - https://twitter.com/itnig LinkedIn - https://es.linkedin.com/company/itnig Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/itnig/ Newsletter - https://itnig.net/newsletter/ Web - https://itnig.net/ ESCUCHA NUESTRO PODCAST EN Spotify: http://bit.ly/itnigspotify ️ Apple Podcast: http://bit.ly/itnigapple

First, we hear from Kelly Schricker (LAUNCH) who runs us through how to write effective investor updates. After that, we have a presentation from Rick Turoczy (Microsoft for Startups) walking through important startup metrics like CAC, LTV, and Churn. Learn more at http://aka.ms/founderuniversity ======== How To Write Investor Updates - Kelly Schricker 1:37 Benefits of writing investor updates 3:44 Invest in Dots Not Lines (Mark Suster blog post: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/invest-in-lines-not-dots-611f36491d73) 4:47 Writing an investor update: what to include, how to format it ======== Startup Metrics - CAC, LTV, Churn 19:22 What is CAC? 20:34 What is LTV? 22:48 What is Churn? Learn more at http://aka.ms/founderuniversity

One of the most important metrics to understand for your start-up is the Client Acquisition Cost (CAC) to Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) ratio. The CAC to LTV ratio is the formula that will tell you exactly how much you can/ should be spending to on marketing to bring in new business. If your ratio is low, it could mean that you could be wasting money in the long term.   Let's start by understanding this.   COHORT WAITLIST: https://www.ugliventures.com/waitlist/   UGLIVENTURES WEBSITE: https://www.ugliventures.com/ UGLIVENTURES INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/ugliventures/

Startup Boards -- Investment Thesis Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. In startup investing, you should have an investment thesis, which is what you invest in and why it will be successful. Here's how you build your investment thesis if you haven't done so already: Step one Look at 50 deals and write down what you like and don't about each one. This is not as hard as it sounds, given how many deals there are. Step two  Follow up one to three months later to see how it is working out. This will inform your investment thesis as you will see some deals progressing forward, some stall out, and others pivoting to something else. Step three Write out your investment thesis, which includes: Your observation about a macro trend in an area you care about Position of the company in the trend Characterization of the company that gives it a competitive advantage Conditions for investing based on price, revenue, and other factors Example investment theses include: Healthcare is moving to the home Companies providing technology-enabled services will succeed Companies with recurring revenue and a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:8 are preferred Companies with revenue above $500K and a pre-money valuation below $5M are preferred.  It's important to write out your investment thesis as you'll return to it often. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let's go startup something today. ___________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out    For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group    Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

This week we're bringing you the final episode in our three-part series on the future of ag insurance.Our journey started with learning the ins and outs of how the sector currently operates (check out the ag insurance 101 episode here) and then talking to key players about new products and technologies entering the industry (check out Damon Johnson on parametric insurance here).Today, Sarah is joined by Matthew Pryor to talk through their learnings in a live attempt to develop an investment thesis for ag insurance. They cover:Technologies and business models shifting the CAC/LTV equation in ag insuranceHow insurance is likely to change as agriculture faces more and more extreme weather eventsWhat entrepreneurs disrupting ag insurance need to be excellent atPossible areas for venture investment in ag insurance, from new products to enabling infrastructure and digitally-native business modelsWe hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain of how we think and work, but if you didn't, or you think we missed or got something wrong, we'd love to hear from you! Shout out at @agtechsowhat or via our website.

What's up everyone! Today we have a super special guest on the show, this interview is more than 12 months in the making – You probably already follow him on Twitter – I've personally learned a bunch from him and know you're going to get a lot of value from our conversation today. Today we're joined by Corey Haines. He's a full time creator and the former head of Growth at Baremetrics.  These days he keeps busy with many different things.  He runs a weekly newsletter,  And a growing marketing community,  He also manages multiple podcasts,  he wrote a few SaaS marketing courses,  he built-sold-and bought back a marketing jobboard  and he's a startup marketing consultant/advisor.  Most importantly, Corey's all-round great dude with a world class beard.Corey, we're grateful to have you on the show – thanks for taking the time.September 2020, you quit your job at Baremetrics to become a full time creator. You wrote about this and described it like you strapped on a spacesuit, launched into space and your plan is to figure out where you want to go from there.  How has the journey been 1.5 years later? Do you know where you're going yet?Yeah. Oh, man. The last year has been a whirlwind. I guess it's almost been like a year and a half now since I left. The North Star guiding goal has been to get into SaaS myself, start a SaaS company, maybe even a couple of products, and just have a small portfolio of bets and multiple things going on at once and see where they all kind of take me. I knew that doing that with a full time job is pretty hard, especially when I didn't want to step on your toes at Bearmetrics since we sold other SaaS startups. So I didn't want to build something that ended up competing with one of our customers. So I just kind of knew, like, that wasn't really an option for me. I didn't want to get another job and then start working on those side projects as well. But also, I wasn't really even close to building anything quite yet anyways. But I just wanted to kind of pull the trigger and jump and strap onto the rocketship, get into space. And then I could figure out where I was going from there. And on a personal level, very, very challenging. And like a lot of learning on hey, here's how to manage cash flow for all the different kinds of feasts and family cycles of freelancing and consulting. And just like knowing where to kind of find money and all the different revenue streams that you have when you're on your own, you don't have a paycheck really coming through the door. From a time management perspective, I've really learned how to be super ruthless with my time. I would say for the first four or five months I imagined once I left, I was like, I'm going to be free. I have so much time, I'm just going to get so much done. All these things are on my list. And then I didn't get anything done for like four months. I was like, what is happening? And because I had so many different meetings, so many admin things. I was busy doing emails, I was trying to chip away at small things here and there, but I was never really moving the ball forward in any one direction. And so I learned to be really ruthless. Now I do most of my meetings, like 95% of my meetings on Wednesdays. The rest of the week is completely wide open and I set what I want to get done, and I get those things done. And sometimes I work late, sometimes I work early. But you have to be really ruthless. It's been a great learning experience because really through the startups that I've worked for, consulting, advising, freelancing. Now I'm basically the marketing lead for Savvy Cal as well. So that's kind of helped bring back some stability in my life. And I see them all as just kind of practice rounds and getting in the reps and sets for learning how to build and grow a SaaS startup for when I want to do that for myself and for my own, especially the last year and a half, it's been like an invaluable learning lesson. Bootstrapping SaaS is really hard. You have to put yourself in the right position. Honestly, I wouldn't say that going the VC route is easier because I think raising money is really, really hard and it's a grind. And once you're on that track, there's a lot of expectations and it's a whole different game. But in the early days, it's easier because you have money, you pay yourself a paycheck. You hire the people to work with you. Bootstrapping is not easy. And so I would count this last year and a half as a part of my bootstrapping journey for building SaaS because it's all the work you have to do in order to be able to be financially stable, to put your time on something else completely without your whole world kind of exploding and going broke or, like, maxing out your credit cards. So I'm doing the best that I can, but I think I'm doing a pretty okay job so far. Multiple eggs in different basketsOne thing I want to ask about – you kind of mention the various different projects you're working on, like the idea of having multiple eggs in different baskets. What is the appeal of that for your personality? And how do you manage that as you're pushing these projects forward? I think that it's not necessarily, like, shiny object syndrome. I think that's what a lot of people conflate with having a lot of projects. You start one thing and then jump to the next one before you really kind of see the potential of it. I'm not really like that. It's more that I'm just mega impatient, and I just want to see all these things exist, and I want to do them and I'll do them all at once. My life is kind of, like, chaos sometimes. That's also why I leave four days out of the week completely wide open to get a lot of work-work done. I just want to see those things exist. I just want to work on them. I'm kind of a yes person and where I want to have my cake and eat it too. I just don't really like compromising and leaving something for later. So that's more the thought and the spirit behind multiple things. It's not really diversifying my income and multiple revenue streams and millionaires have seven sources of income. It's more just like, I want to work on all those things. I think they're fun. I want to see them exist, and I don't want to do them sequentially. I want to do them currently. What would it take to get you back in-houseSo, in-house, freelance, consultant, entrepreneur… Now you're getting a taste of all of them at the same time. Maybe someone in the audience right now is kind of thinking to themselves, I want to hire this Corey Haines guy that maybe this is not likely to happen… You possibly get a lot of offers to go back in-house. What would it take to get you back in-house? Or how would you design your ideal in-house role? Or scrap the question completely and tell me why the entrepreneur journey is the only way to go. Okay, well, I'll give you a Humans of Martech exclusive, because I haven't talked about this really anywhere else. So for last year, I've been working with someone who we were going to build SaaS together, and it's sort of like that was like the main thing. I'm putting most of my eggs in this basket. Long term, I want to work with this person. Then it turned out, his other businesses became too successful to really be able to step away from it even part time. So basically it came to a point where like, hey, we're good friends. We would love to do this, but it's just like not going to happen. It's just not realistic for this stage of our lives. That's a huge bummer because I was kind of just like, all right, well, do I go and find, like, a new technical co-founder or how do I even start to go about that? Is the last year just like a huge false start? Basically, do I go and get a job? Do I go try to do more freelancing or start an agency or something? I thought about this question fairly recently. I thought about it very seriously – going back in-house, to be honest. The first most appealing option would be to go full time with Savvy Cal with some sort of profit sharing or equity agreement on top of just a paycheck. Still, very early on, I had a feeling maybe I could make that work, but just not immediately. And so I was kind of like, well, I can't really think about that right now. And also I'm not going to freak out. I'm just going to let it sit there for a minute. If I really wanted to go work somewhere else, I think that it would be a very short list of companies. A company about to IPO or a unicorn, like a Stripe, or just a really impressive, interesting company that I knew was just going to be a moonshot and explode. And I'm still waiting for the day that Stripe IPOs so I can dump my whole life savings in there because it's just a massive success that they're holding out on all of us investors. Or I would want to jump in really early stage as basically a co-founder but first marketing hire at a really early startup that I think would be the next Stripe, essentially. I think that if I went back full time, it wouldn't be in a big corporate job. It wouldn't be like in a Series A or Series B, because you kind of, like, missed a lot of the work. And there's still the hardest part ahead of you. So I kind of want to jump in really early, get a good deal on equity and compensation, just be in it for the long haul, like the next ten years, and it's going to devote myself to this or like really late and have something that I knew was just like a Grand Slam. The work itself, honestly, doesn't matter a lot to me. I love product marketing, I love demand gen, I love copywriting, I love all the lifecycle stuff. Actually. I don't love Ops. Sorry, but I'm not an Ops person. So the role and responsibility and I don't need a team. Also, I could have a team. It's more just about what's the company, what's the stage or basically the opportunity of where the company's at. And would there be enough autonomy for me to do the things that would be enjoyable within my circle of competence? I didn't want to start an agency, and didn't really want to take on more clients. That would kind of feel like going backwards a little bit. So long story short, I found other sort of technical co-founders who are in this dating phase right now where it's kind of like we're building small things and we're going to see how we work together, not put a whole lot of stake into it or like, this is going to be the thing that we work on for the next five years. But I was like, hey, let's ship something and have some fun along the process. So that's where I'm at today and not for hire. Managing the stress of building your own thingThat's something that I've thought a lot about myself. I'm entrepreneurial too, one day I see myself starting something, but something I debate a lot is this idea of stress, the stress of being the person or one of the two people running things versus being a co-pilot, like being someone who is going along the rocket ship like you kind of mentioned with Stripe. How do you think about that? Is that something that sticks around? If I'm passionate enough about something that I'm building, the stress is going to be a positive stress. I don't know if you've heard this concept, but there's like good stress and bad stress. I think good stress is called eustress and then bad stress is distress. And for me, distress only comes when I feel like I'm doing a bad job of what I am doing. If I am doing a good job but isn't performing well, and I know that and that's sort of like not an acceptable outcome. So it's sort of like coming to something bad or if I just know that I'm letting myself down where my motivation is down, or like I'm not getting enough work done or don't have like, the energy levels that I have. In general, having high expectations, big goals, a lot of work in front of me, that's good stress and it's a lot of work, a lot to do. I look forward to it. I like it. I nerd out about SaaS marketing, and I'm generally not too worried about like, can I do this or will this work out? It seems to all make sense. As long as I do the best that I can. I'll just let the pieces fall where they may and generally they fall pretty well and it works out. That was true with SavvyCal. That was fairly true with Baremetrics. That was really true with Cordial. It's been true across all the other startups that I have worked with, and the advice that I give them, I can be a little bit more prescriptive now. I'm not too scared about being very particular and specific about the things I tell them to do. But yeah, stress isn't too bad for me personally. I think that the problems I might have that would be distressful later on is if a couple of these kinds of SaaS projects end up working out. And now I sort of have a good problem, which is that I have multiple things to work on at once. That won't necessarily be like a new thing for me because I've always been juggling a whole bunch of stuff. But I think I would have to figure out, how do I not let those things become a distress because I feel like I'm letting someone down or because I'm not giving the time and energy that is needed for this thing to really see the potential of it. So that's how I think about it. In-house skills to prepare you for full time creatorSomebody else sitting on the other side of this journey, thinking, I want to strap on a space suit. What skills do you think people should be focusing on in their in-house career? You're kind of earning your stripes, so to speak. What skills would you recommend people focus on to prepare themselves for a journey that you're taking? I think getting used to and knowing how to think through owning a project or even just a whole kind of area of responsibility. Like, all right, I'm tackling the blog, and I'm going to manage everything between writing or hiring writers or editing, publishing, promoting content. Just getting used to owning an area, whether that's content marketing or email marketing or demand gen, events, whatever, it's just having one lane area. I think what can happen early on is that you specialize and you're sort of like a contributor to an area of responsibility or some sort of channel. And that kind of leaves you off the hook because you're like, well, as long as I'm doing what's needed of me for this project, even if it doesn't work out, then, it's not in my hands, basically. And that's not really like a great thing to get used to. Getting ready for a creator journey, what you want to get used to is: all right, this is mine. I'm going to tackle this. I'm going to think through this end to end. I want to make sure that this is successful. To give you, like a little kind of snippet of this. Early on, I started as an intern at Cordial, and they started throwing stuff at me like, hey, we need to sponsor some events, do some research, figure out which events to sponsor, and then we have 500k to spend in the next couple of months. I was like, Holy, you're giving an intern this responsibility?! But they were just, like, kind of generous enough to be like, all right, here you go. Have at it. And I took it and ran with it. To be honest, I hate events, but I was like, this is my one chance to show some ownership and some responsibility at this, so I'm not going to squander it. So, yeah, I found the conferences. I had no idea what I was doing. I talked to people and got advice and got a lot of feedback along the way. But we scheduled them. We spent the money. We planned and coordinated all the travel schedules and cocktail parties and the booths and who's going to go where and how do we get salespeople to actually get meetings and make the most of these events? But I could have just been like, hey, I can't do that. Or, like, I need, you know, I'm going to basically, like, push this off to someone else, and, like, they're going to help me do it, but it's still not really going to be my responsibility. So just learning how to take on responsibility and really have that ownership be a part of what you do. It's a totally different experience, being a part of something that happens in marketing versus, I am the driver of this thing that is happening, and it forces you to be really objective and to really be like a truth seeker, to be like, Maybe this doesn't work out. Or maybe I was wrong about the way that this thing worked. I remember actually early on after conferences, we were like, all right, we need to fix our website. I came up with, like, the worst website copy of all time. Just, like, slapped a whole bunch of chatbots on there. That's when Drift was really hot. I had no idea what I was doing. Nothing worked. Nothing happened. I was like, oh, yeah… I was really wrong about that. It didn't really matter at the end of the day, because it was a couple of months that was kind of lost in progress but didn't hurt sales. It's just that nothing good happened out of that, right? But after that, too, I was kind of riding the high of all these events, and I was like, yeah, I need to really be honest with myself about this stuff. Maybe. I don't know everything. I need to really be objective about how this thing works, or is this right for us? And I just want to do things my way or what the ideas I have are. But what is the most promising idea to actually work and drive results for the company? Let's do that thing. And I'm willing to be wrong or adjust course or fix things along the way or change it completely, because I just, at the end of the day, want the best outcome for whatever it is that this thing is that I'm responsible for. On researching how to solve attributionThe beauty of startups getting to wear all those hats and drive big projects, sometimes with big budgets. I remember a couple of years ago, around the time that you left Baremetrics, you spent a lot of time chatting with a bunch of different folks, wearing a bunch of those different hats and different roles and stuff like that. You reached out to Close, you and I chatted about attribution. What were some of the things that stood out in the groups that you chatted with? Was that part of: I'm thinking of maybe one day building a SaaS and I'm doing some research here. Maybe talk about what's the hardest role to hire for in marketing and why it's operations.Well, actually, when I talked with you, I was really hot on this idea of marketing attribution and building software to solve that. I'm kind of convinced that at this point because of the direction with data and Privacy laws and a lot of deprecation of technology around cookies and tracking and browser technology, that it's sort of a lost cause. We might be able to have this conversation maybe like five years from now once the pendulum swings back in the other direction away from a lot of Privacy and data stuff. But right now it's basically impossible to build an underlying technology that would solve market attribution. It's just a total crapshoot. Sure, you can piece things together, but really, if you want to solve it, solve it. It's a little bit easier for ecommerce and for products and stuff. But for SaaS, if you want to solve it, it's impossible. So after about 50 conversations, one of which was with you, we realized that, yes, this is actually a pretty impossible task. But marketing attribution by far was the biggest and most painful problem across every marketing organization that I talked to and probably still is, because at the end of the day, that's literally what matters: what is working in marketing. If you can't prove that if you don't know it, you're misplacing dollars, you are optimizing for the wrong metrics, you are going after the wrong channels. You're not using your budget in a way that is profitable to build and grow the company. So that is the thing that's the crux of the whole thing working is how do we know that if we deploy this dollar, it will result in $2 in the error for the business? A lot of the other really painful problems were around, I would say, around operations and just like kind of meshing with sales, a lot of the kind of marketing automation stuff around personalization and how do we connect all the dots so that people get the right experience at the right time for the right lifecycle, et cetera, et cetera. I would say just like data in general is really difficult to do, like Segment and if you build your own data warehouse and whatnot kind of solve that. But it's still like a massive headache to manage, make any tweak or change. And similarly, those operations roles are really difficult to hire for because who knows how to do that. It's just you're looking for a unicorn, like you're looking for an engineer who likes marketing and they like getting the leads with data and automations and all this stuff. It's really hard. The hardest role to hire for in marketing is the head of marketingHonestly, though, I was thinking about it, and I think that the hardest role in marketing to hire for – just in general – and maybe I'm thinking about this wrong or interpreting the question wrong, but I think that the hardest person to get right to hire for is basically like a head of marketing. Because there are so many bad people out there who look qualified on paper but just aren't and just are really bad. To be honest, during my time at Cordial, I think that within about two years we went through five different marketing leaders and all of them were crap. Sorry, but they were all complete trash. Had no idea what they were doing. No managerial skills, no leadership skills, no budgeting skills. Couldn't even tell you what HubSpot did. I was like, how are you in this place? How did you get hired? There are a lot of roles that are really hard to find people for, like Ops. I think Demand Gen is a pretty specialized skill set in SaaS, especially when you want to find a SaaS marketer. For Demand Gen, content marketing is getting easier and easier. That's probably one of the easier roles to hire for. But to get a marketing leader right is such a critical position in the company. And normally there's a reason why it has the highest attrition and the highest turnover is because it's hard to find the right person. So that's my answer. What makes up the DNA of a great marketing leaderFinal answer for hardest position, great answer. I want to dive a little deeper on that. Like, what do you think makes up the DNA of a great marketing leader at a SaaS company? I just don't think that you can be a marketing leader and not be able to get your hands dirty and execute and do the work yourself. Maybe at a really late stage when you're more like CMO or VP of Marketing level, truly, and you have 20 to 50 people on your team, it's a lot more about leadership and managerial skills and actually more like budgeting kind of capital allocation. How do we get all people working in the right direction working on the right things. But I would say for a director of marketing, head of marketing, early stage VP of marketing, you just have to be able to do the work. You have to be really good at it. I think that's why Dave Gerhardt was such a massive success and like unicorn when he was at Drift. He was amazing at doing the work. He was an incredible marketer at doing the work. And early on you just need people who can get their hands dirty and get down to business and crank out some landing pages, crank out some email campaigns like really think through the ads and be strategic about do you know your market really well where you can sponsor the right podcasts and you can show up in the right communities and you can make the right connections for your sales team and your marketing team to the right events, et cetera. It's not really about the people skills and the leadership and just managing a team, making sure that everyone shows up to your daily stand up. No, it's about doing the work. I think also having the respect of other people under you, if you can do the work, makes them a lot more productive, a lot more motivated, and they will get a lot more done knowing that they have a leader who can actually help them with their work rather than someone who's just like, yeah, let me know how I can support you. And then in your next one on one next week, nothing's changed, right? You're still alone doing the work yourself, maybe mediocrely or just kind of stuck and blocked because they're not really doing anything. They're just sitting on their hands going through meeting to meeting to meeting, reporting to leadership. I think for earlier stage companies, maybe like seed through Series Bish, it's really about being able to do the work and managing the people. You can't be a crap leader, of course. I think it's kind of like we don't need to say that. Right. But you have to also be able to do the work well. From owning projects to leading teamsJust to tie this back to something you said earlier, like the advice around owning a project, there's a straight line from owning projects to being a team lead. You own projects. You can own all of marketing eventually, it's a transferable skill set. Yeah. You can't not know what you're doing in any one area. That's a huge blind spot. And that area will absolutely hurt because either that person won't know really what they're doing and they'll do a subpar job and that basically reflects badly on you or it's just not going to get done at all because you're like, I don't know, this whole event's thing, we're not going to touch that. I'm not that type of marketer. No, dude, you have to do everything. You have to do whatever the business needs. On writing a book on early stage marketingReally good advice for especially that early stage marketing role. Right. You actually tweeted about this a few times. One of my favorite tweets that you wrote was potentially one day writing a practical book on early stage marketing. For the folks that are listening to the podcast right now that are in an entry level role or mid level management that are one day hoping of leading an early stage marketing team or even mid stage marketing team. Did you ever get around to writing that book? And what would the rough chapters look like? Because there's so many things you can specialize in marketing, right? Like you say, you need to know how to do the work, but the T-shaped marketer is so vast and varied, how would you break it down? What are the most important parts of early stage marketing? My goal is to have it done by the end of 2022. This year, we'll see. Basically I'm working through a framework. I don't know if you guys know Rob Fitzpatrick. He's the author of The Mom Test, which is a great book, even for marketers, about how to talk to your customers because they're mostly lying to you very nicely. It's sort of white lies, but he has a whole framework around how to write useful books. And so I'm kind of going through his process, but I started with a table of contents, and the table contents is basically supposed to act as, like the skeleton of high level learning outcomes and topics to hit, and also what not to hit. So the frame of reference here is that it's for: how to grow a SaaS startup with limited time, budget and resources, basically, early stage companies. I'm not like a late stage scale up to a unicorn type of marketer, but if you're a founder, first time marketing hire, and you're kind of struggling to kickstart or accelerate growth, create some kind of scalable marketing channels, then this will help you basically create that plan and go and do the work and not have any sort of, like, area weakness or things that you can't do. I'm repackaging a lot of the course material, so it's not really a lot of writing for me. It's going to be a lot of transcribing and assembling stuff that I've already created from a lot of other courses and newsletters and podcasts and things I've done in the past. But the loose structure is kind of like we have table stakes: All marketing is derivative with the product Here's how you measure your product market fit, that way, you're not like throwing money into a leaky bucket and marketing something that isn't really ready for traction. How to pick a great market or expand to great markets. Common myths and mistakes that hold people back. Customer researchAnd then it really starts with customer research. I'm a big believer in this. You can let customers tell you how they want to be marketed to, and the customers basically set the strategy for the copywriting. Here's the thing that resonates. Here are all the areas where they hang out. Here are the most likely value propositions and offers to resonate with them. Here's how we go and find more people like this. So I first start with online sleuthing, where you do a lot of review mining and going through communities, being active there. Then you can kind of go through surveys. If you have an early access list or a small group of customers, we can ask them basically to find patterns and value propositions, what they care about and buying triggers, how they find and search for software like yours. And then you can go to video calls. We hop on a call like this and you really kind of dig deep and you're trying to really grab voice of the customer. Right. Like tangible words. These are the words that customers use. And you can copy paste them onto your landing page about how they describe their problems and what they're looking for, as well as influence mapping. So what are all the podcast you listen to and the Facebook groups that you show up in? Basically, who and what do you lean on to learn in your industry? Where do you go to learn about stuff related to your job, these digital watering holes of fuel. Right. Landing pages and positioningAnd then I think it really starts with once you have that kind of nailed down, you have to start with your landing page on your website. This is the same thing that I did with SavvyCal. That worked really well when I started with them. We were doing like $500 in MRR. Maybe. And of course we want to kind of get down to business and start scaling stuff up and do some marketing campaigns. But I just knew, like, there's still a lot of people who are signing up. They were like, how is this different from Calendly? And we would try to describe it still wouldn't really make sense. The conversion rate was really low. Like, Derek had sent out a bunch of blasts to his email list and it still wasn't really converting very well. So I just knew, if we do anything else, it's still not going to land very well. We need to nail the landing page. And really what that means is we need to nail our positioning. We need to nail the messaging. We need to have a clear, concise, compelling reason for someone to click that button and say, get started with SavvyCal and connect my calendar. So that's why I tell people now. It's like, okay, go to customer insurance. Then you start with your landing page and your positioning. You can use what I call the only test to basically create a compelling positioning statement where you are kind of the obvious choice. This is very derivative of April Dunford. It's obviously awesome if you can't tell. So we use a lot from there. But you need to be an obvious choice for someone, right? Not just marginally better or not just different, but you need to be an obvious choice for a subset of customers. Pricing and activation modelsOnce you have that down, I think the temptation is to just immediately jump straight to channels. But your pricing and activation models really matter because, again, you got someone to click the button and get started. And now what a lot of people do is they'll put them through a form where it's ‘contact us' or it's ‘start your trial', but it's ‘credit card required' or there's just some sort of exorbitant price that they just pull out of thin air. That doesn't make any sense. And people are like, whatever, screw it. I'll look at this later. Right. So you want to map pricing to value, not to cost or competitors. But you also want to make sure that you're picking pricing that you can learn from and that's oriented around the primary value metric that's linear with the value that people get and the outcomes that your software helps them achieve in their lives. And also that you're onboarding them in a very fluid, nice way so you're not turning them off immediately. Then the real marketing startsAnd then we can start getting to the marketing, the real marketing, the scalable stuff. Here I have everything on how to launch and announce and kind of use special offers to create momentum. A couple of examples, with SavvyCal, we did a landing page, we planned for a Product Hunt launch before Product Hunt. We ran a little campaign to reserve your username because there's some scarcity on the little slug. So SavvyCall.com/corey and whatever the meeting ID is. And so I want Corey. I don't want Coryhanes3691. I want it to be Corey. And we knew that a lot of other people would, too. So we sent that out to the list. We said, hey, this is our customers only sign up today. We're about to launch on product hunt and we know there's going to be a huge wave of people coming. So become a customer, save your own slug. That created a lot of momentum and early kind of scarcity. We did another thing around a Calendly buyout where we offered to buy the end of your subscription since it was around the end of the year. And we know that you just re upped for your annual subscription calendar, probably, but we'll buy it out. We'll basically credit the same amount to your SavvyCall account. You won't lose a dollar if you switch. Right now, we'll get this done for you. That created a whole bunch of ways. So things like that, you're building this momentum, and then the kind of crescendo is at the end with a product launch that's kind of like the last thing that you do in your launch event. Product Hunt was absolutely massive for SavvyCal, really. There's like a step change in inflection point in the launch or in the MRR trajectory after that, and then we get to channels. ChannelsSo I go through all the channels, everything from content, which I think is very much like the cornerstone of marketing strategy to advertising partnerships, platforms. Events, community, product, virality, and how that can be engineered as well, even if you're not inherently viral and then gorilla tactics. Rest of the bookThe rest of the book, I'm not really sure. I have some ideas for scaling. So how do you hire and create budgets and map a budget back to a goal and then, some type of stuff around your tech stack and minimal tools and things you need to implement. But the real meat of it is channels, obviously. But then, the work before that too, which is your landing page, customer research, pricing, and the launch events. What about the metrics?There are so many things you said there that I want to go off on tangents with, but I know we have a limit here on time, but one thing that you didn't really dive into, and maybe that's in the channel section. But metrics is something that's super close to Jon and I's heart, being at Klipfolio. We know that early stage founders love to obsess about all the metrics they can track. Once they get into the funnels and the channels they think they have product market fit, then it's like, all right, what are we tracking? And I know that you've recently been talking a lot about this idea that your SaaS metrics are oftentimes lying to you and specifically talking about LTV, churn and attribution. What do you mean exactly by that? And is that part of the channel section of the book? Yes, actually, I need to figure out a place to put that in there. Maybe they'll come in the tech stack section. But also given my time at Baremetrics, metrics are very near and dear to my heart, and something that I spent an insane amount of hours thinking about and looking at and consulting others about. Actually, one of the core things that I did was I would meet with about 10 to 20 founders and operators a week, either who were customers with questions and wanted help and advice, or with trialing potential customers. How do I use this? What is the value of Baremetrics? So I've seen everything. Like, any combination, Jon, I'm sure it's the same. I've seen it all. There's nothing surprising, and it really gives you a lot of perspective. And so I finally after all those brain dumpsI was like, here's some kind of quirks about your status metrics that you might not be aware of. It can actually be really misleading. Higher growth leads to higher churnThe first one, actually, is that higher growth usually equals higher turn. This drove me absolutely bonkers at Baremetrics because it felt like every time we started to grow faster the turn would pick up and then everyone else on the team would be freaking, oh, what's going on? We need to stop whatever we're doing, fix the churn and then we can start growing again. So it's the stop, start, stop. We'd like to turn on the channel, start doing these campaigns, churn would pick up, we'd stop, trying to go back down. After the third time, I was like, wait a second, this happened three times in a row. Now I started really digging in with other founders and other Baremetrics customers also looking at literal growth rates and curves on the graph and mapping that onto your turn rate as well. And it's pretty much always like a one to one linear correlation between higher growth equals higher churn. Why is that? It's because when you're growing more, you have a lot more top of the funnel, a lot more interest, a lot more hype and momentum. And also with that, a lot, a lot more cruft, the drifters, the people who are not the best fit for your product. So basically when you're fast growing, a lot of metrics are going to go down, your retention is going to go down because people are going to be churning out after the first month or two because they got really excited about it or they caught you when you're running an ad, turns out they're not a great customer. Also your conversion rate is going to go way down because again, more trials or more premium users, but less conversions because they might not be a great fit or just like you caught them early, you're sort of like front Loading a lot of your marketing. Also your landing page, you're getting a lot of traffic conversion rate way down. At one point I think the landing page was converting at around like 3% from visitor to trial. And then I started doing all this content marketing, all these events and all these launches, and then it went all the way down to like 05%. And I thought, I am the worst marketer of all time. No, actually it's par for the course. It just happens. So a lot of people don't realize that. But you can expect higher churn when you have higher growth. And if you'll see as well really plateaued startups, they have great churn. Their churn is like 0.5% or 1%. Why? Because no unqualified customers are coming through the door whatsoever. Because they're not doing a lot of marketing, right? They're not doing a lot of acquisition. Reactivation rates are underratedBut also you can actually have high churn if and you can sustain high churn if you have a high reactivation rate. No one talks about reactivation at all for some reason, I think because no one really understands it or has taken the time to really think about it. But reactivation is the rate of canceled customers coming back and signing up as a paid customer again and again. I realized after our churn would go down, our reactivation would go down too. And then growth would go up. Churn will go up, reactivation will go up. I'm like, what is going on here? And it turns out that some customers are just finicky, especially certain segments. I found this a lot when I started digging in into software that serves freelancers kind of creators and anyone who generally doesn't have a lot of money. Actually, a lot of gym owners are like very on edge with their finances for whatever reason. I couldn't tell you why. But just like anyone in the fitness industry, they're probably going to have failed payments or they're going to cancel, come back for next month, or like, they're always in between different things. But you can actually have high churn if you have high reactivation. Basically, think about it as a discount to your churn rate. So there was a startup that I talked to, looked at the churn. It was like 12%. I was like, this is absolutely insane. But about half of it, about 6% of that was coming back, like the next month or the month later, they had about 6% of their growth come from reactivation every month. So I was like, oh, it's actually fine. It's actually about 6% truly churn. So it's sustainable. It's fine. And they made it work with another one. And then I'll kind of digress. LTVHere is lifetime value. I could talk about this all day long, but lifetime value is not a thing in SaaS. It just isn't. It works for one time sales. Actually, if you guys have a different opinion, I'd love to hear because I'm always trying to test this and see how I'm wrong here or if there's any edge cases. But it works great for one time sales. Because basically the thought is how do we quantify the expected average value of a customer over time when you have a one time sale or like a very small product skew with very similar price points? It's very easy to calculate lifetime value. And that becomes useful because, you know, even if I'm like break even on the first purchase with this customer, over the lifetime, they'll be profitable. Right. And that's the whole idea. The problem with SaaS is that it's recurring revenue. So therefore, there's kind of multiple sales happening every month or every year, and there is no end date. There's also a wide range of price points. Could be anywhere between $9 a month and $900 a month. And so if you average that out, you're going to get to a number that might be skewed lower or higher than what's actually representative of the customer base. And also the way that you're supposed to calculate value in churn is by dividing your average revenue per customer by your user churn rate. And the thought there is that your user churn is basically the rate at like if you take 4% user churn, for example, over the course of twelve months, in theory you will churn through about 40% of your customer base. And so you can kind of reverse engineer the expected time for customers to be with you, which I think for I want to say for 4%, it's about an average lifespan of about two years. The problem here's, what we found at Baremetrics was that our highest paying customers stuck around the longest and their lifetime value was about like $40,000. For example, the lowest value customers stick around for about six months to a year on average and their lifetime value was about $1,000. Our lifetime value evened out to like three or $4,000. But that was not a useful metric whatsoever. It was like, what do you do with that? Right? How is that even useful at all? So anyways, I basically just say don't use lifetime value, it's not useful whatsoever. People try to use it for like CAC:LTV… just use payback period, just use ARPU compared to CAC to multiply that to your cost of acquisition. That gives you your payback period. At the end of the day, that's what is the most useful way of thinking about lifetime value anyway. So I digress. This is fascinating, I think there's definitely room for a full chapter just on metrics and including this rant here. I think your breakdown of LTV is fascinating, especially folks that don't buy into the annual plan model of SaaS and are all about the monthly recurring revenue and SaaS products change all the time and the pricing model changes as well. The reactivation bit too as well. I think that's a huge untapped area. I feel like we could chat about metrics all day. Happiness and balanceWe only have a few minutes left here, but JT, I'll let you kick it off with the last question for us. Thanks so much for being on the show. I know you've got like a ton of stuff going on, just evident through this podcast. One question we ask all of our guests I'm very curious on your take is… between all the things that you're doing and managing on a day to day basis, how do you manage being successful and happy? That's a good question. I'm glad you ask it. It's a fun one for a podcast like this. Every week is a little bit different. I think, though, for me, just knowing that I'm making progress, doing the best that I can. Like I mentioned before, it's kind of like eustress. It's only distressful when I feel like I'm not doing a good job or when I'm behind on things, or when I feel like I'm letting people down. I'm very much like a yes man and a people pleaser. So for me, being happy, like in my work, it's just knowing that I'm doing the best that I can and that things are moving forward and generally the way I've set things up between Swipefiles, consulting these new staff projects, advising, and random other investing stuff that we do on the side, I just want to make sure I'm not letting anyone down. I'm not doing that. Then I'm pretty happy. And I can kind of go at my own pace, which sometimes feels slow and sometimes feels fast. Personally, I find that having really strong friendships and also a really good relationship with my wife is very key to just being happy overall and in general. But I've also found, I don't know if you guys have a similar experience, but I'm not happy if I don't get outside and do something competitive once in a while. So more recently, I've taken up pickleball, which has been like a huge sort of competitive release for me. And it's like, active and it could be outside and it's fairly casual to do it with friends. It kind of checks all the boxes there. I love basketball. I also love playing poker. It's also very social and competitive as well. So if I do that, like one of those things at least once a week, I can look forward to that and kind of get my fix. And it makes me happier and it kind of releases me to do my work as well. But I find that if I don't do my work and I'm only doing those things, I'm unhappy. If I only do work and I don't do those things, I'm also not happy. So it's like having the blend of both those things to work with and kind of the back and forth that makes me happy. Where to find CoreyAwesome. Love it. Thank you so much for your time, Corey. I'll let you end it for us. Why don't you plug some stuff for our audience? Sweet. Thanks for having me. It's been a ton of fun. Love the conversation. Great questions. Kudos to you guys. You can find me on Twitter at Coreyhainsco for all the things that I'm working on, Swipefiles.com for the newsletter. Also just for podcast listeners: You can use the code “humans” at checkout at swipefiles.com/membership for 50% off the 50 membership, join us in the community. Get access to the courses, office hours, access to me, and I think that's pretty much it. Check out the Swipefiles community. I'm a member (Phil). See a lot of value from there. I'm actually friends with a couple of people that I met in the community, so, yeah, thanks for putting that together. And thanks for taking some time and chatting with us. It's been an awesome conversation. Feel like we can keep this going for two or three more hours. But. Yeah. Thank you, guys.--Corey's Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreyhainesco Corey's website: https://www.coreyhaines.co What Corey has going on Marketing weekly newsletter https://app.mailbrew.com/coreyhainesco/marketing-weekly-WV3pZMdwsL29   Swipefiles https://www.swipefiles.com/Phunt launch Podcasts everything is marketing https://pca.st/7myeg6u3  default alive https://pca.st/beidemfp  refactoring growth https://www.swipefiles.com/refactoring-growth  tiny marketing ideas https://www.swipefiles.com/tiny  Mental Models for Marketing: https://mentalmodelsformarketing.com  Marketing Like A Media Company Microconf video directory https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-unofficial-microconf-video-directory  Consulting side gig https://savvycal.com/icloud  hey marketers (sold) https://www.heymarketers.com  (Formerly) Baremetrics: https://baremetrics.com   Corey's offering 50% on his swipefiles membership if you use the code "humans" at checkout -- so check it out swipefiles.com/membership✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw 

Paul Orlando is the founder of Startups Unplugged where he's building internal incubator and accelerator programs around the world. He's a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California (USC), and he's the author of "Growth Units: Learn to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost, Lifetime Value, and Why Businesses Behave the Way They Do." Show Notes: • https://saasclub.io/313 Join Our Email List • Get weekly SaaS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right in your inbox: https://saasclub.io/email/ Join Our Community for Free • SaaS Club is the community for early-stage SaaS founders and entrepreneurs: https://saasclub.co/join

Paul Orlando is the founder of Startups Unplugged where he's building internal incubator and accelerator programs around the world. He's a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California (USC), and he's the author of "Growth Units: Learn to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost, Lifetime Value, and Why Businesses Behave the Way They Do."Show Notes:• https://saasclub.io/313Join Our Email List• Get weekly SaaS learnings, new podcast episodes, and actionable insights right in your inbox: https://saasclub.io/email/Join Our Community for Free• SaaS Club is the community for early-stage SaaS founders and entrepreneurs: https://saasclub.co/join

Your Top 3 Metrics  Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. There are many metrics you can use for your startup. Focus on these top three metrics for your startup at each stage: For pre-seed, focus on qualitative activities such as customer interviews and community development. Track the number of calls made, the number of interviews completed, and the number of communities contacted. For seed, focus on MVP product development, beta users, and customer acquisition.  Track daily active users, monthly recurring revenue, and gross merchandise value. For Series A, focus on repeatable customer acquisition to show product-market fit.  Track gross merchandise value, conversion rate, and CAC:LTV Customer Acquisition and Lifetime Value. For Series B, focus on retention and sales efficiency to show ability to scale. Track gross margin CAC payback, net dollar retention, and CAC: LTV ratio compared to the industry average. Too much data can lead to paralysis, so focus on the core metrics. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let's go startup something today. ___________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out   For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group   Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

In this episode, Jeroen talks about the biggest changes in the venture landscape in the last few years; DVC funds, market timing risk, presenting CAC/LTV metrics to investors, and much more!

Unit Economics Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. In the early days of a startup, the revenue is small. Instead of focusing on the absolute size of the revenue, focus on the unit economics of the business. Unit economics shows your business model on a per-unit basis. Measure the cost of acquiring each customer and the revenue you receive from the same. You can calculate the CAC:LTV ratio which is the cost of acquiring the customer and compare it to the lifetime value of the customer.  You can also calculate the time of payback compared to the cost of customer acquisition. The faster the payback time, the less capital you will need to raise and, therefore, the more valuable your business will be. Investors are not looking for big numbers; they are looking for repeatability and predictability of your revenue. Use unit economics to show how you have built a working business albeit on a small scale. Emphasize the systems you have in place for acquiring customers, providing a service, and how overall it's a profitable business. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let's go startup something today. ___________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out   For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group   Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

Metrics by Startup Objective Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. A startup's objective changes as it moves from early to later stages. Here's a list of metrics by stage objective: In the earliest stages of the startup, look for conversions.   Basic validation is important to prove the market wants the product. This exercise will teach you what type of customers to pursue. In the next stage, measure the CAC:LTV ratio which is the customer acquisition cost and lifetime value of the customer using a minimum viable product. This exercise will validate you have a profitable business. In the next stage, use MRR or monthly recurring revenue to test the repeatability and predictability of your business model. This exercise will help you refine your business processes. Next, measure retention. This exercise will validate you have a business that can grow revenue rather than just maintain it. Finally, measure recognized revenue which is the revenue for which you have provided the service while the remainder is deferred revenue. This exercise will validate you have a self-sustaining business.  In each stage, focus on the metric that helps you prove you are on the right track. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let's go startup something today. ___________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:   Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out   For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group   Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

We've aired a few special episodes recently, but now we're back to RevOps 201. Today we're talking marketing metrics to align your revenue operation. Marketing metrics are super interesting. There's a ton of them and many don't even help you align. It's kind of like sales and CS. There's stuff that's good to know, but "how many phone calls your sellers make” is not necessarily helping you align your revenue operation. Tune-in for a deep dive on the ONE marketing metric to rule them all: CAC (customer acquisition cost). Plus, a deep-dive on LTV and many other fun acronyms. Follow the Hosts on LinkedIn: Jordan Henderson (Sr. Director of Revenue Operations) Brandon Redlinger (Sr. Director of Product Marketing) Jonathan Stevens (Sr. Revenue Operations Manager) Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Powering high-performing revenue teams with real-time guidance Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast

Ferret is the first relationship intelligence tool for all business savvy investors to know, for the first time, who they can trust Head to [ferret.ai](http://ferret.ai/) using promo code: CONSUMERVC to jump to the top of the waitlist. Our guest today is [Andrea Hippeau](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-hippeau-64658227/), Partner at [Lerer Hippeau](https://www.lererhippeau.com/). Lerer Hippeau is a New York based early stage venture capital fund with some of their investments include Allbirds, Chubbies, Cotopaxi and Glossier. We discuss how to invest in pet products, measuring environmental and sustainability, and what makes a digitally native brand venture backable. Some of the questions I ask Andrea: 1. What was your initial attraction to venture capital? 2. Difference between family office vs. venture capital? 3. What interests you in consumer brands? 4. How do you think about regulation? 5. How do you measure environmentally and sustainability? 6. In an era where you don't have those growth marketing arbitrage opportunities on FB and Google, what makes you excited about investing in brands today? 7. One of your areas of expertise is the pet space. How do you dissect such a large market? 1. What particular sub segments are you most fascinated by and growing? 2. What areas do you think are over saturated? 8. What were some of your biggest learnings during COVID? 9. I had on Ernest Schmitt from The Craftory who made the case that digitally native brands are hitting retail way to early. When do you think it's appropriate to go into retail? 10. Has Figs going public changed any of your perception of the scale relating to digitally native brands? 11. What are the typical gross margins, CAC/LTV ratio or pay back period you like to see in a company today? 12. What make a digitally native brand venture backable? 13. How do you analyze companies and figure out if a company has gotten past the noise and could be venture scalable? 14. As we (hopefully) come out of COVID soon, what questions are you asking yourself relating to how consumers are going to spend their time and money? 15. What's one thing you would change about venture capital? 16. What's one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally? 17. What's one piece of advice that you have for founders? 18. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?

В 68 випуску Product&Growth шоу ми поспілувалися з Іваном Міщуком, CMO в ZNO.UA. Про що поговорили? 1. Про ZNO.UA - ринок підготовки до ЗНО. Як працює ринок? 2. Сезональність та специфіка бізнесу. 3. CAC / LTV в такому бізнесі 4. Роль соціальних мереж в залучені лідів - як цей канал працює для ZNO.UA? 5. Як в ZNO.UA відбирають викладачів? 6. Підхід до контент-маркетингу 7. Наприбутковіший предмет: що приносить більше грошей ZNO.UA? 8. Перехід бізнесу з офлайну в онлайн: коронавірус як каталізатор 9. Яка конверсія з ліда в продаж? 10. Конкуренція платних та безкоштовних сервісів 11. Запуск YouTube каналу: стратегія та вплив на бізнес 12. Просування через гіперлокальних блогерів 13. Як потрапив в маркетинг? Телеграм канал Вані: https://t.me/ironic_historian

В 66-м выпуске Product&Growth Show у нас в гостях была Анна Хома, Head of Marketing в Nebula. Этот подкаст вышел на украинском языке. Что в выпуске? 1. Это как вообще - в 22 года отвечать за бюджет 24 миллиона долларов в год? 2. Верит ли Анна в астрологию сама? 3. Сколько потратили на запуск и из чего состоял MVP продукта? 4. Сколько тратит на маркетинг и зарабатывает Nebula? Что работает, а что не работает? Какое соотношение между CAC и LTV сейчас? 5. Креатив. Какой из последних креативов тебя удивил Анну? 6. Качество контента. Я где-то читал, что у вас работает больше 50 астрологов, которые помогают составлять гороскопы. Как вы контролируете качество контента? 7. Негативные отзывы в сторе - откуда они? 8. Кто лидер в нише астрологии? 9. Что делать тем, кто хочет запустить шапку в нише астрологии?

Justin Fishner-Wolfson is founder and the managing partner of 137 Ventures, a growth-stage venture firm that provides customized liquidity solutions to founders, investors, and early employees of high-growth private technology companies. Their portfolio includes the likes of SpaceX, Wish, Anduril, Flexport, and Rigup to name a few. Previously, Justin worked on the investment team at Founders Fund and before that served in the US Department of State under Alan Larson, Undersecretary for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Justin made his way into the world of venture with Founders Fund and how that led to his founding 137 Ventures? What specific lessons did he learn from Peter Thiel that he has applied to his investing mindset? 2.) What does Justin mean when he says, "it is the last double that matters"? Why does Justin believe that liquidity aligns incentives between VCs and founders? When is the right timing for this liquidity and are there limits to the sizes of secondaries founders and teams should take? 3.) How does Justin think about his own price sensitivity today? Why does Justin believe that the conventional VC views on ownership are outdated and no longer as relevant to this class of company? How does Justin think about diversification among the portfolio today? What is the right level? What is too diversified? What is too concentrated? 4.) Why does Justin believe that standard thoughts around CAC/LTV are wrong? How have they changed over time? How should founders think about this and present these metrics to investors? Given these metrics, how does Justin feel about the revenue multiples we are seeing today both in private and public markets? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode Justin’s Favourite Book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Justin’s Most Recent Investment: Lattice As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

In this episode, Matthew talks about his investment making decisions and does CAC/LTV matter in the early days.

Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. In your pitch deck, the fifth slide is the monetization slide. It answers the question on how you make money.  Show the business model you are using such as recurring revenue, transaction fees, or other. Highlight recurring or repeat revenue where used in your business.  Show the average revenue per customer as well as the CAC/LTV ratio if relevant. Show the last four months of revenue and highlight Quarter over Quarter growth rates. The goal is to show you have predictable revenue from your operations.   Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let’s go startup something today.-----For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at: Check out our other podcasts here: For Investors check out: For Startups check out: For eGuides check out: For upcoming Events, check out For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group

Aidan is a serial entrepreneur who leads the day-to-day operations at Wayflyer, which provides affordable revenue-based financing to D2C brands. Main topics: - maximizing growth despite cash constraints - why D2C brands need to stop acquiring customers at 1/3 of AOV and start thinking about CAC/LTV - understanding why D2C brand funds are shrinking, while D2C business is exploding All episodes: eCommerce Growth Show Episode notes:  eCommerce Smart Financing Follow Omniconvert on: FacebookTwitterLinkedinYouTube

David Sacks is the Co-Founder @ Craft Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's leading early-stage funds with David's portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, Affirm, Airbnb, Slack and Bird to name a few. David started his career in tech as the first product leader and COO @ Paypal, growing payment volume from $0-$500M per month, leading to their $1.5Bn acquisition by eBay. David then founded Geni.com, creating a family tree for the whole world, the company was acquired 3 years later by MyHeritage. David then founded Yammer, the secure solution for internal corporate communication and collaboration, acquired by Microsoft for $1.2Bn. Finally, David then became COO and Interim CEO @ Zenefits before starting Craft. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How David made his way from founding Yammer to creating one of the valley's newest and most prestigious firms in Craft Ventures? Given David's operating success he could have angel invested continuously, why decide to start a fund? What does he ultimately want to achieve with Craft? 2.) How did experiencing the Dot Com Bubble with Paypal and then 2008 impact David's investing and operating mindset? Does David believe VCs really are "open for business" today? How is VC behaviour shifting when comparing early to later stage? How is Craft responding? 3.) Unit Economics: How does David assess unit economics in early-stage opportunities he is looking to invest in? What does proper attribution look like? Where do many go wrong with unit economics? Is it too early to try and assess unit econ at seed? How does David think about having mental plasticity towards unit economics, recognising how they change over time? 4.) Customer Acquisition: Does David agree with Peter Fenton, "there is a complete lack of free and open distribution"? What are the rules of thumb on CAC that David does and then does not agree with? How does David feel about blended CAC? What separates good from great when it comes to CAC/LTV? 5.) Churn: How does assess net negative churn in the businesses he works with? What is great, good, decent and poor? How does avid think about logo vs dollar retention? How does David advise founders who feel COVID has not impacted churn for them? What should they expect? 6.) Burn + Capital Efficiency: How does David analyse burn and capital efficiency today? What does he mean when he discusses "the burn multiple"? How should the burn multiple change with the stage of the business? How does David advise founders on how aggressively to cut burn today? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: David's Fave Book: Thucydides’ Trap David's Most Recently Announced Investment: Sourcegraph As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.  

Amazon Wholesale Sourcing Dillon Carter has made good money building an Amazon wholesale sourcing business alongside just finishing his college degree. He managed to do that because Dillon identified the key bottleneck in his business: managing the relationships with wholesale suppliers in a scaleable way. To deal with this, Dillon and his co-founder developed in-house CRM software, Vendrive,  which they have since made available to other Sellers on Amazon who source wholesale. Today Dillon shares with us the basics of his take on the Amazon wholesale sourcing model. You'll Learn What Amazon wholesale sourcing is and why it's very worth doing, especially for those with less experience/less capital what reverse sourcing is The real block to getting this Amazon sourcing model working (hint: it's not about selling!) The one "human" way that wholesale sourcing differs from sourcing via Retail Arbitrage or Online Arbitrage (RA/OA) The difference between a "value transaction" and a "human transaction" when you're sourcing wholesale- and why you should be aiming to lose one of them! The 3 key skillsets you need to use specifically for wholesale sourcing, to win the account Why you should LOSE value...for free...to make money (confused? Listen to the episode!) The CAC: LTV ratio - what it is, and how you can use it to think about your Amazon Wholesale business Resources mentioned Vendrive - CRM system for managing Amazon wholesale Related Podcast episodes Amazon wholesale business with Dylan Frost of The Wholesale Formula Amazon wholesale  with Dylan Frost of The Wholesale Formula Wholesale sourcing for Amazon with Dan Meadors of The Wholesale Formula Amazon wholesale marketing with Dan Meadors of The Wholesale Formula Some links on this page may be affiliate links. I am highly selective about our partners and only recommend or have an affiliate relationship with known and trusted people with excellence in a particular skill set, and a solid team and reputation.  I don't and wouldn't recommend anyone or any service to you that I wouldn't recommend to a friend privately.

Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing. In pitching you can position your startup in more than one way.  You could pitch for the sector it is in -- such as Edtech. Many investors focus on a sector. In this case you talk about the metrics that investors look for in tech companies, such as CAC LTV ratios. You could also pitch your startup as an impact deal.  Many investors have impact investing as a part of their investment thesis and could engage with your deal on that level alone.  In this case you talk about your impact metrics, such as how many students graduated, how many students' scores improved, etc. You could also position your deal based on the monetization such as recurring revenue. There are many investors looking for SaaS businesses regardless of the sector. In this case you talk about your ARR or MRR numbers and growth rate. In most cases the pitch deck is the same but what you emphasize changes to fit the audience. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.Let’s go startup something today.-----For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at: Check out our other podcasts here: For Investors check out: For Startups check out: For eGuides check out: For upcoming Events, check out For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group

What do high growth companies with savvy marketing teams do to drive traffic growth? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Directive Consulting founder Garrett Mehrguth shares what his team does to help companies like Allstate and Cisco boost traffic even after all of the low hanging marketing and SEO fruit has been picked. TL;DR, It all starts with product marketing, SEO and a focus on bottom of the funnel, high intent leads. Garrett shares the specific strategies his team at Directive uses to get results for their clients, as well as his advice for startups that want to do it right from the beginning. Highlights from my conversation with Garrett include: Garrett says that everything Directive does is based on the belief that your brand is more important than your website. What that means is that when someone with high purchase intent is searching online for a solution, you need to make sure you're discoverable. He says that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation with your financial metrics, meaning that if you focus on the top of the funnel, you might generate a lot of traffic, but you won't get as many high intent leads as you would if you focus on the bottom of the funnel (which generally results in less traffic). Garrett's advice is to track CAC (cost to acquire a customer) and LTV (lifetime value) and use that to determine whether you are paying a reasonable cost per demo, opportunity or proposal -- NOT cost per lead. For many companies, the best place to focus their initial marketing efforts is on ranking on review sites. Done well, this can allow a lesser known, newer market entrant to unseat an incumbent player very quickly. You can pay review sites to conduct review generation campaigns on your behalf, and Garrett says it is absolutely worth it to spend that money. Another strategy that works well is to use LinkedIn ads for awareness raising. Garrett says that leads that come through LinkedIn are not high intent, so you shouldn't spend a lot on a cost per impression basis. Instead, he and his team "trick" LinkedIn by advertising on a cost per click basis. Not many people click the ads, so LinkedIn accelerates their placement in the feed and they get seen by a lot of people. In terms of content, Garrett believes the traditional approach to pillar content and topic clusters promoted by HubSpot is wrong. Instead, he uses that same content and creates product pages as pillars, which he then uses to link to from blogs that address bottom of the funnel topics. Garrett builds authority for product pages by guest blogging (where he can control anchor text and backlinks) and doing podcast guest interviews. He says that where its tough to get your subject matter experts to create written content, you should invest more heavily in podcast guest interviews. Garrett's advice for companies right now is to double down on online advertising. Because so many companies have shut down or pulled their online ads back, prices are down and it is easier to get found. Resources from this episode: Check out the Directive Consulting website Follow Garrett on Twitter at @gmehrguth Connect with Garrett on LinkedIn Email garrett at gmehrguth[at]directiveconsulting[dot]com Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies for combining product marketing and SEO to generate more qualified bottom of the funnel leads.   Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Garrett Mehrguth from Directive. Welcome Garrett. Garrett Mehrguth (Guest): Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. And yeah, excited to chat about search. Garrett and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I love, I love getting into nerdy marketing topics, so I'm really excited about this. Before we dive in though, can you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your story and also Directive? About Garrett and Directive Garrett: I'd love to. I did my degree in three years in economics and I wanted to do my masters in a year. I was playing soccer. I thought I was going to go pro, be like a pro soccer player. I hurt my knee, and that kind of reset a lot of that stuff. And so I said, "Hey, you know, maybe I could try this consulting thing." I applied to Boston, Bain and McKinsey. I'm not sure about Deloitte, but kind of the big ones and instantly got this auto-response. In the application process, I knew I was doomed because you go to their portal and the university I attended was not one of the options. I was like, "They do not tell you that before they take your money." So from there I was like, "You know what? I'll just build my own agency and they'll have to acquire me." I don't know why. That's how I thought, and was just like where I went. I had no tangible skills, so there was that problem. I have this belief system that perception is reality and I knew that people perceived I knew the internet and so I figured I should learn it. So I started to try to learn how to do WordPress sites. And then I got this little shwarma shop in East LA. I was on my little moped. I had a 78 Peugeot 103. I was going around town on that thing and I essentially got the client. It was really, really small. I don't even remember because I was so bad at this point that I didn't put the amount in the contract. I still have the contract, but I don't remember the amount. It's probably like 200 bucks. I did that for 30 days, came back on the 30th day to get the check. He said come back tomorrow. The whole place was boarded up. So that was our first client. I was selling $5 social media calendars on Fiverr and I was just hustling and doing all this stuff. And then I got a hookah shop and the hookah shop asked me to build them a website and then I did that. It was okay. Looking back at, it wasn't the best website. And then he wanted to rank number one for hookah shop and all that stuff. I said, "All right, I'll try." I've never done it before. So I went online, read everything on Search Engine Land, Moz, WordStream, Search Engine Journal, teaching myself kind of SEO and PPC. I ranked him number one and all of a sudden you got all these people in a shop and it was completely dead before. I was like, "This is kind of cool." So, one of my best friends who's my roommate said, "Hey, don't go to law school. You know, come join this company with me. We'll be millionaires" or whatever he said. I was paying him $3 an hour at this point. So we kind of just started from there and now we get to work with really large enterprise accounts and mid market companies, mostly SaaS, doing SEO and PPC still. So pretty fun. Kathleen: Great. Now one of the things that I think is interesting about the perspective that you bring -- and we've had lots of people on the podcast talk about SEO and PPC,  I was interested to chat with you because you do have these bigger clients and I think there are pros and cons to that, right? The pro -- having owned an agency myself -- the pro of having big clients is they've got big budgets. They've got teams to support getting work done. They are generally very savvy. One of the -- I don't know if I would call it a con -- but the tough thing about accounts like that is very often, they've already done all of the basic things that they should be doing. They're sharp, they know their stuff, they have their act together, so being able to really show results and traction requires taking things to a much more advanced level. As I think you were saying when we first started talking, you've already squeezed most of the juice out of that orange. So how are you finding those opportunities for the last few drops? You had some interesting thoughts on that and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say and to get into that technical level of detail with you. What do top SEOs do to prevent traffic from plateauing? Garrett: Let's do it Kathleen. So first and foremost, it's such a blessing because I got lucky. Everyone gets lucky, I think, in business to get somewhere. I had no capital. I started this thing with 20 bucks. We have no debt. We have no anything, right? I think we got Allstate when I was like 23 to 25 years old. And we've had them ever since. Right? So there's little moments like that. Or, we did the global SEO for Cisco when I was 26, I think. So like, you get these little moments and they really help you. And obviously you have to deliver, right? And then you can scale that. But one of the things that I think allowed us to be successful regardless of who we were working with, whether it was a Series A startup who was trying to go to the moon, or a mid-market SaaS firm that was trying to go after the market leader, or the market leader, right? You have these kind of three groups to work with and they all need to slow down and reframe how they approach the idea of search. And that's what I think Directive is really special at, is taking a moment to say, how does your customer discover the products or services you sell, and how can we rethink our approach? So here's what we do. We have two kinds of fundamental beliefs. First and foremost, if you can eat enough humility as an SEO and say that my brand is more important than my website, you become an incredibly powerful and creative marketer. So our first fundamental belief at Directive is your brand is more important than your website. What that means tactically is that when someone searches at the bottom of the funnel and has the strongest purchase intent, you need to make sure you're discoverable. Now, the old adage was, you need your website to rank, but see something has changed in consumer behavior. I call this the Yelp and the Amazon effect. See, consumers got trained at the transactional level that even before we spend $3 on a lollipop or on a breakfast burrito, we're going to look on Yelp to see the reviews. Well, guess what? Before we buy quarter million dollar software, we definitely look at reviews. See, Google caught onto this and they started to change the types of websites that they were showing when there was bottom of funnel purchase intent for SaaS. That's G2, Capterra, Software Advice, PC Mag. It goes down for days and hours, right? There's all these review sites. Well if you search your primary keyword, let's say "ERP software", and you layer it with "top", "best" or "reviews" or "comparisons", you have purchase intent. Also your most expensive cost per click and Google ads, all the sites are review sites. That's because Microsoft Dynamics has no SEO. That's not because Oracle has no authority or content. That's because Google is choosing to show these types of websites. So if we take that fundamental approach that our brand is more important than our website, we can be hyper successful. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. And I've noticed that, too, with reviews. Over the years I've spoken with some other review sites that you mentioned. They've pitched me when I've been at different places and it's really fascinating to just do those searches. And you're right, if you do it -- if you search those terms -- those are the sites that will absolutely come up first. So when you consider that you need to appear on review sites, how do you go about tackling that? Because it's not as simple as just claiming your presence and setting up your profile. You can still get lost in the sea of companies that have done that. How to leverage review sites to drive traffic Garrett: The first step we want to do is we want to take another fundamental hypothesis and understand it, which is that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation to your financial metrics. And it becomes very, very, very dangerous for SaaS firms. So here's what I mean. Most agencies have this belief that in order to generate more MQLs for the demand gen team at a SaaS organization, they need to essentially increase the amount of keywords they rank for. They need to start going to top of funnel and they need to generate more leads. So what happens when organizations pursue what I call a "breadth approach" is they start to experience what's called in economics diminishing marginal returns. In other words, their marketing KPIs improve. So let's say you're trying to go for "top ERP software", but you just have a Google ad running. Instead of saying, "How can I show up more often when there's purchase intent?" and going with depth -- and so essentially expanding search impression share in Google ads for your primary terms that have purchase intent and then ranking on individual review sites through their cost per click models, and then evaluating all of that at a cost per demo level, not cost per lead level, and then doing financial allocation, right? That's what we do here. We focus first on demand capturing before pivoting to demand generation. So we go to the bottom of the funnel and say, "Cool. When there's purchase intent, we're going to show up as often as possible and as many places as possible before we try to show up for more terms." So this allows us to experience increasing marginal returns for our clients in the first two quarters and get buy-in. See, what most people do, is they start to go with their Gartner report and they start to leverage that, which isn't an intrinsically a bad idea. But when they start to essentially go after informational intent and go to the top of funnel, they start to lower their cost per lead, they start to increase conversion rate and they think they're winning. But if you're a savvy growth operator in SaaS, you know, like for example, I convert at 60% on lead gen ads on LinkedIn. Okay, target market giving me their information -- 60%. I get that all the way down to $17 a week. Yet that is 17 X more expensive than buying that same lead from ZoomInfo, and I have no greater purchase intent than someone essentially downloading an asset or me buying them from ZoomInfo. So now I'm paying 17 X on a cost per lead. And so that's the diminishing part where your marketing numbers look better, but your revenue doesn't increase because you have horrible CAC-LTV on top of funnel versus bottom of funnel. And so that's kind of the other approach, is putting everything through an LTV-CAC model and then focusing on bottom of funnel first. Start at the bottom of the funnel and capture high intent leads Kathleen: So let's, let's dig into that a little bit. So you talked about starting at the bottom of the funnel and going really deep to capture high intent leads for very specific terms. If I came to you and I said, "All right, let's go. I want to do that," can you walk me through what that looks like? You mentioned showing up as often as possible for that one, high intent term. Garrett: Yeah. So first we're going to do what's called category defining. So we need to find your category. One of the most difficult problems in SaaS, as most people approach it, is they want to create their own category or they exist as a subset of an existing category. You have a lot of experience in cybersecurity, correct? Kathleen: Yep. Garrett: We do a lot there as well. So like we've been working with SentinelOne for a long time and other large players in that space. Now that's endpoint protection, right? People know they need a security solution, they don't always intrinsically know they need an endpoint solution. Right? So how do you generate demand and increase MQLs if you're in a new category? Okay, so first we do what's called category definement. And what we'd like to do is not only position you in endpoint, but position you in the security software category and then do hyper product differentiation through like product naming conventions and positioning, so that your CTO or whoever that person is who's your audience, they're searching and when they go to security software, we want them to show up above the fold with your brand as endpoint protection and then essentially drive awareness from the greater category to our subset or our pain solving product. So that's kind of first step is define that category. Then we ask ourselves, are we above the fold? So on Capterra, when you land on that, do you have to scroll for a couple hours to find you? How many reviews do the top five have versus you? That gives us a review target. Then we'll help you and say, "Here's how we've seen other clients go about getting reviews and here's the strategy you could pursue." Now we have a competitive amount of reviews on all of our categories. Kathleen: Let me ask you a question about that real quick. Most of those review sites have, uh, call them packages that you can purchase where they will, you know, you give them your list of clients, they'll email them, offer them an Amazon gift card or something along those lines to get reviews. And so essentially there's a cost per acquisition model that you can use. Do you find in most cases that that's worth doing, or do you work with your clients to develop their own outreach and review generation campaigns? Garrett: That's totally worth doing. I think there's nothing more important than other people advocating for your product, especially with how consumer behavior has changed at the B2B and B2C level. So no, that's critically important. Now, what we need to be able to do here though, is we need to be able to measure everything on a cost per opportunity, cost per demo, cost per proposal -- whatever you want to call it -- level, not a cost per lead. What we've found across over 350 SaaS companies that we've worked with over the last five years is that the cost per lead between Google Ads, Capterra, G2, Software Advice, et cetera, has a really, like it's not that different, maybe 15 to 30% range between each. But then I found that third party review sites have a 230% lower cost per opportunity. And so what we do, like, we got hired a couple of years ago by a publicly traded sales compensation software company and within one quarter we increased their demos by over 300% by only pivoting budget. That's the craziest part of all this, is most people are still evaluating their demand generation at an MQL level, not at an opportunity level. And so the biggest, easiest thing you can do is go one step further and look at opportunity. And then the furthest step that we've now actually evolved to as an agency is putting all our clients in LTV-CAC models, and then looking at activation rate. So not cost per trial but trial activations, right? So how well people are going from trial to demo, or demo to close rate, and then we're evaluating channels by close rate or by trial activation rate. And when we start to do that, that's hugely powerful for for financial allocation. How can you use intent data to drive traffic and revenue? Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now one of the other questions I had as I was listening to you talk about this, you talked about intent and bottom of the funnel and a lot of those platforms that you mentioned, in addition to being able to purchase a package and drive reviews, now they're selling their own intent data. Are you also working with intent data and taking it and creating ABM or audience match campaigns around that for your clients? Garrett: Yeah, so you can do a lot of that stuff. I think we, like most people, are using that engagement data or enriching stuff with Bombora for sales dev. Right now, if you do traditional ABM with account based advertising, so let's say Radius, Terminus, DemandBase, Madison Logic, Listen Loop, I mean we use Terminus personally internally. Now the reason is, is we need to be able to do cookie-based targeting, not IP-based targeting. Because, for example, right now, if you're trying to run IP-based targeting campaigns during COVID, you're not reaching any of your audience. Kathleen: Oh, you are preaching to the choir, because the product that we sell incorporates IP obfuscation. So anybody using our products, you couldn't target them by IP. I think it's going to happen more and more, and more people are going to use tools like that. Garrett: Yeah. I think to answer your question, yes, we are doing bi-directional syncs from HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot or Salesforce into our ad platforms. But you still have a really poor match rate because people are using personal emails on social because they don't want to get fired from their company and their LinkedIn goes down. So, essentially what happens is, your match rate is really poor on social because the only one who still has firmographics after the whole Cambridge analytical debacle, -- because you've got Axiom data in Facebook and you can be really powerful there. Twitter has always been crap, but essentially GDN is terrible right now unless you're doing managed placements, you're actually going in a search engine results page and then searching keywords and then finding every site that ranks in the top five for your keyword that uses GDN and then doing targeted URL placements That works because it comes off as a native ad. But then other than LinkedIn, it's not working. But then LinkedIn fails because there's no purchase intent and the CPA is too high. And so what we're finding is the way we're doing LinkedIn is awareness, with text ads and spotlight ads. And that's actually working. But there's a lot of nuance in all that for sure. How to use LinkedIn ads to raise brand awareness Kathleen: So then you're generating awareness on LinkedIn and are you hoping effectively that that'll get somebody to go to the client's website? Then, you can retarget them on other platforms? Garrett: We're actually being a little bit humbler than that because I don't think I can control my user. And what I mean by that is, the click through rate is crap on LinkedIn. In fact, it's so bad for spotlight and text ads and we've tricked it and we've figured out a game. So we run brand campaigns for our clients and for ourselves based on what I call "clarity." It's this concept of saying what you do and who you do it for, and being humble enough to know that you have to get your message across without the click. So what we do is we actually do it on a cost per click level on LinkedIn and we're able to deliver because nobody clicks. What happens is LinkedIn accelerates our impressions and gives us a much lower CPM when I do CPC, than when I do CPM on LinkedIn. And then we personify everything. This is the biggest trick to LinkedIn. So you take your primary asset, let's say "The Ultimate Guide to Demand Generation", and then you turn it into "The VP's Guide to Demand Generation", "The CMO's Guide to Demand Generation", and "The Marketing Manager's Guide to Demand Generation." All you have to do is change the cover page and then run lead gen ads and we're converting at over 50% across the board. So there's that route. And then the awareness campaigns and the text ads and spotlight ads, you're on a CPC level and then you focus on what you do and who you do it for, and then you personify that. You put that all together and you have really, really cool awareness campaigns. And then I say, spend as much money as you're willing to never stop losing. And if you take that approach and you say, "Look, are you willing to spend $5,000 a month until you die and not know what it does for you?" Because I'll tell you right now, I can target your exact audience to perfection and deliver your message to them till you've decided you're done with this organization. "Are you okay 'wasting' five grand a month so that every person in your audience on LinkedIn knows who you are?" Yeah. The trick is to not get results. Because what happens is, people go into it thinking they'll get results and they pause before they ever could have gotten results through a brand campaign. And so when you take the other approach, it works really well. Kathleen: Yeah. That's a really interesting way to think about it. I would love to be a fly on the wall as you have those conversations with clients to be like, you know, "You're going to spend all this money and I'm not going to show you any quantifiable results from it, but you're going to have to believe that the results are there." It's like playing the long game and having faith. Garrett: Yeah. Do you believe that this is your exact persona on LinkedIn? Here's your exact title, firmographic, industry, size of account, revenue...do you believe that? Yes. Do you believe that your message is valuable enough to communicate it to them on a consistent basis? Yes. Cool. How much does your company spend on snacks? Kathleen: Give up the jelly beans and advertise on LinkedIn! Garrett: Yeah. Honestly, it's the frappuccino a day is the kind of the joke I make. What's your coffee budget? Cool. Could you spend that on this and never stop it? And it usually gets some pretty good buy-in. How to optimize your website for traffic Kathleen: That's a really interesting way to think about it. Do you do anything with your clients in terms of what they should be doing on their own site to support all of this? You talked about how it's not necessarily about everybody getting to your website, and how the brand is more important, but I would think that there are still some things they need to be doing on the site to provide supportive content and other assets that you can then use to go out and have success on these other platforms. Garrett: Yeah, that's a relative statement to shock people to think differently. It's not that your website's not important. It's that your brand truly is more important than your website. You really have to understand your brand is more important than it was. Now your website is obviously critical, so what you need to be able to do is communicate who you are and who you're for and what you do for them. We do custom landing pages here. We have a really strong conversion rate optimization team. And so all that review site stuff I'm telling you about, we're split testing two custom landing pages with messaging, calls to action and what I like to call psychological friction tests. So the biggest issue right now in all of SaaS that they could change if they listened to this, is changing their call to action. Almost universally it's "request a demo." There is nothing more psychologically friction than "request a demo." Every time I speak to an audience, and I get to speak about 30 to 40 times a year at conferences, I love to ask, who here likes to do a demo? Who here likes to have a day of demos? Nobody raises their hand. Kathleen: That's like saying, "Who here likes to sit through an hour long webinar?" Garrett: Yeah, and so when I ask them, I said, what if you did something really simple? What if you change it from request a demo to watch demo video? You still gated it. You still sent that lead to sales development or your account executives, but you are asking yourself, can I give my visitor something of equal or greater value to what they're giving me? That's the number one question with calls to action and demand generation is, am I giving someone something of greater value than they're giving me? When someone requests a demo, they fill out a form and nothing happens and it says "Someone from our team will contact you in 24 hours." You're not doing it. So what we always do, and we can take clients universally from around 2 to 3%, to over 10% conversion rates by simply doing watch demo video. And then all we do is have a form that says "Fill this out and we're going to give you a five minute demo video so that you can have a better educated sales conversation when we follow up." Close rates go up, activation goes up, sales development teams are begging for these leads because they're having product conversations, not like "who we are and these lame 30 minute intro slides" to finally get to price. It works universally, exceptionally well. So that's what we do on the website level. But when it comes to content, and I think that's kind of where you're headed with this, is like what do you do with that content engine? Are you familiar with HubSpot's pillar content approach that everybody's following? I think it's a bad approach, financially. The reason I believe it's a bad approach financially, it's due to what I was communicating earlier. HubSpot's approach is you take a really, really beautiful strong asset, and then you lead to that asset with other types of content clusters that support that and you essentially do lead generation through that asset. I say, do that same thing but with features. Here's an example. We do our own SaaS products at Directive to make sure that we're not just full of crap. Not enough people do that. We rank in the top five for all our keywords. We actually spend a ton of money on PPC and we try to actually test everything and our hypotheses on ourselves. What we're doing right now is, we have an educational product called Institute. This teaches our clients and we give to our clients free of charge because we believe that education drives adoption. As consultants, you don't need to only make recommendations, you need clients to adopt them, right? And so we need to educate them as to why. So we educate them on SEO, PPC, et cetera. We sell it to the market for $39 a month. It teaches people how we do what we do, all our templates, our approach, et cetera. We have 40 lessons. So I'm asking myself, at a $39 a month product, my CPA, my cost per lead is too high to do a ton of paid acquisition. So how can I drive organic leads from my product? So here's my strategy and I'll share with your audience because hopefully it can help them. I'm taking the top five to 10 keywords for every one of my lesson pages. So, "how to do Google ads" or "how to do keyword research for PPC", okay? So then I put "keyword research for PPC" into a keyword research tool. Now I take the top five questions people ask around that. Now I'm going to use entity tools like Clearscope or Content Harmony or something like that to really understand what I need to write here to rank. So then I write five articles all around that one lesson. Then, above the fold on all five articles, I link to that lesson and say "Want to learn how to do it with video?" and come up with an offer that resonates with where they're at in intent. In other words, they intend to learn this. That's why they're searching it. I can satisfy that intent with my product feature, AKA my lesson. And now I also create a content cluster. So all of these content pieces around this topic are internally linking back to my lesson page, which I'm trying to rank at the bottom of the funnel. And so I'm using middle and top of funnel content with lead gen assets all internally linking and with magnets essentially generating leads for my product. So instead of trying to generate informational intent leads, I'm trying to generate purchase intent leads. So their hypothesis of what they want to do with content clusters works for HubSpot. The issue is that getting someone from informational intent to purchase intent is incredibly long and most marketing people won't survive their tenure if they're only focused on driving informational intent leads. So we try to pivot everything to purchase intent. Does that make sense? Kathleen: Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is basically the product page on your site effectively as the pillar. Garrett: Yup. Turning product pages into content pillars Kathleen: The same exact approach applies only you're not writing a 4,000 word guide. You're creating the product page. Garrett: Yeah. You just audit all the competitors in the industry to say, "Okay, how many words do I need on my product page to rank? How many internal links do I need? How many referring domains do I need?" And then you say, "Cool, now I'm going to create the entity, the topical understanding to Google that we're the best answer to the questions people have related to the product we sell." And then when you do that whole approach, you're amazing at what you can do when driving MQLs and demos at the bottom of funnel. What should your SEO strategy look like if you're just getting started? Kathleen: So one of the things we talked about when when you and I first chatted about this was that, you work with a lot of big companies and they're coming to you and saying, "We're already doing a lot right. How can you take us to the next level?" But then there is this other school of thought that, if you have, let's say a startup or a new company or a company launching a new product, they have this opportunity to do it right from the beginning -- to greenfield it. Paint a picture for me of what that looks like. You're starting a new company and you want to really ace it out of the gates. Garrett: First and foremost, I'm going to look at all the review sites and ask myself how many reviews I need to be perceived as a market leader. It's the coolest thing in the world, right? Because someone searches now "top whatever software" you sell, and a review site shows up. You don't actually have to be the best! You might not be because you've only been in the game for a couple of months. But if you can get the reviews there, you look like you're the best and that's 99.9% of marketing. So first and foremost, we're going to position ourselves to be discoverable. When there's purchase intent, we're going to focus on demand capture, okay? Because to rank our website as a new organization, we don't have the authority, link profile or content, and investing in all those things takes a large financial upfront investment and has a long runway -- probably two years to build that organic engine. So if you have a 24 month runway to build your organic engine and you need MQLs now, the easiest thing to do is paid SEO. Now with that being said, we don't want to wait two years to try to rank because now we have another two years to get there, right? So we need to start from the beginning to try to position ourselves organically, to lower our cost per acquisition and have a better CAC-LTV ratio. So what do we do? We are going to say, when someone searches for your product or your features, we're going to try to create as much bottom of funnel content as possible. So not only a product page, but a feature page and solution pages. These are saying when someone has pain that your product solves and they go to discover that, can we show up? Perfect. Next what we're going to do is, we're going to start with our link building. So one of the things I had to do at Directive is, before we niched into SaaS, we were niched into just B2B. We had a lot of like manufacturers like Pelican Cases and stuff like that. So we had a lot of B2B players as well. So I couldn't rank for the keyword "B2B SEO", but I wanted to. I didn't have enough authority. My site wasn't large enough. It just wasn't going to happen. So what I did is I went on Search Engine Journal and I wrote, or Search Engine Land, I think it was, a fresh perspective on B2B SEO. In other words, I used someone else's site to rank for my keyword and they control the narrative. So with a startup, what you're gonna want to do is, you're going to go on CIO or Tech Crunch and instead of just bragging about how much money you raised, you're going to want to actually try to position yourself for what your buyer journey is like. We're going to leverage these other third party sites to do what's called guest posting to then rank exceptionally well for these top of funnel queries while internally linking from those guest posts back to our bottom of funnel pages we already built so that we can once again increase our rankings for purchase intent. So you can actually win at the bottom of funnel faster than people realize because nobody's product pages naturally build links. So if you do a really aggressive link building strategy early, using guest posting where you can control the anchor text and the destination URL to point to bottom of funnel pages, you can grow. And so then from that guest posting for bottom of funnel, now we'll focus on those products, kind of clusters we were talking about and our blog strategy, as well as Google ads review sites. And next thing you know, you're 24 months later, you might have one of the best imagine engines in the whole entire industry because you did it right. How to get executives and subject matter experts to create content Kathleen: Love it. One of the pieces of pushback I hear often, especially when you're a startup and you don't have a huge team where often your CEO or your CTO are the primary thought leaders and they're busy, I hear a lot of "Oh, we don't have the time to do all that writing." Any tips for how you can get the goods out of their heads and onto paper in a way that's efficient and scalable? Garrett: Yeah, the most scalable, best link building and PR you can possibly do is exactly what I'm doing right now. Podcasts. There's zero preparation for the thought leader. It takes exponentially less time and you have a much more engaged audience than an article. The best part is, when you guest post and you pitch a guest post, your success rate isn't always as high because not everybody accepts guest posts. Not everybody cares what you have to say. Sometimes editors are busy. On the flip side, the entire podcast content medium is guest dependent. So Kathleen's job is to secure interesting, engaging hosts for her audience. And so when you pitch Kathleen, you're going to have a much higher success rate than if you pitched Kathleen blog articles because now Kathleen has to edit your blog. She might not agree with your opinions because blogs aren't intrinsically the same format as podcasts. They're not op-ed like podcasts are. And so the best thing SaaS companies can do right now is link-building via podcast, hands down highest success rate, most scalable, easiest ended up. Kathleen: I totally agree, but I will say please, for the love of all that is Holy, take two minutes and learn something about the podcast and what it's about and tailor your pitch. I get pitched a lot, by a lot of podcast booking agents. Generally they're pretty good at doing their homework. But I can't tell you how often I get pitched from people who are like, "So-and-so built his real estate empire and can talk about earning money and like changing your life." And I write back and I'm like, "What does this have to do with inbound marketing? This person sounds like an amazing entrepreneur, but that's not what my podcast is about." Garrett: I'd say we have over a 75% success rate. So I'd give your audience some tips on how they can pitch. Get their name right. I know it sounds simple. Write a subject line that doesn't stink. Everything should be about how you make the podcast host's life easier and better for their audience. What I mean by that is there's a really important word when you do outbound or pitching. You say, "I am emailing you because", and that quickly allows someone to know why. And then you hit them with why the audience cares, not about yourself. So a lot of people like to say, "Hey, you know, my client, uh, built his agency from one to $10 million, you know, would love to be a guest on your show. He's been featured by Forbes, Tech Crunch, in the Inc 5,000." And then the podcast host goes, "Who cares?" Right? Compared to saying, "I'm emailing you because I'd love to talk with your audience about a topic that I know they care about, that I happen to be an expert in. Here's three different topics I think your audience might be interested in. Do any of these resonate with you?" Ideally, you want your podcast host to just say "Yes, this one". And then that's all the preparation required and you're good to go and it works. Kathleen: Yeah, I totally agree. At the last two companies I've been in, it's been a part of my strategy to get my CEO as a guest on podcasts. It's so much easier than trying to get them to write blogs. I think there's a human connection element of, you hear the person's voice, you get to know their personality, that that draws you in so much more than written content can do. So there's that aspect of it too. Garrett's advice Kathleen: Well, any other last words of advice that you think my listeners should know about related to this topic? Garrett: I guess one of the blessings we have with our portfolio is we have a lot of first party data. So I guess some encouragement. Since March 1st I wanted to look at what happened across our portfolio. Spend is down 24%, but conversions are down only 18% because click through rates are up, CPCs are down and conversion rates are up. So here's the really cool part about cost per click advertising is that it scales with demand and doesn't create waste. In fact, at a unit economic level, your advertising is actually more efficient now than it was before. Is volume down? Yes. But also auction competitiveness is down. See, all CPC advertising and all channels is based on an auction. It's based on inventory. It's like an economic model. Supply and demand. Well, because fewer advertisers are advertising right now, you're actually able to satisfy the existing demand that does still exist for whatever product or service you sell at a lower rate and you will have better efficiency and effectiveness in your advertising right now than you did before. That's just at the ad level. It's not necessarily the close rate level or at the volume level. But just at the actual cost per click and cost per acquisition level, it's actually much more efficient right now to advertise, which is kind of cool. That's across over $1 million in spend. Kathleen: That makes sense. So don't give up your ad budget altogether. Garrett: Just to meet demand. But remember your ad budget will do that intrinsically. So as long as you're not spending a ton on display and CPM type stuff, you're going to find a ton of efficiency on CPC because fewer people are advertising, thus lowering your cost per click, and there are some people out there buying and you want to make sure you're discoverable to those people. So it's a kind of a cool way to still win right now. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Absolutely. All right, well switching gears, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say about these. The first is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound who my listeners could go check out as an example? Garrett: I mean, HubSpot's a monster at this. They still are. I know. And everybody knows that. Kathleen: I'm going to make you tell me someone besides HubSpot though. Garrett: I know, I know, I know. The thing is, it's a lot harder now to move somebody out of a top 10 ranking. And so you see a lot of people pivoting away from that old school, gated content theory of inbound. And so that's why off the top of my head, I can't think of someone who's like doing that part of it exceptionally well because the game's kinda changed.  Kathleen: Who do you think is killing it with marketing right now in general? Garrett: I always like what is Zoom is doing? Because I liked what they did with like offline advertising and I think that's so cool. I think they're really creative in the sense of thinking about how to position themselves. I love the organizations that are investing heavily in podcast ads. For myself, that's one of my highest performing channels is niche-based podcast ads. I advertise on almost all the SEO or PPC podcasts that I can find because it works exceptionally well at a low CPM. I like the D2C stuff. I think the D2C people are kicking B2B butt. Like Baboon to the Moon. I love their branding. I think if B2B had a little bit more boldness like this... Kathleen: Yeah. What did they, I've never heard of them. I'll have to check them out. Garrett: So yeah, if you want to see somebody who I think is brilliant and actually has a brand opinion and stance and is hyper creative and out there -- Baboon to the Moon. Drift gets way too much credit for it because I don't actually think they're that good at it from a branding standpoint. They just have a free product so it's a lot easier to act like you're doing really good at it. They like try to take the human side of positioning. I think Baboon is doing something really cool because they're taking a hyper creative approach and it's like they're on acid. It's like a goldfish on a human's body using their product, but it's brilliant because they are so consistent with it in their messaging, copy, and creative that it actually creates a brand theme that I don't recognize in B2B. I think B2B organizations need to do a better job creating a brand theme. Like for us at Directive, we're trying to do a lot of people in our branding, but instead of just doing people in our branding, we're also like labeling them with their titles and their names so that it's so people know it's not a stock photo. So we're trying to bring it to life. We can obviously do it a lot better. We're not nearly as creative as that, but I think if B2B looks at the direct to consumer brands that are doing so well right now, at the end of the day it's very similar if you have a self onboarding SaaS company to a D2C product. It's very still transactional. And so if you can take your self onboarding, your trial-based SaaS company, and do that, and take that DDC stuff, and build that brand guide and just be really bold and crazy and ambitious with it, I think it'll pay off. Kathleen: Yeah, that's, and you need to have leaders within the company that are willing to take a risk and be different. There's a lot of sameness in general in marketing and I think when everybody else is going right and you go left, there's a lot of opportunity there. Garrett: Oh, a trillion percent. It's hard to get that buy in. I mean, I don't know anyone in my portfolio is actually doing it. That's why I'm in my head trying to think. It just starts at the top. You just need a CEO and a board that supports a bold new direction, not just verbally, but actually, and really actually sees it all the way through, especially when they get that first negative feedback or whatever from someone who doesn't like it. Kathleen: Yeah. There are going to be people who don't like it, that's for sure. Garrett: B2B is terrified of making anyone feel anything. That's truth, right? They're terrified of if someone doesn't like something. And the point is, the worst marketing is marketing for everybody. And so if you can be bold enough to have people hate you or like you, that's when you actually have marketing. Kathleen: I totally agree with you. All right. Second question. The biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that trying to stay on top of the changing landscape of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. And so I'm curious how you personally stay up to date and educate yourself on all of that. Garrett: I think it's actually less important to stay up to date with things than people think, and here's why. Most marketers don't have a fundamental belief and a hypothesis of how they approach generating revenue for an organization. What's allowed myself and my organization to be successful is we have a fundamental belief that you need to make a brand discoverable at the bottom of the funnel regardless of channel. Now, the beauty of that is that it doesn't matter if digital marketing changes. See in 1997 when Google first came out, what was the whole point? People came to people and said, "Hey, I want to show up on this new search engine. How do I do it?" And the answer was, "Well, you need a website." See, the new answer is, "Well, you need reviews for your brand and you need to be positioned." As long as you don't get married to Capterra and G2, but get married to the idea of showing up when someone has purchase intent for what you sell, everything can change without changing anything because your fundamental belief is that you need to be discoverable when there's purchase intent. And so my encouragement to people is ground yourself in a fundamental belief of what you actually believe. It's such a critical part of marketing. If you want to make a ton of money in marketing, you need to actually have opinions. And you actually have to have beliefs and a hypothesis. You have to also be willing to adjust those, but you need to have them. And so I think if people have a real belief system and fundamental approach and then say we want to be essentially discoverable when there's purchase intent, that allows you to just naturally adjust whatever happens in the market because all you're doing is maintaining your belief. And that's, I think, what's so important for marketers, is to get away from this idea of, "Oh, what could I try? What new trick or hack can I try in a channel?" to say, "How can I essentially take my belief of discoverability and apply it to all my chanels?" When you do that, it allows you to stay really even keeled and focus on your customers. Kathleen: Yeah, and I would add to that, the best marketers I know in many cases are not actually marketers. You're a great example. You studied economics. The best marketers I know tend to be the most avid students of human behavior. People who understand people make great marketers because they're focused on the things that are timeless. It really doesn't matter what Google does with an algorithm because, honestly, Google is just trying to solve for people, right? So if you're focused on people and how they behave and how they buy, none of the bells and whistles matter. Garrett: Take that same person and then they learn financial modeling. Now you have the best CMOs in the world. People who have a really authentic, true belief of understanding of people and how they buy, and then they also understand financials? You put those two people together -- those are the CMOs of the Fortune 500. How to connect with Garrett Kathleen: Amen. I could go on and on about that. If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about some of this or has a question and wants to get in touch with y ou, what is the best way for them to connect with you online? Garrett: I'm active on Twitter. I'm @gmehrguth. So first initial, last name. I'm active on LinkedIn. Shoot me an email, it's just initial last name at Directive consulting. I'd love the chat and help anyone who has questions around demand gen. I'm pretty active on there trying to share all of our data and different tactics and things that we're doing. Almost daily I shared a new tactic or approach and a thread for essentially how SaaS markers can generate revenue. So if you're interested in that, feel free to follow and engage. Kathleen: Great. And I'll put all those links to Garett's social profiles and his email in the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to connect with him. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learn something new, I would greatly appreciate it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a five star review. We talked a lot about reviews in this interview and we know how important they are, and they are equally as important for podcasts as they are for products. So take a minute and do that. That would mean a lot. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Garrett. Garrett: Well, thank you Kathleen. Glad to be here.

Your One Key Metric: SaaS businesses Every startup has one key metric to grow their business to the next level. For a software as a service business it is the CAC: LTV ratio CAC standards for Cost of Customer Acquisition and represents the cost of signing up the customer including marketing, sales, and any other related expenses. Lifetime value and stands for the total amount of revenue from the customer. This is typically calculated by looking at the churn rate which is how many customers are dropping out each month. The metric compares CAC to LTV. A base ratio of 1:3 indicates a business model that is successful. In this example for every $1 spent on acquiring the customer the customer is spending $3 on the service. For venture funded companies the ratio needs to be 1:5 or better Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding. Let's go startup something today!

Every startup has one key metric to grow their business to the next level. For consumer product companies selling through retail, the key metric is same-store sales. You track ongoing sales by units per store each week or month. This metric tracks your organic growth rate of the product and can range anywhere from 1 to 10% month over month. If selling online the CAC: LTV ratio applies which is the cost of customer acquisition compared to the lifetime value. This is the same as recurring revenue companies. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding. Let's go startup something today!

David Tisch is the Founder & Managing Partner @ BoxGroup, one of the leading early-stage firms in NYC with a portfolio that includes the likes of Flexport, RigUp, Ro, Glossier, Clearbit, PillPack and Plaid, to name a few. Recently they raised their first external capital with 2 separate vehicles totalling over $160m. David is also Professor and Head of Startup Studio @ Cornell Tech. Prior to BoxGroup, he was Managing Director of Techstars NYC and before that was an Executive Vice President @ KGB. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How David made his way into the world of early-stage investing? How he made the transition from prolific angel investor to raising $160m+ in external capital? Why did David feel now was the right time to raise external funding after 10 years of self-funding? How has taking on external capital changed his investing mindset? 2.) Many suggest that "concentrated seed investing does not work", how does David think about and assess portfolio construction? May others also suggest that, "seed investors are not company builders", does David agree with that? Does David believe investors can change the trajectory of a company? Where can they help the most? Where do many think they help but they actually do not? 3.) Why does David believe that founders do not speak openly about bad experiences with VCs? What have been David's biggest lessons on the right way to turn down an opportunity? Do founders really want direct and honest feedback? Is it actually damaging to give it to them? Why? How does David approach this? 4.) Why does David believe "consumer social is interesting again"? Why was it not interesting for a while? How does that mean David is approaching the category? What does David mean when he says, "for the first time ever there is no channel to arbitrage on the internet"? Is David concerned by the state of CACs today? How much attention does David pay to CAC/LTV in the early days? What are the key signals? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: David’s Fave TV Show: Survivor As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!

Show the system behind your goals Today, we'll talk about establishing a growth story for your startup Investors fund deals based on the team, the market, or the technology.  While these are popular investment thesis, the investment decision often comes down to what I call “the Growth Story”.   This is your operational revenue model showing how you acquire customers and how much they pay for your product/service. If you have substantial revenue say a $1M then the investor assumes you have a growth story.  Growth stage investors will look at the model to see how much you can grow that business and what constraints you will face and when. For pre-revenue or low revenue companies you can sho  in unit economic numbers the proven repeatable business model you have up and running.  If you haven't done so already then take $5K and prove out the unit economic model. For example, let's say -You can generate leads for $1/lead from Facebook ads -Through a followup email you  can convert 1 out of 50 leads into a paying customer -Each paying customer buys on average $250 worth of product  -You can take these numbers and render a basic economic unit model as follows: CAC: $50 LTV: $250 CAC: LTV is 1:5 -You then add the time it takes for signup and fulfillment and you have a unit economic model.  The fact you know your numbers will impress investors.  Investors look for the system behind the goals.  This is one way to demonstrate your growth story. Thank you for joining us for the Startup Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding. Let's go startup something today!

Dando continuidade ao tema anterior listaremos mais quatro indicadores que são fundamentais dentro do seu negócio. Os quatro indicadores são: O CAC, LTV, ROI e CHURN RATE.

EP017 - Founder/CEO and VP of Sales & Business Development at Rodo, Nathan Hecht and Patrick McKeever http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 17 is an interview with Nathan Hecht and Patrick McKeever, Founder/CEO and VP of Sales & Business Development at Rodo, respectively; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Scot and his guests discuss a variety of topics, including: The founding of Rodo as “the cheapest and easiest way to lease a car on the planet” How the Rodo app connects customers with the vehicle and lease price they want The challenges of Rodo expanding their dealership network and customer base How the current digital shift impacts car dealerships and who will survive the impending drop in new car sales Subscription services as a fusion of leasing and carsharing, and their potential for growth moving forward If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 podcast. We are at the 2019 automotive intelligence summit here in Sunny Raleigh, North Carolina. It was rainy yesterday. So you guys are getting to experience the, the real Raleigh. It's July 24th. And we're really excited to have on the show. A couple of folks from Honcker. They're from Manhattan, so excited to have folks from the big city down here and in Mayberry of North Carolina. So we have Nathan Hecht. He is the founder and CEO. Welcome. Nathan:    Thank you. Thanks for having me. Scot:    And he brought along his partner in crime, Pat McKeever, who is VP of Sales and BD. Patrick:    That's well said, Scott. That's correct. Thank you. Scot:    Also in our pre discussion in charge of keeping Nathan out of trouble. So it's good to have a,. Patrick:    That's my main job actually. Scot:    You go with, come with security. Nathan:    He's not kidding. Scot:    Uh so Nathan, tell us about you know, the founding, I'm a fellow entrepreneur, so I'd love to hear the founding story and all the background on yourself and how you got into this. Nathan:    Sure. Thank you. So the founding of the company is actually real interesting. It was actually from a personal experience in trying to lease a car in New York. I went into a local car dealership and basically went through the runaround of trying to choose and price of vehicle for a monthly lease. It took about five hours to ultimately realize that I don't, I don't even think I'm going to take this car after, after this whole experience and during, during the five or six hours that I was in the dealership I was searching for a way to do the same thing online and quickly realized that there was no way to do a new vehicle transaction on the Internet. And in my case specifically at least. So at the end of that day did a little more research and I I committed to trying to do this and that's how the company started and as they say, the rest is history. Cool. How long ago was that? That was about two and a half years ago. Half years ago. Cool. Scot:    Awesome. And then Pat, how do you intersect into the story? Patrick:    Oh I had met Nathan from a previous my previous place of work where we played in the, in the automotive data dms data space and actually had approached Nathan had learned about the company in today. If you have a need for dms data, we can help you. He said, no thanks. But we kept in touch and at that point kind of kept an eye on him and he was starting to get some, some traction, a real traction and I immediately saw sort of the need or the hole if you will. Patrick:    There had been other services out there that could present a savings to the consumer, but at the end of the day, and I'm a huge leasing fan, both of my cars are currently leased and have been leased for the last 10, 12 plus years. I saw kind of the fit immediately. So we met in Brooklyn about a year and a half ago and I think I made an offer at that first meeting. I'll pretty much maybe the next day. I think it was the next day. We, we had a really good sort of connection where similar but very different at the same time. And we work well together. So it's been a, it's been a blast. It's all, it's been about a year and a half. It feels like 10 years, but but it's been an awesome ride so far. Scot:    Awesome. So I, I also have a lot of co-founders and partners. Usually I'm described as the arsonist and they're the firefighters that kind of what you guys have going on here, probably like the fires you get to put them out. Patrick:    That's pretty well said. Yeah. Yeah. Scot:    So Nathan, you had the idea you wanted to solve this. So give us kind of some highlights. Over the last two years, Nathan:    I knew nothing about car leasing, car financing almost zero about the overall industry. I actually was an investor in a, in a solar panel integration business right around 2008. After I sold my previous company and one of the companies that we did this solar panel array for was a very large Mercedes Benz, Mercedes Benz dealership in Queens. And the owner Michael Cohen was just a really friendly guy and as I started to think about this business, I said, who do I know in auto? And I knew nobody. And I said, okay, well I'll reach out to this Guy Michael Cohen. I went to one of the operators of that business that I was in investor and I said, can you make this introduction? He said, sure. I met Michael and I told him about what we were doing and I'll never forget it. Nathan:    I think this is the first time I'm actually saying this publicly. We were sitting around his board table and he goes, you sure you want to do this? And I was like, no. He goes, I'm warning you. This is really, really hard. And I don't, I don't even know if anybody can solve it. And by that he meant providing an accurate monthly lease payment for a consumer in real time on an app and then actually giving the consumer the Amazon experience of completing the transaction. And that just fired me up and I was like, Yup, I'm going to do this. I had already spoken to my team that was working on me with something else and I said, we're going to sort of pivot into this. And again, most of the team were actually based in Israel engineers, developers and so on. Nathan:    And they were like, Carly seeing what there is no car leasing there. They had no idea what I was talking about. And we just dove into the deep end of the pool from day one and started to figure it out. And Michael made some introductions and very quickly learned how this works. We understood, but we, we started to focus on, on the, on the technology side of it and we then focused on the brick and mortar side of it and then the consumer side of it and so on and so forth. And slowly over time things started to come together. And finally we needed to sign up a few dealers because we're a marketplace. And I was like, okay, so this is like an entirely new beast. How am I going to do this? I'd never come in, you know, face to face with a, with trying to sell something to a, to an owner, principal at a dealership. Nathan:    And myself and my creative director said, you know what, let's do this. We took screenshots of the app, we put them onto a big whiteboard type of placard and we printed them. And I walked into these car dealerships in Brooklyn, New York, a a fine Jewish kid with the Omnicon has had into these car dealerships. And I said, can I speak to the owner please holding up this big placard of screenshots of an app? And they was like, you need a car, can I help you with a Honda? And I was like, no, no, no. I want to show them something. And believe it or not. Some first general managers came out and they looked at it for a mint and they said, what are you selling? And then I eventually got to own our principals. They looked at it, they immediately saw the value prop and what we were doing and how different it was. It was available on the Internet at the time. And some of the largest regional dealer groups in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut signed up very, very quickly once they saw the value prop. And then we slowly grew from there to where we are today over a thousand dealerships and approximately 15 markets and hundreds of thousands of consumers using the app. And it's still really, really early days. So there's a, there's a long road ahead. Scot:    Awesome. So so I'm gonna ask a bunch of Newbie questions to make sure I understand. So you guys go into the dealers are you competing with their alternative leasing thing or are you partnering with that? We're part, we're completely partnering with them. So, if I'm a Mercedes and I have a Daimler finance thing that's doing the lease, you guys partner with those guys to make it easier for the consumer. You're not, you're not competing with example.  Nathan:    So we’re a marketplace where there’s the dealership on one side offering their vehicles and their consumers on the other and our technology right in the middle that sort of makes this an incredibly fast, seamless lease transaction without ever talking to a dealer without ever walking into the dealer. So we're really the first company to take what is normally such an arduous brick and mortar process and, and turn it into a seamless online experience. Scot:    Do I have to be kind of like outside of the dealership to do this or can I be in the dealer using the app? Nathan:    You can be anywhere is when, as long as you've got Internet you know, and you can download the app or go to the website. You can be anywhere you want. Scot:    So I go to the dealer and I say, I want that car. And then they say how do you want to finance it? And then if I choose lease, then I have to download your app. Nathan:    No very different. So we're like imagine you wanted to buy an airline ticket and you went to Expedia. So you'd see basically an aggregation of all of the airlines and flights. If you were flying from let's say JFK to Raleigh and you'd see a list of flights and prices next to it, it's essentially a marketplace for airlines and for hotels and what have you. So we do the same thing. You don't need to go into the dealership, you download the app or go to our website, you type in the vehicle that you're looking for or the vehicle type. And you will see actual vehicles from dealers near you with pre-calculated monthly payments that are probably unbeatable as far as price goes. Scot:    I gather enough information about me that you're using that as an input into the underlying credit scores and all that kind of jazz. Exactly. So when you register, Nathan:    We gather some personal information on you. And then behind the scenes were taking all of the necessary industry data about the vehicle from the dealership. You know, from the manufacturer, so you know, you know, rebates and incentives that may reduce your monthly payments and reduce the selling price of the vehicle or what have you. And in real time in the background, we're calculating all of that to show you a monthly payment with an actual due at signing and you shop the way you would shop on a regular ecommerce site. You choose what you like, you put it into your cart, you place the order, you upload your driver's license and answer some credit questions. The dealer then gets that transaction, that order, and they process the order for you and deliver the vehicle to you the next day. Patrick:    Oh, so I don't have to sit there for 12 hours telling them a million times. I don't need this. Scot:    Exactly. Exactly. Patrick:    Wow. That's awesome. So you've kind of taken that Carvana level experience, applied it to leasing. Okay. I got it. I didn't, I didn't realize this direct to consumer on the front end. That makes a lot more sense now. Yeah. Cool. And then the so, so padded, it sounds like dealers are gobbling this up. Is it, you're just essentially an order takers? Am I understanding that? Scot:    I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it order just yet. We've got a, it's my favorite thing to say. It's got a lot. Hilary entailed interests, great dealer in that interest. Patrick:    We've got, we have built a good sales team that is, is literally boots on the ground knocking on doors, you know, very similar to what Nate did in the very early days. But yet to your point, we've got five of the 10 largest national auto auto dealer groups on the platform today, including Lithia and Asbury. So there the dealers are seeing the value pretty quickly when we, you know, have 10 minutes to sit with a dealer, principal and owner GM. Because really for, for them it's a similar experience to a consumer where by the time we pull a dealership into the fold or alert them on a, on an order, it's a VIN-specific structured lease with a driver's license and a credit app. So it's essentially here, Mr Julia, here's a silver platter, confirm inventory, get the credit approved and we're off and running. So it's a really pretty hyper efficient process for both consumer and dealer. Yeah. Awesome. So I looked at crunchbase. Looks like you've raised according to crunchbase, they're not always right at about $30 million. Yup. Tell us a little bit about the, had you raised venture capital before? Is this your first venture back to business? Nathan:    I had raised early stage venture capital in the past in two previous startups that I founded. And in this specific instance we've raised just under $30 million to date in a friends and family seed round and then a series a and Patrick:    Do series a series a in North Carolina was like $1 million. Scot:    Okay. It's a bay area. Susan. Nathan:    We did a, our series a was 23 million. And actually it was interesting because we had a lot of interests a lot of inbound interest. And then one company took the entire series a IAC, which is the a, which is a, a media and, and a technology conglomerate out of New York City. We're very lucky to have them as investors. At this early stage, they just invested a big chunk. And Toro I saw that. Yes, they just invested about a quarter of $1 billion in Touro. Scot:    Nice. Good. You can get get series being wind up. The so it seems like you're at the sweet spot, so you're kind of like, you're in this, you're you're, you know exactly what investors are looking for. So you're, you know, don't have a lot of employees or marketplace. You're a Fintech, you kinda check and then you're in the auto category. So you're, you check a lot of boxes there. Congratulations on figuring that out. Nathan:    Thank you. I, I can't take all the credit for that. And I also would say investors will never tell you you're exactly what they're looking for. We were lucky enough that, that things sort of clicked for the, for the right investor group at the time that we were looking for capital. Scot:    Cool. So, so I get the supply side and the dealers are there. Do they help you bring consumers into the app or do you have to promote the app yourself? Nathan:    We have to promote the app ourselves. And that's not an easy task. As you know, customer acquisition is is difficult, especially when they're bombarded with, with so many ads and so many people, so many companies trying to get their attention at the same time. So we're out there, you know, grinding every day for recognition. Scot:    So you're doing the traditional Google and all those kinds of aspects. Yep. But I'm an internet marketer at heart and so while you may have a high CAC LTV of Elisa's, like pretty substantial, which was helps on the front end of that, right? Nathan:    Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly correct. There is a very large LTV, even if, whether it's one lease or the lifetime value of that consumer, if they start leasing in their mid twenties and they listen to their seventies yes. While the CAC is hefty right up front, there's some fantastic payback over the long term. Scot:    Awesome. Cool. So I think that's super helpful to kind of frame the rest of the discussion of kind of going up to 30,000 feet and you're, you're in the thick of it. In the vehicle 2.0 podcast, we talk about connected car changing ownership, Evie Nav. I'm going to spend the bulk of our time on changing ownership cause you guys are Kinda like, you know, sitting right there and in the sweet spot of that. Do you the big trend right in your space is this subscription kind of model. It seems like that would be a natural kind of element for, you know, so you have some people looking at subscriptions, kind of almost like a rental model and then others kind of extending a lease and kind of providing some flexibility inside of Elise w you have any kind of point of view of where we're going to go as far as ownership. Nathan:    I think subscription as a category is a very interesting category. And there's a ton of opportunity there and there are some significant players already that are getting customers and traction and funding and so on. But the economics behind that are still a bit foggy, if you will. A lot of it is around used car vehicles. A lot of this credit, credit risk there. There's inventory risk. You know, there's, there's a, there's a tech risk there is how do we value the residual value of a vehicle if a consumer uses it for a month and then returns it and then I need to release it or resell it and so on and so forth. So it's an interesting category. It has a future, no doubt. But I, I would, I would compare it to, you know, web 1.0 mid nineties when sort of e-commerce was just trying to find traction. Nathan:    Travel was fine trying to find traction. There were a lot of companies that fell out and failed in trying to, you know, figure this stuff out until ultimately it was figured out and you have the you know, those that have succeeded. So that's possible that, that will happen here as well. But it's certainly a category that we keep a close eye on. And in what we're doing in particular we're thinking about these things as well and we're trying to make the, the, we look at ourselves as sort of an ecosystem for if you're going to have a car in your driveway, where did you get it? How did you insure it? How are you how are you servicing it? What are you doing with it when you're not using it? You know, can you capitalize on that? Can you make money on it? How are you paying for it and so on and so forth. So what be it, subscription or modernizing the transaction slash ownership you know, s [inaudible] and everything else that goes around it. It's really interesting and it just needs, it needs hard work, execution capital and time to prove it. Scot:    Does two goods, consumer to kind of download your app and they're active in there. You know, you don't want them to just kind of come back four years after the lease is over. So. Exactly. So I can imagine you guys have a lot of ideas around how to extend that. Precisely. Yep. Interesting. So, so pat, you're out there calling on dealerships. Are they, are they so distracted by these changes going on that they don't have time to think about something tactical like, hey, how do I make leases better? Or, or is this really, they're so transactional driven that you can get their attention? Patrick:    Yeah, it's a bit of both. So they're certainly transactional, right? Where they're still, depending on the audience, also still a bit shortsighted where they're worried about today, this week, what does my month look like? I gotta I gotta move units. Which is good. They're also, they're also aware of what's going on in the space, but I think a lot of them just are a bit I don't want to say confused, but there's so much, they hear so much and they have so much stuff thrown at them that they don't, many cases they just don't know what to do and what, how to do it and how to change the process in the store. This, some of the stores that we're working with, they're really super successful with us. It honestly just comes back down to the people in the store, right? So there's a great store outside of Philadelphia that we use sort of as our poster child. There's two people in this store that take honker orders all day having, I mean every day long and they're moving 20 plus units a month through us. And that's been consistent for the last year and a half. It's at Chrysler Dodge jeep store and it really comes down to their process and the Scot:    And they, they, they were very progressive and came on board very early on. So I think some dealers are still sort of catching up. Some are ahead of the curve. It really comes down to the ownership. And how kind of plugged in, they are really cool. One thing that we've seen in the ecommerce world as a marketplace, we'll come out and do some really innovative stuff and then the rest of the world it'll, it'll kinda raise the bar and then the rest of the world has to kind of react. Yet if you guys felt that where the traditional dealer is now feeling, you know, because you've created this seamless experience I kinda liken it to the Starbucks app. Like would you use the Starbucks app and then you forget to use it and you're in line buying two people and you're like sticking a needle in your eye. You're like, well, I forgot the Starbucks app. So then I imagine you're going to cause the whole leasing thing to get easier at dealers over time. Are you starting to feel that happening? Nathan:    Absolutely. I, I'd say from the consumer side for sure. I think it's it's fair to say that once a consumer has leased the car through our app, they will never do it the old way. So that's for certain, once they experienced this, this this digital experience on the dealership side as well. I think to Pat's point, the dealers that are embracing this and putting resources behind that and realize that this is the future, just love it. You know, and they, they, they rave about knockout deals in, in, in a few minutes and, and, and so on. And so forth. So yes, but again, to be clear, it's still very early and there's a lot that we have to prove and still a lot of adoption necessary. Scot:    Cool. I know you guys are busy out there conquering the world. So final question. If folks really want to learn more, obviously they can download the app and look at some leases that, that seems to be like an obvious one. But then maybe online. Do you guys, other than the honker website, do you guys publish any thought leadership or active on Linkedin or Twitter, any of that kind of stuff? Nathan:    Very active on linkedin and Twitter. And other social media platforms. The Honcker.com is now Sim similar to the app. You can do a transaction, you don't need to download the app if you don't want to. Most of our customers prefer to, to transact through the app. And yes, there is some thought leadership. There is a blog where we're posting stuff too on okr.com/blog. So there's a, there's a lot out there and we encourage engagement. Feedback and other communication. We've learned more from, from listening and being attentive to our customer base and our dealer base and the broader industry than we could ever have possibly figured out on our own. So we encourage our consumers, whether they've done a transaction or not, or just browsing or otherwise have thoughts to reach out and, you know, tell us what you think. Scot:    Awesome. Nathan, Pat, thanks for joining us. Nathan:    Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

EP178 - Chewy IPO and Listener Questions Part 2  Recap of Chewy IPO (Chewy S1) Listener Questions Part 2: Q5: Nick Barrett Would be really interested to hear your guys thoughts on how an established e-commerce store should expand into new product categories. Is it a good idea to launch new niche websites through Shopify to do this, or is it better to keep focus within a single e-commerce site and expand within that? Q6 Rebecca Saunders Have you seen any recent data on the costs of customer acquisition online via the various channels, and how these have changed over time? I hear a lot anecdotally but haven’t managed to access any reliable data. Thanks in advance! Love the show btw (all the way from rainy London). Q7 Amit Agarwal Have you ever done some research on e-commerce subscriptions such as amazon subscribe and save or autoship? Also, what is the industry trends for bark box, hello fresh and other bundle subscriptions? Q8: Parker Block  Hey Scot, What do you see as likely business implications of rising appetite for anti-trust action (see FTC/DOJ announcement , Lina Khan joining Congress staff, etc ) on platforms which monetize  consumer data ? Q9: Baxter Overman How do you put consumers at ease with in-home delivery services? (i.e. Walmart grocery). Wouldn’t drop-off when the customer is home for certain items (or lockers) be easier to sell? Q10 Aakash Gupta What’s your favorite app that you’ve downloaded in the last few months? Q11 Twitter: Natalie Dillon mentioned us as one of her top podcasts – thanks Natalie! Q12 Ted: Mixed use retail entertainment? Q 13 Michelle Grant  Thoughts on pricing strategy in an omnichannel world where price transparency is high and filled with bots to find the lowest price Q15 Melissa Burdick The advertising race to the wallet – We’ve seen some big news lately: Target in talks to buy Triad, Walmart who is bringing advertising in house and just made a key hire Suresh as their CTO….where is this going for ads?  Is it going to be a war for brands wallet? Is everyone going to take a page from the Amazon playbook, bring ads in house, and move to a self-service performance advertising, PPC world? Where is the $ coming/going to come from?  In the chart below, it looks like Amazon is taking from Google.  (I asked a big CPG this question and I asked where is this coming from – or are you just getting more $$?  Their answer – more $$). How should brands prepare? Q16 Melissa Burdick Is Amazon going to do to walgreens/bartells/CVS what they did to the bookstore (kill the bookstore to build a bookstore) with the acquisition of pill pack + private label (aspirin, etc) and enable the ability to sell mass CPG profitably? Q17 Melissa Burdick Can Scot please update his Amazon Scape – how has it changed? Q18 Melissa Burdick When is Spiffy coming to Seattle? Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 178 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, June 18th, 2019. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 178 being recorded on Tuesday June 18th 2019 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here to host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:38] He Jason and welcome back Jason Scott your listeners well we if you listen to good ol episode 177 we had so many listener questions we could not get to the mall. So this is kind of a episode 2 or continuation of that episode before we jump into a star questions though we a while ago on a new show about 30 days ago now we talked about the chewy S1 and since then she has gone Publix we wanted to give you a quick update on what’s going on with you once you take us to the Jason. Jason: [1:14] So they did their IP aware According to some Tuesday it was Friday do I have that right. And you’ll tell me if this is good or not I think it is the day they had announced a rainy a price range for the offering at like 19 and 21 bucks and they actually came out at $22. That’s a little higher than the range they have a lot of good activity and they closed closed event on Friday it was at 35 bucks which is like 80%. So That seems like a pretty successful offering at least compared with like all the the Uber news or the with news. Scot: [2:07] This is the only been one to one IPO process and you know what would they tell you you’re so far. Knock on wood so what they what they tell you is that the Brain Trust at Goldman Sachs these kind of place is you want to go to one school of thought and this is not with the bankers agree with so you have to kind of navigate your way through all this obviously you got a fox and how so she was here once thought is you price your I get the maximum because that’s what’s best for the company the bankers would tell you to look your building long-term shareholder relationships so you want to give these shareholders that take a risk in your company a little bit of a benefit so you price a little bit lower than kind of where you can look at Newburgh lift they both would be kind of what’s the bankers would say kind of broken IPOs where they traded below their IPO price therefore now if you’re someone that participate in IPO you feel sheepish because you came in it what was a $20 now it’s trading at 18 where is this true IPO performed a lot better in a bottle the bankers would recommend I said if you want to come to clear range up there can a price above that range slightly and then have kind of a good pop and then stay there and then come out with your results and then kind of beet raisin your off the races did you could do. [3:30] Secondary offerings happy happy shareholders by wear stockings all kinds of good things happen at kind of tend to think this is the way to do it and they did really well. Jason: [3:43] Yeah now a couple of things that make it particularly interesting in the the sort of Commerce retail world so folks may remember. Chewy was acquired by PetSmart a couple years ago and it was a big deal at the time I was over three billion dollar. Acquisition. And so a incident PetSmart is now spinning off chewy as a separate public company and so I Like You by. And read my notes correctly that that close kind of values the company at that north of 4 billion dollars. Weather so acquire company for 3 billion ticket public at 14 billion sounds like. Pretty exciting acquisition for acquisition and transaction for PetSmart do I have that right. Scot: [4:42] I guess yeah they’re kind of Phoenix it’s almost like a private Equity, think it’s unusual for a company to do what they did cuz usually you fold it in you. You get rid of the brand overtime you make it your eCommerce brand so so young to the degree they have integrated it you could argue it Kris Russell because you know now I’m Siri chewy could be acquired maybe I do think that they sell and over half so I think they can control that but let’s say they do a secondary in overtime their ownership get step know maybe they need to sell some swimming in debts and then let’s say doomsday scenario Amazon acquires chewy and your PetSmart that’s what’s running your e-commerce site then you can kind of have a you know really bad day for someone at PetSmart to listen to see what happens with that integration now that you have these kind of. The amoeba is being pulled apart here and and how does that work for PetSmart. Jason: [5:42] Yeah so that’s kind of what I was going was like from a pure Financial standpoint if we look at it as a banker like it’s it’s hard not to see this as a win but but for your point. [5:55] PetSmart was not a particularly digitally Savvy brick and mortar retailer prior to this acquisition so I can the time part of this acquisition was to bring more digital competency to PetSmart and once pain the PetSmart team arrived PetSmart like really abdicated digital responsibility to that team so like as far as I understand it. There are fewer. Digital people at PetSmart today than there were before the acquisition so they’ve they’ve essentially made themselves extra dependent on chewy and it’s now not clear. What. [6:36] Responsibility going forward she will have for PetSmart digital footprint like you can imagine they have a deal to run petsmart.com. I haven’t explicitly seen that but that that seems like a logical assumption but you know what happens with all the. The start of omni-channel things and you know when PetSmart wants to launch new services or they want to like Market the Veterinary Service veterinarian services that she doesn’t sell but PetSmart does through their stores. Like they’re certainly isn’t like a really strong digital team at PetSmart to be solving the. The start of Digital customer experiences for PetSmart so it it it does it feels to me like it definitely create some risk. For PetSmart and I’ll be interesting whether they they have like. Chewy braintrust walked up some how or whether they’re going to try to rebuild their own their own capability there I guess I just it’s an interesting. [7:36] I think to follow so I found that interesting and then my assumption is that the kind of felt like they had to do it because. The the one interesting thing about the chewy idea that we haven’t mentioned is that that chewy is losing money, and like despite some like phenomenal hockey stick. Customer acquisition growth and sales growth and they have over three years they went from under a billion dollars to 3.5 billion dollars on sales they still haven’t found their way to profitability so your PetSmart you own this fast-growing money-losing venture. And you used a lot of debt to buy them so like. That they’re not helping you pay down the debt you used to buy them because they’re losing money by doing that idea o u stand up a bunch of cash in my understanding is the whole IPO like. Like tried to raise about a billion dollars and 900 million of that went straight to death from the PetSmart acquisition so for your point like it sounds like going public makes it easier to do subsequent raises. So maybe that. The way to bring more operating cash. Chewy but like there’s not a billion dollars in the bank as a result of this IPO that you can have spend on marketing that they didn’t have last year. [8:58] It’s all very interesting is going to be interesting to watch watch how it all plays out and then I guess the other thing is fun for me and you cover this on a previous show a little bit but like. In the process of going public May disclose a bunch of details that we don’t normally get to see and so I know there’s some interesting metrics that came out. They they do a really good cohort analysis of a evaluate. How sticky their customers are from each year that they acquire them and how valuable those customers are in so they have a like in their filings they have a nice what we call a wedding cake kind of showing. Each of those previous years cohorts. Growing in value over time and have some really favorable long-term metrics our customer retention is amazing a big chunk of their customers are on subscriptions are longer-term customers are continuing to spend more and so like. In general they’re having to spend a lot of money to acquire each new customer but the the lifetime value of those customers like is a significant multiple of that customer acquisition cost, so it just spend together inside peek at a pretty big size e-commerce business. Scot: [10:14] Yeah you know the history of e-commerce is littered with companies that they do all this math off of cackle TV and they’re using kind of known LTV, acquire new customers off that no nail TV and then at some point you get through your lines cut across and that LTD of that new customer surprisingly goes down over time because the early days you’re you’re bring in these these early adopters their Advocates they stick around and then the Slater customers you acquire you know maybe they’re just sampling and that kind of thing so it’ll be interesting to see. At the same time Irwin size applying data science and machine learning all his new technologies to try to fight all this in the sea. How to do another big thing when you go public as you have to decide. Which of these metrics are going to publish Schnitzer it’s pretty tricky thing cuz you kind of you know you kind of have to think well metric out there instructions down that’s bad so you can you can actually have a much different and you should have different kind of TV is you put out this one versus on your quarterly so will cover the first quarterly and no be interesting to see if they if they continue with a really transparent Buick faculty because that’s one they had some really good date on them. Jason: [11:31] Yeah it’ll be fun to see. Scot: [11:33] Cool swell I’m springing this on you but did you have a chance to look at the big Facebook crypto announcement today Libra new crypto-currency. Jason: [11:45] Yeah you should have spring stuff on me cuz you know I did all day so I just rushed to the hotel room to get to chat with you so tell us about. Scot: [11:57] Well I’ll just point point listeners to it the immediate reaction from Regulators was oh heck no so the other side quotes from the EU and both parties in the US saying we’re not really sure we trust Facebook with this so that that’s kind of I’m still adjusting it and it looks like they had a big team here the guy that got from PayPal but they put on chats Dave music. He’s leading this so it’s a big pretty big initiative at Facebook it’s what’s called a constant. Constant coin so it it’s kind of going to an individual value versus versus the US dollar does versus floating around the reason the white paper it looks like it’s going. It’s going after being a payment mechanism, like miles and that kind of thing for people. Within the Facebook Network they do have several people that have signed on to this kind of governing body eBay was announced today is also looking at it location being that the company Side dance this governing body will ultimately takes this currency along with the u.s. dollar other payments down the road so it just feels like it’s the payment thing to watch to see how it goes. Jason: [13:23] So do you think the the Winklevoss twins will be all in in this will be the Zuckerberg Winklevoss reunions. Scot: [13:29] That direction was an article where they have had something to do with it I know that’s compliment you can find them. [13:45] I think that they were asked to apine on it because they they have put a lot of stuff into the crypto thing. Jason: [13:53] I don’t know what we’ll see how it all plays out like superficially. I I simultaneously and surprise and admire Facebook’s ability to sort of ignore their currents. Situation and launching new products so I do I do feel like. Visa V the other big technology giants like Facebook is it the biggest sort of trust deficit of all of them and yet they continue to launch products that like. At the core require like this really strong level of consumer trust for adoption so launching portal and putting like on microphone and camera and everyone’s living room and the launching of cryptocurrencies likes that there’s some hotspot doing those kind of launches when it it it feels like you’re you’re not exactly killing it in terms of earning your user stress. Scot: [14:44] Okay one of our one of our many interns just look this up and they actually it so Facebook had talked to the Zuckerberg they have an exchange called Gemini and they’re not sure they’re to work together but the Winklevoss folks said you know it’s time to let bygones be bygones and waste will probably be Frenemies so if you’re very Millennial wait till dresses. Jason: [15:07] Let’s jump into listener questions. [15:19] Questionnaire questionnaire questionnaire questions. Scot: [15:24] Yes sir we are so we covered for last time so I can start out here with number 5 this was from Nick Barrett and it came through Facebook I believe Nick is from Australia or New Zealand so I don’t know if that puts it in context but there you go I think he works for this company called Mighty ape which is kind of like GameStop it’s like an FYE but an American kind of context to hear your guys thoughts and I’ll and established e-commerce store could expand in a new product categories is it a good idea to launch new Niche websites to Shopify to do this or is it better to keep Focus within a single e-commerce site and expand with a nut I’ll take a stab at this kind of depends so I’ll use a I use a metaphor here of orbits right so so at the at the at the center of this orbit is your existing customer in your existing e-commerce experience I think customers will. Pretty easily let you go one or two orbits out you start to go three or four orbits out then you really need to start thinking about that customers buying experience and the messaging it doesn’t make sense to have it going to tie it to something on a closer orbit to what you’re doing today so use example it looks like a Mighty Eighth the selling games Collectibles those kinds of things so. [16:50] You know another example of a store like yours is ThinkGeek here in the US and you’ll think he did a really good job of starting with your muesli. [17:00] Kind of collectible stuff and then bringing in toys stand life-size figures and then they going deep into categories so then in the store are they and the lion to have a pretty, deep Star Wars category a Harry Potter category Etc and then online and license the brands and then there’s there’s actually extra deep in this category So within the Star Wars world. They did, cleverly came up with a sleeping bag that looks like a tan tan and so they they kind of got so deep into this vertical they’re actually kind of able to come up with their own products around that. But you wouldn’t go in there expecting to find a non geechie pizza oven or something strange like that so so you know. [17:49] Two to the same argument if if you guys wanted to add kind of your you know you’re on private label Collectibles I’ll keep that in the main side what say you wanted to get into something totally out of what you’re doing today like I don’t know Sporting Goods or hammocks or something like that then I do think you know having another e-commerce site is the way to do it you know what. Yeah what you didn’t necessarily but all all kind of kind of keep replying to thread is how do you find what to add in this is where it’s really interesting set a channel advisor we have 3000 customers and the overwhelming majority of them are Supernatural and it’s always fascinating to me to find out how they. Figure out what products to sell a lot of them spend a lot of time date of money so don’t go through comments feedback on products they look at no search results that’s a cool place on your own website to go find things you’re what are people searching for on your website and not fighting that’s really interesting kind of area to learn a lot about consumer Behavior a lot of them use tools like camelcamelcamel this one called jungle Scout and then there you can go look at Amazon’s data my favorite example it won’t surprise listeners is a Star Wars example so these guys are our customer and they like. [19:10] Like kind of a GameStop in FYE Etc solo Star Wars stuff and they’re trying to look for new products they had a license with Lucas sounds do what do they had the image of Han Solo Carbonite that they put on almost everything they did a phone case but it started poking around and using some his tools they win the Star Wars category of Amazon Founders All these people looking for Star Wars beach towels yo when you’re out in your bathing suits on the beach you’re always so obviously want to Star Wars down so they came out with Han Solo in carbonite on a beach towel you are really big one so it looks like it’s on the beach cuz she’s there. And that became a top selling product on Amazon very quickly and they should develop that product by looking at null search results in finding those little imbalances between supply and demand that people are looking for a date use that create a product extension anchor so ankers electronics company in there is. Picture in China or Taiwan they started mining the Amazon feedback and people would buy. [20:23] Chargers and accessories and Illinois say one glad this has two USB ports but I have 6 devices looking at you Jason and you know I really wish you had a a charge faster and be it had reports. I think a lot of the anchor kind of lease early products were developed off skimming and parsing and really understanding the Amazon product feedback and then saying alright this product at 3 stars why can we develop a product. Our own just got five stars in address to Consumers. Jason: [20:58] Yeah and I mostly agree a side note on anchor like I literally have to have anchor products delivered to a email stop because my wife has banned me from buying Morty. Totally has my number. And one piece of bad news for you Scott I don’t know if you’re aware of this but I think was purchased by GameStop and effective July 2nd they’re shutting it down. Scot: [21:23] Oh man I didn’t know that. Jason: [21:25] Yeah so it’s not going to be a a section of a GameStop versus a separate site so. Scot: [21:32] Mulligan artist closes stores. Jason: [21:35] I don’t know maybe per your point and M4 Next original question again GameStops hoping to. Aggregate that traffic from their side and Think Geek and do more effective cross-selling because they. Basically I agree with your answer but I would almost come to it from the opposite and I would just say, it’s extremely hard there very few businesses that can be very profitable by selling a single item in a car and there are very few businesses that can be profitable by only selling an item once to a customer and so in general you’re looking for businesses where you have multiple products for the customer put in in your reason for the test come back and shot from you multiple times and so to me that means. Looking at your existing existing customer base as you suggested and finding adjacent products that might also appeal to those those customers. In the early days of e-commerce there was this artificial thing. SEO from Google search engine optimization bring much favored keyword stuffing in the URL and so you saw a lot of. [22:48] Individual sites that were selling one item in the name that URL after the item they were selling and that him for a while that that could be very effective Google’s dramatically depreciated the the effect of keywords in the URL so you know it now makes more sense to aggregate as much traffic you as you can on a single URL and sell a bunch of stuff but what I would suggest is having a lot of different content for that different stuff in different landing pages for that different stuff so for your point you’re selling Video Star Wars video games over here at Star Wars beach towels over there you might have separate landing pages for those two and you might have separate like digital marketing campaigns for those two so it kind of feels like a separate site in that sense but once you get there and get that beach towel I can I can try to cross sell you the video games and try to make you up a bigger more valuable. Does I guess that’s that’s the way I would think of. Scot: [23:43] Yeah it’s kind of fun fact two big companies were created off that crazed were you just putting one product on a domain name hayneedle and Wayfair Wayfair had like coffee tables kitchen tables dining chairs that all these Furniture things and you go to dining chairs if you like just dining chairs slice of the things they ended up ruling all that stuff up both of them did and and getting rid of that strategy one. Question number 6 is from Rebecca Saunders have you seen any recent data on the cost of customer acquisition so this is a question which we just kind of chewy online via the various channels and how these are changed over time I hear a lot and it totally but haven’t managed to access any reliable data thanks in advance love the show by the way all the way from rainy London. Jason: [24:34] Well thanks for the question Rebecca on answering from rainy Seattle today good night my SAT answer is. Generally know why there are people that publish short of some industry data on customer acquisition that I would submit to you that it’s almost completely useless because. The variance depending on the specific industry in the specific customer circumstances are so great that looking at these. Averages are are somewhat meaningless and so you know you both have like. Companies that are selling individual packs of Band-Aids you know for $3 online and guess what your customer acquisition cost has to be extremely low when you’re selling a $3 item with free shipping. And you have customer selling $10,000 diamond rings and. Not surprisingly that the customer acquisition cost can be much higher for that if you’re a company that’s already doing billions of dollars in sales right you. To get meaningful growth you have to reach a really broad audience and that tends to be more expensive per user for customer acquisition if you’re a small startup. You can very cost-effectively acquire some really valuable customer so your customer acquisition ends up being a lot lower so. [26:03] As much as I’d love to point you in a particular resource and say hey just check out these numbers. I guess I really don’t feel like other companies numbers are in less than a direct competitor of yours somehow are likely to be that useful to you I will tell you you know what I was digging into that chewy S1 a little bit and for example in 2017 chewy added about 3.7 million new customers in the matted 3.8 million new customers in 2018 but that’s 2017 customers they spent about 60 bucks a customer to acquire around and for this 2018 customers they spent $101 a customer. So there are not a lot of businesses that are much smaller in scale than chewy that could afford that kind of. Customer acquisition cost but if you look at Chuy’s lifetime value and the dispenza previous cohorts if these new cohorts Behavior chewy the way the previous ones that has a Scott sort of alluded to earlier then like even spending $100 a customer could be. A tapered an investment like a it’s a risky one so so we’re going to have to wait and see but I would definitely not look at Chuy’s numbers and go oh gosh for my business I should spend a hundred bucks a customer because it works. Scot: [27:22] Yeah and dumb ass gets in dead to your point the reason it’s hard to compare your business when Elsa’s you’re not only are you different categories you know Supernatural businesses where they essentially say look if I can spend a dollar and make 3 I will I will consider it almost cogs and I will have an unlimited budget. Other people kind of say you’re the kind of come from an advertising View and they took people to come from marketplaces they tend to have that cogs kind of totality cuz they’re looking at it as a percentage of sales people that come at it from the ADI to SeaWorld they’re looking at a return on ad spend the inverse of a Crepes and they’ll say look I’m going to have a budget and demands that budget to a 4X or whatever it is returned my dad stood socially really part of its Theology and and and some of it is other times I’ve seen really big companies for the CEO says I want to be number one to strollers and then you say well that’s insanely. Expensive in your money I want to be number one in strollers and. [28:37] It doesn’t matter cuz when the boss looks at strollers and your shoulders not there you’re going to get fired so you don’t really care what he’s done or you know they are building a Brandt and they don’t really care about a transactional kind of a Roi on on the stent there so it’s a hard hard to nail down. And it does kind of depend in my experience where people come from if they come from that ad world of that Marketplace Road. [29:06] What’s your view on return on that seventies. Jason: [29:10] Yeah I mean I tend to be sort of green eyeshade out of about it I I like to have a pretty short return on ad spend to make the investment the. Because frankly like the more expensive the customer is to acquire the least likely the customer is to be very loyal so in general I like those customers I can earn organically and cultivate a lot more than the customers that I have to go out and by so like you know for sure Mary meters suggestion I’d way rather have some sort of freemium model what I have customers coming to me and find the use my product for free on a limited basis and then turn them into paid customers and and sort of do growth hacking then spend a fortune buying a customer and trying to monetize those that being said I work for a giant ad company and that’s mostly what we. What we do. [30:13] Spend a bunch of money to to acquire customers and it absolutely can work. It’s not again it it’s somewhat related to your risk profile and. And comfort level I will say the one thing one nice thing about being a small company a lot of my clients are very large and and they have to acquire huge audiences and. The markets that have huge audiences that have inventory or tend to be pretty efficient so it’s really hard to get a good deal but one of the nice things about being a small company is you can play in a lot of small customer acquisition formats where the market isn’t very efficient yet and you can. I often get outside return so no being a in early player on Instagram when people weren’t advertising on Instagram was a great way to make money or being a you know a really excellent executor on Pinterest or even like fractional television versus heading to buy Super Bowl spots or different things like that like there are definitely ways to sort of piecemeal together audiences to get an outside return as long as you can get by with a a relatively modest audience size but you know as soon as you get into having a choir or million new customers a year to hit your numbers. You’re you’re pretty much stuck thing the market rate for customer acquisition. Scot: [31:42] Yeah where it where I’ve seen small businesses get upside down on this is day they take care of an Amazon eBay way of looking at things the applied to Google and they kind of think all right eye I just spent 20% took Wireless customer and then what they don’t realize is the next time that customer comes to they’re going to probably come through Google so now and then now you had another drink song that one in so I know what you’re saying is if you think you’re acquiring a customer for a hundred Google and you’re getting a $300 kind of LTD with them they’re heading Google twice more and you’re paying another couple hundred bucks. Upside down you really look like to have to get especially with the CPC stuff and and you have to be real careful with with how your measure know that. [32:28] Question number 7 this is from a bit Agarwal have you ever done some research on e-commerce subscription such as Amazon subscribe and save our auto-ship also what is industry trends for BarkBox hellofresh and other subscriptions. Jason: [32:42] Great question I’ll be curious what Scott’s answer is because I’m always looking for better data in this category than I have in general I would say like there is not a lot of traffic data it’s it’s the usual story like they’re these. Third-party data aggregators that do things that customer surveys and things to try to give us some data or there’s the universe Creek receipt scrapers like 1010data or slice a rocket and they can give us some insight into like. Amazon subscribe and save is performing versus individual products but. Those are like directional it best I haven’t seen awesome data there there’s one of the reasons that you yes one was kind of fun Chuy’s and I ever get with their trade name is for their subscription program. [33:38] 67% of all Chuy’s Revenue comes from the subscription program in as we talked about in one of the previous answers you know the real key to to profitability in an e-commerce business is about. Repeat purchases and customer retention and like there’s no better flavor of customer retention then auto-ship and so like. I’m a big fan of the tactic I haven’t always had the best third-party data to validate that tactic. The second half of your question I will I will say, yeah you asked about some of the the well-known subscription offers out there like BarkBox and hellofresh. [34:21] There’s a general sense. It’s been hard to scale those subscription services and that customer retention hasn’t been awesome and so there’s this phenomenon called subscription fatigue and in general the subscription Services tend to have a lot of churn so they don’t maintain all of last year’s subscriptions and a bunch of new ones and so there’s kind of a dirty little secret amongst the. The companies we tend to think of as subscription companies that are successful and that dirty little secret is most of them have an offering that’s not subscription-based that’s on the man ordering. And the bulk of the revenue tends to come from that on demand order so you know Stitch fix the bulk of their revenue is from. Young people that are ordering a fixes on demand rather than have a a a recurring a box coming all the time and in the. [35:22] My understanding is the BarkBox and Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s have all had like three big turn on their subscription list I think when the hair is got a choir that came to light that 80% of Harry’s Revenue was from there. Their retail deals are people walking in at Target and buying Harry’s Razors rather than being on the the the subscription program so I would say like subscriptions are really valuable thing to try to achieve and there definitely is evidence that Amazon’s program is really potent seems like chewy has a really potent program but you know you probably need to be careful about assuming it’s easy or that you’ll have great great customer retention from doing. Scot: [36:05] Yeah. I think that spot on a couple editions it it seems to work well in anything that’s replenishable I do think it’s kind of jumped the shark like I I see tons of News subscription programs for coffee and beer and wine just feels like we’re probably Pastor the subscription craze. If you’re interested in the topic that you know again one of the nerdy things I recommend is when companies go public and they file that S1. [36:36] That that is like a gold mine of data and it’s if you’re interested in these topics if you can find a company that has Nest one out there it’s really a good read because you’re you’re dealing with these companies that have managed a business cycle were talking about up to the point where it’s at a pretty good scale so so so they’re kind of on Generation 8 thinking and yeah that’s the guy you got started on Generation 1 thinking right live red and really enjoyed Stitch fix I would say you know there is a lot of negative cinnamon around Stitch fix prove the critics pretty wrong with the success they’ve had there is one is a really really good read and then when I when you read an s-1. [37:22] It’s kind of like a poop sandwich so so you know the where the bread is the poop in the good stuff’s on inside you have kind of dig in and find it the the part you want to read on this one and Skip all the way to Management’s discussion and and they’re in the Stitch fix one it’s a textbook on how they think about their cohorts and and how they fight this Trends Jason’s talking about how do you know how do you make the algorithm better and how do you also scale it with with computers instead of just people so I recommend that a good Counterpoint is Blue Apron went public and has not been successful so in a reading their ass one it’s really interesting because you know. [38:08] It’s not as strong and it’s not as clear that they’re actually getting in front of the sky turn problems so that’s a good one and then if you’re interested in the food deliveries area GrubHub is public and I find their public stuff to be very interesting as well. A good reading it going back to this one in either Coeur d’Alene updates her are so it’s hopefully that gives you something to chew on a it is hard to find a lot of like the previous couple folks asked about CAC LTV out there I like reading a case of a prospective cuz it really. Gives you an idea of how these teams are thinking about things and and I learned like a thousand things from repossessed one so I think that’s one of the best areas to go research the subscription program if you’re interested. Jason: [38:59] Yep and it just occurred to me there’s one other point we kind of touched on I’m the last person to call episode that I’ll just reiterate there’s certain segments that are much more mature and subscriptions and so that’s Professional Services and digital subscriptions Regza think Netflix Amazon Prime you know subscriptions to publishing companies Wall Street Journal newspaper all those sorts of things and if you look at how those industry of olives a couple of interesting things have happened. These aggregators have emerged because customers have subscription fatigue and their subscriptions are fragmented everywhere and it’s really annoying so you now have Amazon with a service where you do all your media subscriptions through them and they give you a single dashboard to turn on and off subscriptions and control them. [39:54] Apple just wants to be similar offering the financial institutions have noticed that people locking all the subscriptions they spend a fortune and they don’t tend to use a lot of the subscription so every budgeting tool out there like mint like a big feature that they offer is identifying all these recurring. Cost and continue to turn off all the ones that you probably aren’t using and I think that’s now a national television campaign for. Wells Fargo is they have a feature in their mobile app called control tower which is all about helping people like turn off the. [40:29] The dearth of subscriptions they signed up for not getting value from so like give you. [40:36] Use that as sort of a time machine and you let you know it’s it’s probably unlikely in the future you want a copy subscription with one vendor and a water filter subscription with another vendor and you know and have all these things coming on different schedules and on different payment periods and you know it. To me that’s one of my Amazon subscribe and save the big advantages is there started the de facto everything subscription aggregator for physical Goods. Scot: [41:04] How many active subscriptions do you have Jason. Jason: [41:08] So I’ll be honest I am not the biggest personal fan of that there is huge convenience but I do find that I waste a lot of money when I do their subscriptions and stuff tends to pile up so I’m not a huge fan my my wife does a lot of our household management and she’s way more organized than me so she uses a bunch and I I couldn’t tell you how many she has. Scot: [41:31] Is that work that has like around 20 and he has an Amazon credit card and it says so they’ve gotten every kind of replenishable thing in their house that like kids can I come from Amazon if he’s done some calculus on it and it’s like the optimal savings for a little leverage on the on the Amazon Prime card. Jason: [41:50] Side note taking a deeper dive in this answer than we intended to but the today most of these subscriptions and most Auto replenishment is what I call explicit like you go and sign up for something and you have to ask for it and pull it. And it starts coming until you get around and turning it off but I do think the future for a lot of this physical goods are implicit replenishment where. If if you do most of your spending on Amazon or you do most of your purchases on Walmart like they they just get enough. Data about your habits you proactively. Send you the stuff when you need it without you even having to ask and both Walmart and Amazon have had various packet patents on this this idea of predictive shipping in that it does seem to me that like combination of big data and artificial intelligence in this face that like their there’s going to be in near future when a lot more of this purchasing is autonomous and the reason that’s interesting to me is. You know when you never have to think about ordering toilet paper again or buying toilet paper because your your house just always has the right amount for the paper what do all the physical stores that today have an entire aisle of the grocery store dedicated to toilet paper do that space so it’s like there’s an interesting challenge for brick-and-mortar retailers in the future as Auto replenishment gets more dominant. Scot: [43:16] All right question to break comes from Parker block he always throws curve balls we appreciate that Parker this one came from LinkedIn hey Jason Scott what do you see as likely business implications of rising a Type 4 antitrust action on platforms which monetize consumer data. I think she’s just a little bit in the last episode but a lot of the platform’s especially ones with user-generated content like Facebook Twitter Google search YouTube they rely on the section of law code section 230 which essentially makes thumb the same as a utility like like a phone line if you if you say something on the phone line that could be sheet Suites or something like that you know it’s not AT&T job to monitor that so say since we say we are not a newspaper where I your you have liability around what is it libel in was written once. [44:20] Slander libel and slander you can be sued if you say the wrong thing she actually very careful with what you say that’s why they have fact-checkers they say look this is just a platform we’re just kind of here I am so happens but as they increasingly are kind of changing and and. People offer what they say it is interesting to see should they still be within section 230 so that’s one interesting area another one is Noah senior up get really aggressive with these do not follow laws gdpr and you know all these kinds of things I I do think there’s going to be increasing appetite I’m not hugely political and. The times I had to kind of watch that stuff you always shake your head like when Zuckerberg was in front of Congress and they had like no idea you know the problem is our Representatives have no idea how this stuff works so slow. Do anything that I just I’m not optimistic that it makes any sense what I shall do so I have to see. The other thing I will say is there’s a lot of people Scott Galloway is really big on this on kind of breaking up Amazon and it a lot of people kind of gunning for Amazon it’s not really in the spirit of your question which surround customer day. [45:38] I’m sure Jason has deeper thoughts on that everything about Amazon is a monopoly there has to be someone the consumer being hurt you know usually have Rising prices when you have a monopoly with like the power company or something Amazon is lowered prices so and you know if you look at it. Their ownership of retail it’s very small e-commerce store at 50% so yeah that’s pretty big but you know you have Walmart got to swing an atom if if you if you took antitrust action at Amazon you know most certainly have to Walmart because Walmart has such a big share of much bigger share of offline and I feel like Amazon’s probably be okay and I think Facebook Google Twitter are prime or in the crosshairs because of the section 230 stuff and then the fact he’s ad models are built off of tracking across internet I think they going to have double risk there that will be nurse to watch. Jason: [46:33] Yep this is the way I sort of think of it there’s a couple categories of Regulation like they’re there are business models that various government entities. [46:46] Might want to influence by writing new laws and so that’s what all this privacy stuff is right like they’re you know you’re up isn’t trying to in for some some fifty-year-old privacy law. Against Google and Facebook they wrote a new I called gdpr specifically to change the behavior about how companies collect consumer data and use it the. You know there’s lots of new laws that get proposed for you know regulating energy companies and and how they influence the Earth and all these various things so a lot of these companies have risk that that dries, countries will pass new laws so you’re up obviously passed a Big Lot in the gdpr that as meaningful impact on how I’m we all do data collection for people and personalization there is a proposed law in California called the California consumer privacy act on which is very similar to gdpr and that goes into effect, you know it it’s sort of difficult to treat customers in California wildly different than the rest of the United States in California such a big Market that it could potentially have the effect of having companies serving us consumers behaving very similar to companies that are serving. [48:07] European consumers because they they just won’t want to risk getting Sideways from the the CCPA so. I do think that the biggest impact of those kinds of regulations is companies chains self moderating the their behaviors to not make it a necessity for a legislator to pass these laws and it’s. [48:29] In a legislative bodies aren’t super efficient it’s really hard. That’s why I was frankly and so you know you wouldn’t you wouldn’t have big expectation that like the US Congress is going to you know suddenly the House and Senate are going to agree on a bunch of stuff and pass a bunch of new new regulation and so it’s it’s more that they’re going to threaten regulation in that causes companies to like somewhat moderate their behavior. It is absolutely true that Europe is more aggressive than this right in regulation right now and so like it’s more likely that you that European regulation affects us companies then. Then you know that we’re going to see a huge wave of new u.s. regulation so that’s my long-winded answer on writing new laws and then purr. Scott’s point in the case of companies that whose primary business model is selling stuff that consumers there are t. Is regulation in prokaryotes that’s called the antitrust laws at the Sherman Act and so it’s it’s a less about Congress writing a new law that would have some negative impact on Amazon and more about how the US antitrust laws affect Amazon in first God’s point but the laws are. Like arguably someone outdated you both have to be in Monopoly and despite how big amazon is there really not. [49:53] The majority of very many markets right like they might be that the largest Bookseller in the u.s. I’m so so digital books could be a potential Market. If you could get a court to agree that e-commerce is a market separate from retail then you know you could argue that they’re up for ality even then there be arguments that they really aren’t cuz even though we say they’re 50% of e-commerce that doesn’t include some. Some huge businesses like marketplaces and pouring and all these other things the and in the second prompt per Scott’s point is once you’re a monopolist you you have to do behavior that negatively affects consumers in an amp us antitrust law that behavior is you have to raise prices and so you can’t just make the argument that oh my gosh Amazon’s reducing choice and that is fundamentally bad for consumers in Europe they have antitrust laws like that and so it’s it’s frankly at the moment a lot more likely that. European Regulators like impact how Amazon can grow as they get as big in Europe as they are here than it is that us antitrust law is going to be very effective against Amazon because they just don’t look like a a monopolist and then they they don’t sort of trigger any of the hot atoms of of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Scot: [51:19] Alrighty number 9 this comes from Baxter Overman how do you put super cities within Home Delivery Services IE Walmart grocery wouldn’t drop off when the consumer is home for certain items are lockers be easier to sell. Jason: [51:36] Yeah it was so one service that just got an ounce in the last couple weeks. Involved in last couple weeks is this Walmart delivered a fridge door and that’s kind of what I think of when you asked this question and so that the principle here is hey you order milk from Walmart you don’t want that like sitting on the curb for 8 hours while you’re at work. It’s a Walmart has this offering where we’re like using an electronic lock they have permission to go in your house they go in your kitchen and they have employees that are trained. Put away your groceries for you including putting the perishables in the fridge in the. This was a big deal they made it their shareholders meeting a couple weeks ago and they had a video of Mark Lori doing the first delivery and when they first proposed this service like a year ago the idea was that they would install cameras in the customer’s home in the customer would be able to monitor the delivery guy on the camera this year what the evolution is the delivery guys wear a body Cam and so you can watch everything the delivery guys doing while he’s in your house so they had Mark Lori wearing a body body cam. [52:44] Delivering groceries to Consumers house and I do think some of those tactics like the body can can help. Instill trust like I do think there’s a major trust issue here like I don’t think the Walmart service is going to be a. A huge mainstream service I think there’s some niches where it might appeal to but I always chuckle because. In this Walmart video I’d be intent is seeing marks wearing a body cam so you can trust him so you have nothing to worry about and in my head I’m thinking Mark what is worth like two billion dollars the one guy that’s not likely to steal any of my students. [53:23] He probably didn’t need a camera at like there’s probably nothing in my house that he wants that he doesn’t already have so that that’s my my sarcastic answer. Scot: [53:33] If you hard boil a nurse problem-solve. Jason: [53:36] Yeah yeah so when it’s the. Scot: [53:38] Not enough of them. Jason: [53:39] Exactly I buy Cuban would do some deliveries. Like trust is the big impediment here in in you so you see lots of interim step so I Amazon has this very robust program called Amazon key and it both. As a version where guys can open the Smart Lock and put stuff just inside your door they put stuff inside your door as opposed to all the way in your kitchen so there it’s slightly less invasive and so maybe you press them more but the I’ve been told that the big version of chi that’s really popular is customers aren’t willing to give give Amazon delivery drivers access to their home but they’re willing to give them access to the garage so in a lot more customers have an electronic garage door opener and then have an electronic lock on the front door so there’s a lots of places where the Amazon delivery guy can deliver the packages inside your garage and that’s easier to have trust in there’s also a business-to-business component to key where Amazon installs the Lockers in. [54:42] Commercial buildings and obviously you have a lot more trust giving giving a delivery guy access to your secure Lobby than you do your individual house so I feel like they’re all these different tiers of trust but the one thing I would say is overtime as the services get more popular and more people use them and have good experiences There’s an opportunity for trust to grow and so when. Uber and Lyft first launch trust was a huge impediment I’m I going to get in some random strangers car today we all no lots of other people that successfully use Uber and so it seems less scary and and you know even more so with Airbnb as we have more people in our networks that. Regular use Airbnb and have good outcomes it feels safer to me and so in the same way if Walmart is able to find. A decent-sized niche that’s willing to do this refrigerator delivery service and I have to get out. He’ll probably share that experience with their neighbors and friends and you could see the service grow and get more trustworthy over. Scot: [55:49] Yes I don’t have a beautiful answer. Number 10 also from LinkedIn this Crumbs from Akash Gupta and what’s your favorite app that you downloaded in the last few months. Jason. Jason: [56:10] So my can’t rain answers I don’t like apps that there’s all kinds of data that we like apps have huge abandonment rate and so for most clients I’m actually advocating they build really good mobile websites that replace the functionality of a nap and that’s using a technology called Progressive web app so that’s my sort of boring work answer in my personal life the app that I recently downloaded that I had no idea existed that’s been really useful for me is it’s actually a plug-in for the mobile browsers so it’s a plug-in called screenshots and essentially What it lets me do is when I’m on a mobile web page it lets me take a screenshot of the entire webpage not just the the part that’s visible above the full and so it for work a lot I need. Screenshots of an entire entire page and sewed this was a new fine for me that I tend to be using a lot but. I’m not that can be pretty itchy. Scot: [57:12] It’s good I would say at at spiffy we use this thing called geckoboard and they just updated their app. And up so gives me all my kpi is in one what kind of screen which is nice. Jason: [57:29] What’s the app for the Star Wars experience in Disney if you like that should be our favorite app. Scot: [57:36] Play Galaxy’s Edge I don’t I don’t know if it’s a blister not you so I didn’t download the Amazon go Store app. Okay this is just a comment over on Twitter Natalie Dylan and she is at Maverick witch you like this Jason that’s the VC firm started by Howard Schultz founder of Starbucks to invest in consumer-oriented companies she mentioned just as one of her top podcast that was a typo at first but I’m pretty sure she actually meant us so wow I was speechless. Jason: [58:11] That’s very cool Natalie if you’re listening I’d like to think that I have some partially funded your child’s college education so thank you very much for that. Scot: [58:20] Did the Starbucks usage. Jason: [58:22] Exactly. Scot: [58:22] I think we’re now Pisco effectively at this question number 12 this comes from our friend Ted down in Austin he said make sure Jason talks about mixed-use retail entertainment I don’t know what that is but I’m glad you get to answer. Jason: [58:38] Yeah I mean. In general like in the 1960s when the mall was first invented the the appeal of the mall was there a bunch of sores aggregated that you all wanted to get get tune so you know we built a big building and surrounded it with a giant parking lot and and put a bunch of stores together in overtime we added things to that mall that made it even the game customers another reason to go and spend more time there so for those indoor malls that was things like ice rinks and movie theaters in food courts and as. [59:16] That the collection of the stores has become less and less appealing and it’s been less and less valuable that drive traffic just buy this assortment of stores a lot of these venues have had to get more persuasive with the non-retail things that they put them all so you know the food courts have have often been replaced or augmented with more significant fine dining and today like a mixed-use small almost certainly means like in addition to shopping and entertainment that there’s probably a residential component to and so you know you can live in an apartment building that’s like upstairs from the stores or adjacent to the stores and like I would argue even Hudson yard is a classic example of a mix you space there’s both a significant residential component of these various condo Towers that are adjacent to it like and there’s these entertainment features in it like the Skydeck in the that the stairway installation is named I’m forgetting at the moment and so in general. [1:00:28] New successful shopping destinations 10 to have the this this multi-use component and let’s focus on shopping meme only reason that you’d go visit at so I assume that’s what that’s talking about. You won’t see many new balls built that aren’t like very focused on the the other traffic generation activities on the other revenue streams besides. Scot: [1:00:53] That’s not sorry. Jason: [1:00:55] Well but we haven’t what’s the name of the. Scot: [1:00:57] The Vessel. Jason: [1:00:58] That’s all thank you. Scot: [1:00:59] Yes take a walk in the vessel okay alright Michelle Grant has a twofer one is should Amazon be worried about broken up I feel like we asked and answered that one did you want to comment on that. Jason: [1:01:14] I think we covered it pretty well right based on current US antitrust I think Amazon has very little risk like they I think potentially digital books could be in area where you can see some enforcement or like I might have said like Amazon web services is it greater risk lucky I feel I can Google and Microsoft have made enough action lately that that you know that that probably isn’t immediate in Amazon where to get as big in Europe as they are in the US it would be more interesting question. But I like I’m defending companies in the US I think Amazon has a lot less to worry about from regulation then does a Facebook or do. Scot: [1:01:57] Cool and then this is clearly in your wheelhouse cuz it’s got the O word you’re Jason what are your thoughts on pricing strategy in an omni-channel world where price transparency is high and filled with Bots to find the lowest price. Jason: [1:02:15] Yeah so there is a bunch of controversy about pricing right now like lots of omni-channel retailers don’t have Universal pricing so they might have a different price in every store the online price might be different than the store price you know a complicated retailer like Walmart there could be five prices for every item there to be a store price there to be a ship to home price there could be a ship-to-store price there could be a pickup in-store price and online grocery pick-up price and you know Walmart slogan is is everyday low prices well if they’re 5 prices for everything spoiler alert for them are not alone. [1:03:02] Inside you know most retailers today like have these fragmented pricing models and I believe that trust is such a big deal moving forward and there’s so much information and transparency available as a result of digital in the web that I feel like it’s inevitable that all retailers are going to get forced. To adopt a much more transparent pricing model which generally means so much more Universal pricing model so you’re not going to get away with. Having a different price in the stores then you do online and hoping the customer just doesn’t catch you so in general will see more Universal pricing. But you probably at the same time will see that price change a lot more based on Real World Market circumstances and so you’ll see a lot more Dynamic pricing but it won’t be secret prices that are changing without you knowing it like I think retarded you know tend to be transparent about that and into me the best example today is is Amazon they have a super Dynamic pricing model that changes all the time but if you put something in your cart and the price goes down they don’t just take that extra margin they tell you. And they lower the price of the item in your cart and when you you don’t go to their stores they now have digital prices and all the store so they can show you the same price online that they have in the store so I you know it’s. [1:04:27] It’s very difficult for retailers to make changes like this and break down silos so we’re not going to see it happen overnight but I think we’re we’re already starting to see retail shift in that direction so to me the future is. Universal transparent Dynamic pricing. Scot: [1:04:42] All right most sybaritic had a whole bunch of questions I’m going to lightning around a couple of them when is spiffy coming to Seattle. Stay tuned Ken Scott please update is Amazon scape and how has it changed unfortunately there is an inverse correlation between my time to work on the Amazon scape and your first questions to come to Seattle so position where I don’t have a ton of time to work on that it’s changed a lot so I think Amazon’s probably launched. It’s been a year old I would say two programs a month 24 to 30 programs since I did that so like the Amazon Prime wardrobe isn’t on there 4-star store is not on there there’s a lot not on there one day delivery yes those are not on there. Jason: [1:05:39] Scot I have no cars in Seattle so between those two I’m going to vote for the Amazon scape. Scot: [1:05:44] Maybe maybe I’ll find an internship this one of our many interns can help with this this should be an interesting one is Amazon going to do to Walgreens drug stores what they did to the bookstore with the axis of pill pack and private label enable the ability to sell Massey pg-propyl probably you think there’s one for the drug source. Jason: [1:06:11] I think it is I mean they’re going for everything so it is a market like that they made some Investments and they’ve already like I think had some material effects on valuations for the national companies. [1:06:25] I’m not sure like I mean there’s that Jeff has a equip that I kind of like and agree with Amazon denim put book stores out of business the internet put book stores out of business and I think the same made partly be true for retail pharmacies like I’m sure Amazon’s going to take a go after and take a chunk of the pharmacy business and that will be derogatory to traditional pharmacies but the bigger deal is we’re shifting from picking up prescriptions in store to having prescriptions delivered to our home so increasingly the old wanting majority of all the prescriptions we take R tronic, Africana conditions and returning things and the insurance companies are basically mandating that we all get shipped these bigger quantities of those prescriptions at home so as a smaller percentage of prescriptions get picked up in-store there’s less traffic in those doors the only reason people go to the stores his prescriptions they’re not good retailers if they don’t have prescriptions and so like I feel like that friends that macro-trends. Is really going to dramatically affect the retail pharmacy space now most of the retail pharmacies have already pivoted they own insurance companies and mail-order prescription services so that seems like where they’re putting their big bats well I’m sure Amazon will have some success in Pharmacy in and probably some Innovative products. [1:07:55] I’m not sure that’s why I’m wearing they’re going to capture. Huge market share super fast because there is a bunch of Regulation and Power in the hands of individual insurance companies that that you know are some institutional impediments that make it a harder Market to dominate them say books was not saying they won’t get there but it would take long. Scot: [1:08:19] Yep Mike my take on that is when I go to a drugstore I stand in line and there’s usually. More helpers than customers but there’s only one person to check out the person five people in front of me has a thousand questions and it takes me an hour to get something but she took me 5 minutes so I feel like there’s a huge customer service kind of customer experience got there that the Amazon could definitely fill in in his going to go at it because it’s very clearly something that they can make a huge Improvement. This is a good one Jason how we doing on time. Jason: [1:09:02] I think we are coming up to the end. Scot: [1:09:06] Listen to all your questions about sitting on a big one can you talk about the advertising race to grab the wallet we seen some big news lately Target in talks to buy Triad Walmart Spring advertising and house and made a key hire there where is ever

Tom Bogan is the CEO of Adaptive Insights, the company that proves a new generation of business planning software for finance and beyond. Prior to their reported $1.55Bn acquisition to WorkDay, Adaptive Insights raised over $175m in VC funding from the likes of Bessemer, Salesforce Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and many more incredible investors. Prior to Adaptive Insights, Tom was a partner at Greylock Partners where he focused on enterprise software investments. He was also president and COO at Rational Software until its acquisition by IBM. Before Rational, Tom served as CEO at Avatar Technologies and Pacific Data. He began his career as a financial officer in both public and private companies, serving as CFO at SQA and Orange Nassau, Inc., as well as vice president of finance at SCA Services. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Tom made his way into the world of SaaS, came to be a Partner with Greylock and then made the move back into operations with Adaptive Insights? Elad Gil has previously said the role of CEO is to “find product market fit, ensure the company does not run out of money and ensure the team does not implode”, how does Tom define his role as CEO of a $100m+ SaaS company? How does the role of CEo fundamentally change over time? What aspect of the role does Tom find most challenging?   What core role of CEO is constant throughout the lifecycle of the company? From seeing many of the world’s best SaaS CEOs, what are the commonalities in how the very best CEOs hire the very best execs? How does Tom think about the debate of hiring externally or promoting from within? How does Tom look to reduce internal discontent when hiring externally rather than promoting? At $100m Jyoti Bansal said on the show, this stage is about “creating and sustaining operational efficiency”. What have been Tom’s biggest learnings on the creation and maintenance of operational efficiency? What has worked? What has not worked? How does Tom think about internal asset allocation? Why does Tom believe that ultimately, ARR growth is the metric to rule them all? How does Tom think about and prioritise the metric stack in SaaS? How does he approach payback period vs CAC/LTV? In terms of services components of businesses, does Tom believe these should be baked into the CAC? What should the financial targets be for these services businesses?   Tom’s 60 Second SaaStr What does Tom know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Tom’s favourite business reading material and why? What would Tom most like to change in the world of SaaS today? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. In 2001 David joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a General Partner. David’s successful exits as an investor at Matrix include: HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan and Enservio. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, CloudBees, Digium, Meteor, Namely HR, Salsify, and Zaius. You can also find David’s amazing blog here! Huge thanks to Hardi Meybaum and Jason Lemkin for the intro to David today. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: What are the leading indicators that early stage VCs dig deep on to assess the strength of product market fit? What level of traction both in enterprise and SMB would an early stage investor deem exciting enough to pursue? What levels of engagement are sufficient enough to suggest cause for a much larger and increased round? How should founders assess sales rep productivity? What can they do to actively shorten the ramp time? How will early stage investors analyse the ramp time? What suggests repeatability of process? Why does David believe there is no point focusing on CAC/LTV in the early days? What is the single biggest thing that founders can do to show repeatability of process and revenue as fast as possible? What is the most common reason that people miss plan? How must the mindset of the founder switch from extreme frugality to hyper growth scaling? When is the right time for this transition to take place? What are the inherent challenges to this switch? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Skok If you’re looking to simplify file version control, ensure data security and save time while increasing accessibility, Egnyte is the right solution for your business. Egnyte delivers secure content collaboration, compliant data protection and simple infrastructure modernization; all on a single SaaS platform. Founded in 2007, Egnyte is privately held, headquartered in Mountain View, CA and supports thousands of businesses worldwide. For more information, please visit egnyte.com/SaaStr. MonkeyLearn allows companies to easily analyze text with Machine Learning. Customers like Clearbit and Segment are using MonkeyLearn to turn emails, support tickets, customer feedback, and documents into actionable data. Their platform makes it super easy to classify texts by topic, sentiment or intent or to extract specific data such as keywords, names, and companies. MonkeyLearn makes teams more efficient by automating business processes, getting insights and saving hours of manual text data processing. And if you would like to learn more, head to monkeylearn.com/saastr, that is www. m o n k e y l e a r n .com/saastr. Plus, listeners of the SaaStr podcast will have a very special opportunity to purchase monthly plans for half the price. So, check out MonkeyLearn and start getting more out of your text today.

EP128 - TopHatter CEO Ashvin Kumar We caught up with Ashvin Kumar at the ShopTalk 2018. Ashvin is the co-founder and CEO at Tophatter an innovative live action site for mobile shoppers.  With the engagement and psychology of a game and the economics of a marketplace, Tophatter generated over $300 million of GMV in 2017 (100% up on 2016) and sells 100,000+ items every single day.  We talked with Ashvin about his background, including his previous start-up Blippy.  The pros and cons of various auction format and how Tophatter appeals to it's entertainment seeking value oriented shoppers. Episode 128 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, March 20, 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. New beta feature, Google Transcription: Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this episode is being recorded on Tuesday March 20th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:37] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners we are live live live from shoptalk and Las Vegas excited to have on the show. Ashvin is the top Hatter co-founder and CEO and tophatter is the world's most entertaining Marketplace they've raised over 35 million in venture capital and we're really excited to hear your story hear about tophatter and talk about, marketplaces machine learning in a variety of other topics welcome to the show action. Ashvin: [1:06] Thank you and thanks for having me Jason Scott have to be here. Jason: [1:10] We are thrilled to have you so one of the ways we almost always start out the show is get a little bit of the background of our. So can you tell us sort of how you started your career and found your way to this. Ashvin: [1:23] Sure so I'll let I'll start at the at the very very top so I was born and raised in in Silicon Valley. Local kid that that that never left the Bay Area basically there's there's not too many of us a lot of lot of folks descending on the Bay Area these days so I got to grow up in Palo Alto. Went to Palo Alto High School I was in I was in the valley and that the.com. Bubble and I remember I'm there is just remember there was a big there just weren't enough programmers and like the in hanging like the 99 2000 time and I remember getting your coffee. When your programmers you know how to write Java and I was like. Yes and I had no idea when got a book studied about the week before got in there and started learning job at up the I make great money that sell rather this is awesome and so that's where the bug started for me. Jason: [2:23] Will assume job I was like a required freshman class at Palo Alto High School now. Ashvin: [2:27] You know what's interesting at we we did do a little a little programming it at pellets high school so we had a little bit of that there but not a ton it wasn't quite as in Vogue as it is now. I know I think computer science is like Stanford's largest major by far and certainly the flavor of play for the decade. Yeah so after Polly Went to went to Stanford computer science Stanford actually while I was there I was interned at Amazon. That's where that's where my co-founder and I first spent a lot of time together he was an internet. At Microsoft and I was an intern at Amazon and so we decided to split the difference in. And find a place to live in between the two so we lived in the University District in Seattle. And every every night we come back and talk about the differences between Microsoft and Amazon which is awesome and I had a fantastic 2003. Does neutering there for a few months and it was it was already felt like a fairly big company with a lot of but still plenty of opportunity ahead of them and I remember. I want one thing I'm a Jeff Bezos would talk to the entire episode that has been. Like one of the treats was he come and talk to all the entrance and we talked about some some the company values and that there's two that I'm a really well as a frugality and Trust. And an enzyme I'm ever just wanted to hit like a soda need to go pay for stuff. Jason: [3:55] Obviously like I'm imagining you comparing notes with your roommate and like the cafeteria on the Microsoft campus was a little fancier than the free bananas at Apple at Amazon. Ashvin: [4:04] Do it what about that but what I found fascinating was that they were proud of that fact and so it just it just. You got me so it got me excited. Three different perspective than one person's proud of their reality and Microsoft obviously was touting there free food and free soda just two companies with very very different mindsets obviously. So after I graduated from Stanford where I worked at a small startup Enterprise social networking startup for for 3 years I would some of the so my friends from Stanford is the 3rd engineer. When I join we had about 7 people. I reread the series day we spend three years building the company in about. 3 years 23 years and my co-founder and my current co-founder and I decide to leave our job he went to. You went to a different start up use also 3rd engineer there so between us we had seen a couple we felt like we were the ground for a couple companies. Scot: [5:07] Is this the same guy that was also a Microsoft intern. Ashvin: [5:09] Single room the other after after college to and so after. Scot: [5:13] This is like Millennials like this. Ashvin: [5:16] Under that bastard us. Scot: [5:17] Best friends for life come on get with the lingo your conversation. Ashvin: [5:25] Do we have till we die. After after work it out of respect of guys to come back and jam on ideas together and eventually about two and a half years and we decided that we we want to. Tried on a run so we are we just started working hacking on various different projects and all all we knew is that we wanted to work together and that we wanted to build something fun. I interesting that people are going to like those sort of but that was a starting point but we didn't really know what that look like. And so we just are working on stuff we build stuff and we just put it in front of anybody that would it would see for feedback. We that weed weed send users to it and all sorts of ways that we can find a post on Facebook and post on Twitter viral things to try and get user to user experience. In the process of that was like right around $2,000 this is like the financial crisis. Scot: [6:18] Great time to start compass. Ashvin: [6:19] Yeah. Scot: [6:21] Just leave her jobs and start a company in early 2000s. Jason: [6:24] Frugality. Ashvin: [6:27] Actually move back in with my with my parents my co-founder you move back here. You also trying to save money on on rent so he moved in with his girlfriend at the time. Way too early to move in with a girlfriend and they're married now so everything worked out but. Be trying to be frugal a hack on stuff share with anybody that would see it in the process we met if you see it at CRV and they weren't like they were doing a lot of deals at the time of the crisis. So things are a little slow there and they had a spare office in at the their office is on Sandhill and so is he invited us to come work out of their office. Scot: [7:16] Sweet and nice. Ashvin: [7:18] CBS on basic being in Resident entrepreneur I don't like to say I don't like say unfriend resident because that's like a fancy title where you actually get paid we were at in Resident on foreigners. Jason: [7:27] That's like the difference between a country club and a club in the. Ashvin: [7:29] Exactly. I got a big chunk of our day was figuring out which coffee shops wife I wasn't going to cut out so having like condition Wi-Fi and free lunch actually was really helpful. Scot: [7:46] I spent a lot of time at the Starbucks in Palo Alto on I'm picturing you guys when I go in there it's like funny it's like all these startup books just kind of like you know you can see the founders and they're just like you know. Hey they have big red circles on it. Jason: [8:07] And now everyone has to be in the official Patagonia down vest. Ashvin: [8:11] But siding I stack that standard BC attire. Scot: [8:14] Yeah that's a b c. Ashvin: [8:15] Tina Turner wearing the Patagonia vest. Scot: [8:17] Depth of funny humorous t-shirts yes I write Piper. Ashvin: [8:22] So much of products in 2000 and in 2008. And when the benefits was being a b c Verma said we could we just walked down the hallway and showed us these. The folks there in got their feedback and eventually we found we we built something that they got really excited about that's why if we actually ended up raising money for it so it's probably called blippi, and it was a it was a social network for the type for the things that people are buying so the idea there was that we would. We would Connect into your your Amazon account your iTunes account and we basically passed we published your friends the stuff that you were buying so if you download something about the man so I'm kind of out your friends way of discovering what your friends are by. As I was going by first foray into Discovery shopping and we got really excited about that and and CRV got really excited about that and they wrote us a check to see if from the company and that's how we got started so they put. Scot: [9:25] Serbia's Charles River Ventures for those of you that aren't in that VCU Palo Alto. Ashvin: [9:30] So what we raise money for that and and actually we got a lot of traction initial traction a lot of hype around that product. And 6 months later we raise another round for that sweet we actually ended up raising $12 additional for that. Unfortunately six months after that after spending so this one year into the journey with blippi like we realize it but the product wasn't really going to work. So the retention numbers weren't there the engagement just wasn't there when we tried a bunch of things so by the end of that year we had a we had a lot of money in the bank but filled product. And so we have to figure out what we're going to do next and Mike O'Connor and I we just kind of went back to what we were doing before it was hacking on all sorts of different projects. Scot: [10:16] It's a blippi was a consumer, thing did you try pivoting till like retailers integrating with their platform to do a staring contest. Ashvin: [10:23] Yeah could question so there were a few different ways we could have hit it I think that at that time we we still felt really strongly that we wanted to be if your consumer experience and we didn't want to have a component where we were doing an Enterprise Integrations or working closely with. With folks without us having restaurant user base. Scot: [10:42] Did was of oxidation like to an affiliate program. I think so Jason shares of cool GadgetEase bought I buy it you guys have been coded in the affiliate link. Ashvin: [10:51] That would be one possible promise at scale and then we it was such a treasure Trove of information. Jason: [10:56] I can say there's probably a data play where you're quick. Ashvin: [10:59] It was it was. Is really fun products only only first build it and then other things that we buy every single day at the amount of like apps I download on the Play Store things that I just go on Amazon buy. Based on a recommendation from a friend or you know somebody recognizes me a book I'll just go buy it on the Kindle right now and have so I can have it there with one when I'm on the plane to like you're buying things all the time and are. Product would pull all that information in Niagara that information published in a structured way to other people could benefit from it. Scot: [11:34] Remember Facebook Beacon where they tried this and then a people to buy gifts for their wives or wife's. Ashvin: [11:42] Storage associate with it too but but all in all it was really fun product with a lot of information associate with it and there were a lot of different directions we could take it, the reason why we like there's a guy that had the fun engaging element that also had fantastic quantization potential. If you want use a product then so I can work and then that's where but we found we found it we can get people to initially engaged to the product but we couldn't get them to retain overtime. And so at the end of the year we've had some decisions to make when we decided to have basically Sunset the product and work on other things but we were really excited about probably really excited about the space of Discovery Commerce. I'm just at this the area that we stayed in and we started working on other ideas in an e-commerce so the next idea we tried we tried a bunch of things in between the next thing that we got a little bit of traction was we we we took the idea of Groupon and. Combined it with base e tried to build a Groupon like experience for Etsy sellers because he's at the sellers have fantastic. Merchandise they can make me a sandwich. But I have no distribution so we that will look spell the distribution list. For people that want to be introduced to new types of Pepsi products and so that actually was awesome we lost that in 2011. And I had really great traction for a few months but then a few months in we realize that this is actually hitting a ceiling that we just we can't. We can't attract enough Sellers and we can't get enough people on the distribution list to make this a scale at at a meeting for 8. [13:12] I've been so 6 months after that we realize I can't wait this business or the tapped out even though it had some initial traction and we work and we went back to the drawing board works on a bunch of other consumer. Consumer products all in all in Discovery shopping and then 2012 is when we launched tophatter. And I'm we launched tophatter I had to lift head like a consumer heads consumer attraction in a list that we had not seen before. And then we'd work to my way to work then we work on so many different projects up to this point that when we when we initially launch shop in and saw the numbers were like wow there is something special here, I wouldn't know exactly what about it is Piggly special but there's something really special here that we want to that we want to make sure that we capture in Foster. Scot: [13:53] And so as a as a function or in the consumer space What are the numbers you're looking at so you've talked about you. Retention stuff are you looking at KLTV are you looking at cohort analysis helplessness can't understand how someone building. Ashvin: [14:08] So these days as a as a business scales at those are all really important numbers for us or we look at court we look at when we say chords for provokes international. We look at when a person signs up in month 1 how do they perform in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 so we look at how that how, how to progress over time. We also look at tactile TVs we look at all that stuff but it's mainly like numbers as rescaled up initially When You're Building Products it's it's a little bit more like trying to find love. Scot: [14:42] Just some Mau movement. Ashvin: [14:43] Yeah you look at you looking for you looking for something special in the product trying to capture trying to capture Magic In A Bottle. And I think if you don't have that initial magic in the model of then all that other stuff doesn't really all that other stuff doesn't really make sense. It's hard to optimize for that other stuff. And so I think the thing that was special. Tophatters at it did have magic in the bottle really early on and and then as we scaled up we use all of you know we look at CAC LTV we look. All that fancy Jazz figure out if we're doing work on the right things. Jason: [15:19] Tell her what's my little bit about tophatter and sore what the value prop is and what what makes you guys doing. Ashvin: [15:24] Yeah so tophatter is a I just got to shopping app I always encourage people to to take to go download the app to get the full experience because it's a it's a it's a very differentiate experience we sell things in an in an option where I'm at. So we're on live auctions 24/7 I think the average eBay auction takes 2 weeks to complete our average auction takes 90 seconds and get us some other price so it's real time is fast. How are average price points 10 to 15 bucks so it's in like an Impulse impulse purchase. I don't feel they can make a decision within 90 second see if they want something. And we sell across the a variety of categories from jewelry to electronics to accessories. Scot: [16:07] It seems like it's raining towards of value kind of consumer, like that wish kind of a Marketplace and you'll see some of that wants to have something cool for like under 20 bucks or something. Ashvin: [16:16] So are consumers also shop at Walmart and Kohl's and and QVC and HSN and yeah it's it's at the dollar store TJ Maxx when these are all these are all of her consumers so they say it's about you wanting to customer. Scot: [16:30] Never while they're there is he's really weird auction sites where you would like by kind of a currency to go to bed and you know I think they gave options are really bad name kind of there. Ashvin: [16:38] And we're constantly kind of fighting yeah so we're like we we had to fight that kind of band brand misperception. Lots of people see that we're not inside that's the first place that's what one of the first question that we get his ass a penny auction sites with a pay for my beds and doing a lot of them are can we make make really clear. Beds are free. Only pay if you win so it's just an old-fashioned auction but it's not it's not an option for. For the reasons of price discovery on most items that we sell their free commodity items it's an option because it's engaging and we find that again we think about how we build an engaging experience that's what we started. It's just fun everything starts at a dollar and so you pick the price they want to pay you know so you like something at a dollar there's no reason why you won't like it at 2 and then if you like it at 3 instead. Scot: [17:26] Is it a 1 winner wins got a thing or is it more of a Dutch auction so if Jason did six and I bid 7 we both kind of win or. Ashvin: [17:32] Right now it's one winner of the challenge too is that is that if there has to be losers in the auction for you to feel free to feel good when you actually win something. Scot: [17:44] That that hurts the you know the pack because she got to go acquiring up cat x x yeah and then it could hurt LTV cuz if I'm a loser lose so many times year. Ashvin: [17:54] Better interest in their data shows that the folks that compete for items are the ones that are there are more likely to come back so if you if you try and win something you win something with no competition less likely to come back and if you competed for anyone, cuz there's a little bit of social validation in the fact that somebody else wanted to sing. Scot: [18:11] I saw an article that said you're you guys had over 300 million in DMV in 2017 it was an idea the sky. Ashvin: [18:18] Jessica sent a scale so we're going to do so last year we did over 300 million in Top by in this year right now like we're focused on doing a billion dollars in 2019 this year will do at least a half a billion dollars. It's a no it's not it's not like an Amazon CEO business but it's not like a small business either so. Scot: [18:39] And your business model is typical take rate kind of a random. Ashvin: [18:43] It's a it's a Marketplace business model we take roughly 25% depending on the category. Scot: [18:49] So then I can figure out your revenues by multiplying GMB by 25% just making sure I understand. Jason: [18:59] That would assume that Scott can do math. Scot: [19:01] Yes and then are you guys a mix of first party and third-party entirely third party. Ashvin: [19:11] It's an entirely third-party give me like our sellers do we sell things ourselves. Scot: [19:13] Yeah yeah. Ashvin: [19:15] So we don't take any inventory your Marketplace we just connect buyers and sellers so we asked her sellers to give us all their inventory so we tell sellers. Give us a spreadsheet everything you got and then destroy those into how we use data. Do we have it we have a big pool of them in Torrey millions and millions of items that we can potentially share with their buyers and then from that we Whittle it down to a small set of a relatively small so excuse that we show fires when they open. Jason: [19:45] So how are you soliciting sellers. Ashvin: [19:50] Are sellers are Swedish settlers faced in the you asked me if sellers we also have a team in China to work with our sellers in China today, about 70% of our sales come from sellers that are based in China and leave it to you in there that helps find and work with our sellers. They're actually found is just. Just looking at the broader internet. And selling like as a as a third-party sell on the Internet it's just very challenging to find places to sell on the internet there just aren't enough places to sell. There's some when we go and talk to our sellers in China they're always looking to diversify where they're selling and nobody wants to just be on Amazon. I prefer for obvious reasons but if you look but you look down unless there's actually not a lot of options Beyond Amazon you got the Amazon you got eBay. You got a Bye Baby I wish the list rise up pretty quickly and so when we come in there and say that we have no we're going to have to I know ours this year and we've got reasonable volume every two years. Because a that good volume and be that they wanted they don't want to be wholly dependent on on their Amazon sales. Jason: [20:58] So when is Big trans here at shop talk has been Ai and machine learning. And you guys are like getting a significant amount of data now so that I imagine within an able the possibility of you ever drink some of those techniques. Ashvin: [21:15] Death till we have it we have a fantastic day it is at and we have a dataset that's that's different and bigger than a lot of e-commerce. Players are size because we've got people spinning history to so not only do we have people buying things we have people expressing interest at various different price points along the way. We have a really expect all data said they're only be getting this to leverage as we get better and better at at machine learning. But for us via the business is only improved as its scale. And I attribute that to obviously improvements in logistics and operations that you get his knee Converse business scaling but just as much to to being able to leverage or data in more intelligent. Jason: [22:01] When are you likely using that for merchandising as well I cute like so you mentioned like there's a big inventory of potential stuff to offer to your buyers. Ashvin: [22:11] Yeah so like internal in our in our company we have nobody we have Noah merchandisers so I think this is one of the one of the Hallmarks as I see it if I can modern. The modern retail company is it is one that's going to use data my data is the new merchandiser us for one of our internal mottos so. And we can we learned this the hard way we actually it a few years ago we we did hire some folks with more traditional retail backgrounds and we had a hard time internally reconciling. The air intuition was laughing right we just had a hard time reconciling that with with the day that we were seeing. And so it's trying to get these Two Worlds 2 that's it come together as challenging but I think just are we got nowhere we're engineer's by training and that sort of our DNA. And out we we like to call the numbers and and and only talk about you comes and retail merchandising is like the core piece of that where we do spend a lot of time. Jason: [23:09] So have you guys developed any of your own models are you using any of the commercial or Open Source Tax like what's the jewels that you're using. Ashvin: [23:17] We use while he's a lot of Open Source. We do use a lot of open source code to take glue iron machine together but we're not using any off-the-shelf solutions for Ray I so we we build their own data model as we've got Folks at experience machine learning. I bet spend time tuning the models and then also thinking about how do we like what what types of data would make this model even better, and how do we go capture that data so a lot of what we talked about internally is Howard data structure and how can we structure it better to make it more effective writing everything. A lot of people ask me about about data and about a I and I always tell them that it just starts with structured data you got to have a data set and you got to have a schema that's easy to work with. Jason: [24:04] We have lots of the sort of more old-world clients in the the starting points for a machine learning isn't even doing any machine. Ashvin: [24:12] That can you get the data. Jason: [24:13] Just about getting a. [24:14] Attributes for your data and another thing we talked a lot about because it's a coming problem is it a government so I can just making sure you have the the right rights to leverage that date on all the way she. Scot: [24:26] She mentioned can I join in on this so you mentioned you get this did data, do you actually didn't go and and go to like the manufacturer and say hey your price is too low if you know you're at $12 and if we did 899 you are model tells us we could sell twice the volume is that is that a example to use case. Ashvin: [24:45] Yes so we have got me so that is like an example of division we haven't actually gotten it we haven't actually done that just yet but yeah if the core piece of our technology is that we can look at it and I didn't estimate the price that were going to get for it so. We like to have a good sense of what we're going to sell something for before we even put it up for auction before I buy or even sees it. And so we can look at our in our million just using save this these are the things that are going to perform well, I'm can we go get them for for better prices or can we how do we make this how we make these price-points works and they're there two ways that we can figure out how to how to make advertise ask you to sell it at a higher. Price that we think we can get a better price for or how do we lower the cost on the supply side. Scot: [25:28] I'm convinced this is what drives a lot of Amazon private label you know the, the brands would tell you that they're just stealing their data and stuff but I think what happens is you know I think Amazon looks at like khaki pants and they see there's this conversion gap down at you know X dollars and then they will go and recruit Chinese sellers to fill that Gap and then. And we're like lahren you know some private label at that price point in there and I think they're looking more of conversion day that you kept getting data with sexy little bit. Ashvin: [25:54] What's interesting about Amazon so like we we get compared to when we talk to investors obviously Amazon's the Shelf in the room and they want to talk about how we are different from Amazon Amazon everything is Sartorius on Amazon. Amazon has his wealth of kind of search oriented conversion day that somebody types in khaki pants and they can see what percentage of the khaki pants search volume has been fulfilled. We don't have that meeting we just have people open up the app and it's almost like a news feed of products and so we have to clean and we have to clean and make inferences in in in different Amazon. Scot: [26:32] So just to change topics little bit so a lot of people contact me cuz I'm known in the marketplace world marketplace. That's great it's going to be harder than you think it is because unlike you know what say you were going to build like a Dollar Shave Club or something like that what's nice about that business is you you you control one side of the equation right you control the supply Dave's go to bring demand. You chose the what I would say is at least twice as hard if not for ex's heart of building Marketplace you have to not only do have to go build the buyer side if you could build the seller side so it's kind of like simultaneously building to businesses and you. There's probably some. Scot rule of the square of the number of sides to marketplaces you know that the exponent of the equation has that been your experience that is kind of getting to the school you're at. Arrow on one side of the boat too hard and they end up going in a circle to acquire all these fires the bars I have a terrible experience cuz there's not enough Supply logo acquire Ali suppliers they won't sell anything till at RIT because I didn't. Selling a product you have some scar tissue to share with us. Ashvin: [27:37] I absolutely I mean this is like this is what working on all the time so try not trying to climb the ladder on demand and Supply at the same at a similar rate. On the challenging and visit this is why it's really hard to grow a Marketplace faster than it is very hard to grow, American pit playset and I can exponential rate it takes time to grow marketplaces until we've been fortunate enough to, the mostly double the business year of the year and even as we try and double the business of feels like the wheels are about to fall off either on the supply side or on the demand side. And interrupt you to see some of the conversations that go on internally it's always will be one channel screaming about not enough buyers in another slack Channel screaming about like not enough to use for a certain type of visors just like, constantly it is it feels like a battle everyday and then when you take a step back and look at the business we actually like. We actually got some stuff done and we grew even though that every single day feels like it feels like a dog fight. Scot: [28:39] Is that the hardest thing about building tophatter or have you been surprised by the back end scale it's taken or the customer Discovery what's been the hardest problem in hindsight that the kind of surprise you. Ashvin: [28:56] I made a promise to be changed your every year right now one of my biggest challenges around is trying to understand or Supply better and if so can I go to the data model we see that are 21 a big challenge is this your process. Dish Network Network routing with this this year is that we are our customers tell us that they want to see more things in the marketplace. When we first launched in 2012 and keep my everything we do is real time so when you open up that app everything that you're seeing is is available right now in this moment is going to sell the 90 seconds or anybody in the world named in the world that opens up the apps in the sea. Scot: [29:29] Just have a QVC as kind of a model. Ashvin: [29:32] It's like QVC. And in a when we first launched in 2012 because we had such a small demand days we can offer that much to fly so if you open up the app in Primetime you know if you open up the app there might be like 5 things for sale. Because that's all that our demand could so bored and that year, going to see more than these five things available and then in 2013 or demand a screw and we can put our supply base also and they said the same thing we want to see little bit more so every year it's it's kind of the same thing this year if you'll stick. because we we see the we see the option to break into all these different categories of issue with this deal that we do have and so, a lot of what we spoke Asana is trying to understand what categories do art buyers want to see, how do we get them how we brought in our category how do we go deeper into categories that we do have to sell better and better things so it's it's, trying to trying to build that Insight while then why like I'll mark while I system is is evolving is it super challenging and we have a pretty big. You're pretty big team of of analyst that. Are there looking at data all the time trying to trying to understand how the system is functioning and build more insight into what we should do tomorrow. Scot: [30:47] We have a lot of entrepreneurial type sellers that sell on eBay and other platforms give us like the Quick 90-second Pitch like how do you pitch a seller to be on your platform. Ashvin: [30:57] Yeah we say jeezy I use give us all your montuori and will we we we we connected with our bye week we look at what are bars in Taiwan. I'm willing to stop everything is going to do on you can tell us also if you've got a floor for the the things that you want to be like that price that you expect to sell it at and we won't listen unless our production models are telling us that it's and it's all about that rice. Scot: [31:19] Set a three hundred million kind of run rate at a lower aov do you have like 30 million to buyers and sellers how many buyers like I kind of wanted to 30 minutes. Ashvin: [31:32] Papyrus like last year we had I mean an exact numbers but last year we had over 2 million buyers on the. Scot: [31:40] Are the churches buying for a minister. Ashvin: [31:42] Did buy a lot of stuff. Scot: [31:43] That's awesome yeah that's cool yeah. Ashvin: [31:45] Dad and Elvia to get to the point like a 10 lb of 10 bucks I got 10 to 15 hours every transaction size to make this business work they better be buying a lot of things, and remember the classic thing about e-commerce businesses, 1015 years ago is the first question to ask you what's your HIV and if you're able V is like in the ten to $20 range like. Scot: [32:07] Does the seller I would ask one thing that scares me is you know I give you all my inventory and I see all the stuff going on there for a dollar can I have a reserve or or do you guarantee if I want 10 bucks you'll deliver 10 bucks. Ashvin: [32:19] Yeah so today on today I currently back a lot of the risk is taken by the sellers but we just Asher sellers that we're not going to run unless we think you're going to get a. We are prediction models think that you're going to get a price above the price that you want but I want to go rolling. Scot: [32:35] Give you a desired price point. Ashvin: [32:36] Writes about wanting a rolling out this year is for us to take the risk and so were you know we got all the data we're confident are predictions into at some point in time we feel really comfortable taking the rest and so from. From from a perspective a seller can treat our platform just like they treat any other. Marketplace so just like you work with eBay just like you were Vans I just give it everything at the best price that you have and what will sell it and will give you the price for it. We also have the option to take apps out on it too so. Scot: [33:05] So if I'm if I've got a like a great price on this widget and we we, do this I know when a lot of sellers are working with like the Amazon and eBay deals team there's a certain kind of death what what kind of depth would you ask a seller to provide do you want like 10 of a widget a hundred a thousand and one. Ashvin: [33:22] So today we don't work with our Salvage closely for volume commitments that's another opportunity we can have so we we anticipate that as we start to take as we start to give sellers commitment and we're trying to get better prices from seller anticipated volume of famous will go. Along with it today we do today we get more volume to the sellers that are willing to take more risks. And they don't have to take that rest me like we're happy to take that risk and so it's a little bit of a kind of value proposition mismatched right now they were excited to address this year. Scot: [33:51] The last one is one of the knocks on some of these folks like an AliExpress or a wish is you in this thing and you you're all excited and then like it takes 6 months for the. How to get to do something you've got that feedback on in and have you work with your sellers on how fast you expect them to ship these things and get them to a consumer. Ashvin: [34:10] So we expect the sellers to ship right away doesn't necessarily mean they're going to get it right away the customers that we have. Longer for value and so we haven't seen the shipping times be a huge problem and I really think there's a Class A customer that wants to get their item right away but those are nicer of those aren't really our customers broadly speed. Our customers though want value one thing that we we sound is that our Logistics are going to improve what scale. And so as we scale up we found that are sellers are willing to open up warehouses closer to the man. And we're willing to give them more volume if they open up their warehouse closer to man into labor faster different ways to get the products to the customers faster and are using a Marketplace model are sellers are willing to, I'm investing that are averaged it just be clear are average time delivery times are in a couple weeks if it's coming from from China and if it's coming from the US with a bunch of our inventory comes from the u.s. to is Justina today. Jason: [35:13] And does the buyers see that delivery time before they did. Ashvin: [35:17] And it's an important component so if we tell our sellers that if you can ship faster you're going to do something more to man on your products. Jason: [35:25] Cuz I feel like that's an incremental fly in the wish model is like you're off and pretty far in the purchase funnel before you find out. Ashvin: [35:33] Yeah you know I think they experimented both ways so I think that take a fairly similar mindset. Some terms of trying to figure out where it where to break this news to the customer quote on quote, and obviously it's it's pretty bad experience if you break it too late in the funnel but I'm sure they're trying to learn to an experiment with where's the right place though. Frostburg to share it right up front so people so we set expectations right away. Jason: [35:58] So you mention in the beginning I always encourage people to download the app so I'm assuming that's just the sort of preferred iteration of the experiences the mobile app. Ashvin: [36:11] Yeah so most of our business is done I mean the real time experience and so we saw things we sell things that are only available for 90 seconds. And so we do have experience but most are web expenses primarily for our seller so all of our seller tools are on the web and that's how sellers access it and our our website works just the same way that are at this. Vast majority of our business is done on our apps on on our Android app Android or iOS. Jason: [36:40] So almost everybody that has a strong mobile experience I get the metrics are. [36:45] They're on the mobile app experience the challenge usually is maintaining that that high active user base on the mobile app it sounds like. [36:57] In your case it kind of matches pretty well to the demographic because he's. [37:02] People that are that are going to want to be frequent purchase orders are you seeing like significant turn like what are you doing and try to maintain. Ashvin: [37:11] Yeah I mean we got a liver specialist Discovery shopping experience together. We focus on engagement I think this is a big difference between us and Amazon we like to ourselves as the anti Amazon. And anyways Amazon focus on making things Amazon focus on the buying experience we focus on the shopping experience. Games on focus on efficiency they want to get you in the app and out of the act like my could you and find something quickly get it boom you're out where the opposite where did we help custom we help our. Jason: [37:41] I want to go lighter. Ashvin: [37:42] Yep we want we. Amazon helps you save time tophatter helps you spend time we want to go for us like we want our customers to be in the eyeball time we want them to be discovering great things even if they're not buying and I were constantly iterating on on that experience. The primary feedback from our customers that they end up turning out is the fact that we don't have the breakfast apply that they're looking for. And every year that challenge every year like we're able to offer more and more Supply obviously we want to have it overnight love love to have it happen tomorrow but it's it's it's just a process of building outdoor supply this. Jason: [38:16] It's interesting the VC's are comparing you to Amazon they may be should be comparing you to like Clash Royale or some. Ashvin: [38:21] Maybe there's a there's a game like experience to us. Scot: [38:27] Chef fortnite wear like everyone's on an island at the Battle for the deal. Ashvin: [38:30] There's a will there's a. Scot: [38:32] Fortnite Meats products. Ashvin: [38:33] People love the competition. Jason: [38:34] Gamification for sure. Scot: [38:36] A quick disclaimer Jason Scott show takes 10% of any ideas that utilize from the show that are lawyers make the same things. Jason: [38:42] Do you disclose like roughly like what the active monthly users are on the mobile app is it like just I'm just trying idea border magnitude vs. Traditional shopping site. Ashvin: [38:54] Yeah I don't want to get there like that monthly numbers. Scot: [38:58] Denis Entre Nos RMA you there. You and you you probably know like time of day. Ashvin: [39:07] They're absolutely is in and where it where are part of our business is making clever matching the right amount of Supply with the right amount of man so we have two man models that tell us. How much how many buyers we expect to be showing up, at this very moment and then what Supply we should be showing in this 90 second time frame so we have these models that tell us how much we should be listening to get that information so we have to know. We had an all the stator in terms of sharing though we sell over a hundred thousand items today and I just give you a sense. Scot: [39:42] Are you limited by the time of anything since 90 seconds there's only so many things you like so many slow. Ashvin: [39:50] One the middle the night there's less people on the side there's like less people on the app. Scot: [39:53] Like let's say there's 10 people on at anyone given second do they they all see the same thing going for 9 year to you now start just going to say there's some point where it starts to make sense to show some audience maybe a ring and another people at electronic item. Ashvin: [40:07] Right so ever so there's there's a everybody has a different sort experience so you can sort down and see you could do that access to everything. But it was me different place in this world so it's personalized to the person the information we have they said about the person based on what's available at this very moment. Scot: [40:25] So you can go broader category and get more personalized and leverage those 90 seconds it seems like. I going deeper would be good too because you know a lot of sellers I've talked to you the kind of have these fees opportunities to. They don't see no volume come in there from you which is like where these deal platforms gets these really crazy great prices. Ashvin: [40:46] We can sell things in volume to it just won't part of the Beauty from my buyer respective is that if you don't win right now you don't know when that's going to come up again. And people in by arbovirus and set reminders on certain items so even if they don't win it right now will send the notification the next time it comes up and sometimes the next time it comes up is in the next hour sometimes it. Scot: [41:05] Never lose our kind of you know to notify them cuz I've expressed interest yeah for the show it the first thing. Ashvin: [41:10] Exactly exactly so so we do we are able to sell things in volume but it isn't this really happen like in the same 90 seconds. Scot: [41:17] What what categories do you want to add the most. Ashvin: [41:20] Your work cited going to break into apparel for us like we find that. We think that the experience that we have or what we're trying to cater to a broad mass-market audience but our audience today is limited by the supply that we do sell so a few years ago we were only selling jewelry, and our audience is 90% women. I'm now we're selling a lot of electronics in her audience is closer to 6040 male female because there is something for guys to buy and sell. I'm excited like break into apparel and a bunch of other categories shoes. Scot: [41:56] Pro tip hair extensions so hair. Ashvin: [42:00] 10% for you guys. Scot: [42:01] Go to hair extensions of the number one seller on AliExpress and it's like crazy volumes there's something about the price point in quality of imported from China hair extensions Jason's more of an expert than I am. Ashvin: [42:13] I got high. Scot: [42:16] It's all about the weave I think you should definitely look at this hair extensions. Ashvin: [42:24] We saw a lot of drunks video. Scot: [42:24] So drones are second only to two hair extensions. Ashvin: [42:30] And I also tried to break in international markets so today were were 85% based in the US we think in many ways the business and be a lot more interesting outside the US. Jason: [42:45] Very interesting is a trance personalized at all I can like do you use what you know about the user to decide what gets merchandise on that home page. Ashvin: [42:54] Yeah we so so there's there's a set of items is available to everybody that's that is on the app at this given moment but we stored it based on the information that we have about you. I didn't know if it's you bid on a lot of electronics items you're probably see Electronics items do kind of times that are available you probably see sword at the top so we do our best to personalize it in that way. We make decisions about the demand that we're seeing today in the supply that we have available we're also. At Ross magnesia know what from that pool we should be listening to sell at this given moment in time. Jason: [43:31] Well this is been super fascinating as men we really appreciate you coming on and talking to us, but it does happen again we've used up all that a lot of time so blisters want to continue the conversation we encourage you to jump over to our Facebook page and if you enjoy Today Show please jump on the iTunes give us that 5-star review and then you can download, tophatter from there. Scot: [43:53] Yeah and obviously people should go in and try the platform do you do you publish stuff online where can people find you online if they're interested in learning more. Ashvin: [44:01] Yeah you can that you can find us on our Facebook page fault on Twitter. Where are we have a were active on medium so we're publishing content everywhere we're also we're also watching it national TV campaign also so we're about to roll out a pretty big TV ad campaigns of silver, TV channel near you too. Scot: [44:21] Congrats I'll be fun I look forward to. Jason: [44:23] Going to star in the first. Ashvin: [44:25] Yes absolutely. Scot: [44:27] Just can you give listeners a little preview of a little little sneak peek. Ashvin: [44:33] Yeah I think the world were appealing to the folks that want to have a fun experience shopping and so. Scot: [44:41] Awesome watching NBA jerseys. Ashvin: [44:43] Not yet. Scot: [44:44] Okay well we really appreciate you joining us I know you've been really busy here at the show out recruiting sellers for the platform so we really appreciate take your time. Ashvin: [44:53] Thank you Jason thanks God. Jason: [44:55] Until next time happy Commercing.

Clate Mask is the CEO of Infusionsoft, the leading cloud-based CRM platform for growth-minded small businesses with more than 145,000 users worldwide. Under Clate’s leadership, InfusionSoft has grown from a fledgling startup housed in a worn-down strip mall into a 550 person company, raising over $130m in VC funding in the process. If that was not enough, Clate is also an angel investor with the likes of CampusLogic, where he also sits on the board and is co-author of Conquer the Chaos: How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Clate made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found the leading CRM for small businesses? Enterprise vs SMB: Why does Clate fundamentally believe that not everyone has to move to enterprise with time? Why do so many founders believe they need to? Why is it such a preference for investors? How does the decision to remain in SMB change the future structure of the team and product roadmap? What was the hardest challenge for Clate about staying in SMB? The Metrics Stack: What is the core metric that founders must observe to analyse the state of their business? How does this core metric affect every other metric? How does Clate view the significance of payback period, what is good to him? How does sales rep productivity change when serving SMB vs enterprise? What is good sales rep productivity? Why does Clate fundamentally believe CAC/LTV is the mothership? What is it solely driven by? Partnerships 101: How can a founder know whether they have the right model and product for a partnerships model? How do partnership models change both the service and sales process of your company? What are the biggest risks to implementing a full-scale partnerships model? What have been the biggest challenges for Clate of scaling this partnerships model? 60 Second SaaStr What does Clate know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What is the most important element an investor can provide? A moment in Clate’s life that has changed the way he thinks and sees the world? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Clate Mask    

Brad Feld is one of the world’s leading VCs having Co-Founded Foundry Group, Brad has made investments in the likes of Zynga, Makerbot and Fitbit, just to name a few. Brad is also Co-Founder of Techstars, one of the world’s most prominent startup accelerators, whose portfolio companies have raised over $1.3bn in funding. If that wasn’t enough Brad is also a best selling author having co-authoured Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and VC and Startup Communities: Building An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your Community. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Brad made his way into the world of VC and came to found Foundry Group? Brad has previously stated that companies can be segmented into 3 different core components? What does he mean by this? How can startups be structured internally for scalability? Why does Brad hate the word culture? How should culture be viewed and approach internally within startups? How has Brad seen his personal development with regards to being a board member? What has he got better at? What does he believe makes a great board member? Why is CAC the easiest metric to game in SaaS? How should the CAC/LTV ratio be approached? How can entrepreneurs use this to attract VC investment? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Brad Feld If you have a digital product, whether it’s mobile or web, Amplitude’s product analytics helps you understand what your users are doing, iterate and ship product faster, and drive metrics like engagement and retention. To learn how you can use analytics to build a sticky product that grows your business, get your free copy of the Product Analytics Playbook from Amplitude. This 155-page book (with worksheets) will help you develop a comprehensive retention strategy for your product — just click here to download.   User education is one of the most powerful ways to increase engagement and retention at scale, yet is often put in the too hard basket. Elevio is the platform that removes this burden, empowering your users to self-serve contextually relevant help via their support widget and embeddable elements, increasing retention and engagement, while reducing support load. Elevio even tells you what content to add or fix and why based on usage trends from your users. Preventing content rot, and increasing coverage, which we all know is an ongoing challenge. You can also integrate with your existing support stack for content, access to live-chat, support tickets and more. Use elevio for continuous user education with 20% off your first year at (elev dot I O / saastr) using coupon code GOHARRY

Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, one of Boston’s premiere tech startups paving the way in the sales intelligence space. Throughout the InsightSquared journey, Fred has raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of DFJ, Bessemer, Salesforce and Atlas Venture. Prior to founding InsightSquared, Fred was a corporate development associate with Salesforce Ventures and before that he held several key roles at Bessemer Venture Partners including associate and Director of IT. He is also a board member of TUGG, an organization that brings together tech entrepreneurs with social enterprises that support at-risk youth.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Fred made his way into the world of SaaS, hustled his way to being a VC with Bessemer and then came to found InsightSquared from Boston? Why does Fred strongly argue that it is easier to start with SMB and move to enterprise than enterprise down? What are both the technical and personnel considerations of the decision? Why is it the product manager’s job to lose complexity as slowly as possible? Why does Fred disagree and state that CAC/LTV is not the guiding metric for SaaS startups? What are the core problems of CAC/LTV? What alternatives should founders consider as their guiding metrics? Where does Fred believe most founders go wrong when assessing their metrics? What metric keeps Fred up at night? What does Fred believe are the fundamentals to successfully building an inside sales team from scratch? What is the lowest ACV that an inside sales team can justify? How does Fred look to create a culture of accountability and responsibility without the element of fear of not hitting quota? Why does Fred go against conventional wisdom and suggest that customer success is the responsibility of the entire organisation? Why is this advantageous compared to a dedicated CS team? How does this mean both time and teams are allocated towards customer success? 60 Second SaaStr What does Fred know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What is the least discussed but most worthy topic in SaaS? What would Fred’s biggest advice to emerging SaaS founders be? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Fred Shilmover    

Paul Albright is one of the valley’s most experienced SaaS execs with extensive operational and capital management experience, including 3 IPOs. Most recently Paul was the Founder & CEO @ Captora, the marketing acceleration software solution that raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of NEA and Bain Capital Ventures. Prior to Captora, Paul was Chief Revenue Officer at Marketo where he drove the overall revenue strategy across sales and marketing that delivered global revenue growth over 100% year-over-year, from $14m to $58m. In a similar position at SuccessFactors, he grew revenues to more than $200m and over 80% year-over-year growth. Previously, Paul led worldwide marketing at NetApp and at Informatica, which he joined pre-revenue through their successful IPO. If that was not enough he has also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Paul made his way into the world with the likes of SuccessFactors and Marketo? What were his big lessons from seeing both companies scale into hyper-growth mode?   Does Paul agree with Dave Kellogg in stating, “CAC/LTV is the single most important metric for SaaS startups? What other metrics must all VPs of Demand Gen and Sales be watching constantly? What does an efficient sales and marketing engine look like? What are the core components to build that? What are the requirements to both run this engine and scale it quickly? How does the growth of this engine affect hiring in other parts of the business? Why does Paul believe that it is much harder to go SMB up than enterprise down? What are the changes that are required on both ends? For this in “no man’s land of pricing” what does an efficient sales process timeline look like from lead to conversion? 60 Second SaaStr How does Paul think about picking the investors he works with? Is customisation always wrong? What is “good sales rep productivity” to Paul? What does Paul know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Paul Albright

Rajeev Batra is a Partner at Mayfield, a firm that has championed bold entrepreneurs since 1969. Rajeev’s investments at Mayfield include the likes of Crunchbase, SmartRecruiters, Marketo (IPO then taken private by Vista Equity), ServiceMax (acquired by GE Digital) and more incredible companies. Prior to Mayfield, Rajeev was at Mobius (Softbank) Venture Capital and Austin Ventures. Before making the move into VC, Rajeev was on the operational side as an entrepreneur and executive with three of the companies he worked with going public and later being acquired, including the very notable Siebel Systems. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Rajeev made the transition from successful operator with 3 IPOs under his belt to investing in the next generation of enterprise companies with Mayfield? What does Rajeev mean when he says “startups do not die of starvation, they die of indigestion”? How does this realisation affect Rajeev’s approach to customer profiling and segmenting customers? Why does Rajeev believe that “early product market fit can be misleading”? How does Rajeev look to provide context and action from numbers and analytics in the early days? How does Rajeev feel that founders should approach gross margin from the early days? How should this relationship and thought process towards gross margin change over time? Why does Rajeev believe that retention is the number 1 metric for SaaS founders to focus on? In the stack of metrics, how does this compare to gross margin, CAC/LTV and payback period? 60 Second SaaStr Enterprise investing is spreadsheet investing: True or false? How does Mayfield use an internal budget to align themselves to entrepreneurs? What does Rajeev mean when he says “I look for 2 act opportunities”? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Rajeev Batra

Dave Kellogg is the CEO @ Host Analytics, the leader in cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM). Previously, Dave was SVP/GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce and CEO at unstructured big data provider MarkLogic. Before that, Dave was CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as the company grew from $30M to over $1B. Dave has also worked in various capacities with the likes of Breeze, GainSight, Tableau and MongoDB and previously sat on the boards of ag tech leader, Granular (acq by DuPont for $300M)  and big data leader Aster Data (acquired by Teradata for $325M). In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Dave made his way into the world of SaaS with Salesforce, came to be CMO at Business Objects and now running his own SaaS company as CEO at Host Analytics? What does David believe is the single most important metric in SaaS? How should SaaS companies structure the first four lines of their financial statements? Why is retention and renewal not always an accurate sign of customer satisfaction? How does Dave look to analyse churn? What is the post-mortem? What is more important, logos or expansion? If a startup’s churn is too high, what is the top 3 things they should do? Why must you have a “standard taxonomy” for churn? How can you construct this? How does David think about taking existing customer and up-selling them? How does he view this in contrast to cross-sell? Does Dave agree with David Skok on the need for more than 1 variable pricing mechanism? Why does Dave not encourage usage based pricing? How does Dave analyse the benefits of multi-year contracts paid upfront? How does this distort TCV and inflate the figures? Does upfront payment misalign the provider and the consumer, in terms of care and support? With that in mind, how does David view billing frequency? Contract durations? 60 Second SaaStr What does Dave know now which he wishes he had known at the beginning? What is the 90 day rule? Why is it important? How much ARR should a good sales rep add in relation to comp? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Dave Kellogg

Brad Feld is one of the world’s leading VCs having Co-Founded Foundry Group, Brad has made investments in the likes of Zynga, Makerbot and Fitbit, just to name a few. Brad is also Co-Founder of Techstars, one of the world’s most prominent startup accelerators, whose portfolio companies have raised over $1.3bn in funding. If that wasn’t enough Brad is also a best selling author having co-authoured Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and VC and Startup Communities: Building An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your Community. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Brad made his way into the world of VC and came to found Foundry Group? Brad has previously stated that companies can be segmented into 3 different core components? What does he mean by this? How can startups be structured internally for scalability? Why does Brad hate the word culture? How should culture be viewed and approach internally within startups? How has Brad seen his personal development with regards to being a board member? What has he got better at? What does he believe makes a great board member? Why is CAC the easiest metric to game in SaaS? How should the CAC/LTV ratio be approached? How can entrepreneurs use this to attract VC investment? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Brad Feld

Dan Burkhart is the Founder & CEO @ Recurly, the startup powering much of the subscription success, trusted by the likes of Twitch, CBS Interactive and Hubspot just to name a few. They have raised over $20m in VC funding from leading investors including Greycroft, Freestyle, Harrison Metal and more. As for Dan, his background spans 14 years with the likes of eBay and NBC Internet in the marketing, business development and strategic partnership realm. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Dan make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found Recurly? How does Dan perceive a good CAC/LTV ratio? Does he agree with the hallowed 3:1 often cited by founders and investors? How does Dan manage and measure customer churn? How does he approach regrettable and non-regrettable customer churn? What is the post-mortem analysis of customer churn? How does Dan insert an element of accountability without creating a sense of churn? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Dan Burkhart

Devon Wijesinghe. He’s the founder and CEO of InsightPool. He co-founded the business in 2012; and, within a short time led the company from 2 to 60 employees. He is currently revolutionizing marketeering and sales across many social platforms. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? –  Travis Kalanick Favorite online tool? — Pardot Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Try and learn to concentrate on financial metrics and understand finance deeply   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:27 – Nathan introduces Devin  to the show 01:53 - InsightPool focuses on the sector of influencer marketing 02:03 – “A brand needs to have an army of people syndicating their content with their own voices” 02:15 - Insight Cool finds influencers for brands that they can work with 02:35 – InsightPool’s pricing model 03:10 – Average customer pay per month is $3K 03:33 – What is included in $3K 03:53 – Devin was the solo founder 04:00 – Devin sold a previous company for 9-figures in early 2012 04:50 – “Social became prevalent as the newest data set” 05:11 – Devin seeded a business idea for $250K 05:33 – Devin has a formalized angel group 05:41 – Devin is an advisor and investor 05:58 – David Cummings is Devin’s friend 06:17 – David and Devin’s companies are the first ones in ATV lean and tech village 06:48 – He currently has 60 people on the team 07:21 – InsightPool is currently serving over a hundred enterprises 07:50 – MRR 08:23 – InsightPool has a sales team 08:49 – CAC LTV 10:00 – Average spending on CAC 10:25 – Gross churn 11:00 – Net revenue churn 11:53 – InsightPool did a series A round and got an investment of $8M 12:35 – InsightPool did a debt round last year 12:50 – The amount InsightPool is burning per month 14:50 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: A brand needs to have an army of people syndicating their content with their own voices. Go with what you think you are made to do. Learn how to make the metrics and finance dance – understand it deeply before taking that leap.   Resources Mentioned: Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. The Top Inbox  – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Jamf – Jamf helped Nathan keep his Macbook Air 11” secure even when he left it in the airplane’s back seat pocket Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Eric Bouck. He’s the CEO and founder of Propeller, a CRM that lets you sell from gmail. Prior to Propeller, Eric was the co-founder and CEO of Zigzag Software which was eventually sold to Samsung. He also spent some time working as a director for Samsung. He also worked as a Group Product Manager at Dell EMC and spent 4 years with this company. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Inspired What CEO do you follow? –  N/A Favorite online tool? — Webflow Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Yes If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Marry the right person”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:26 – Nathan introduces Eric to the show 02:05 – Propeller is the CRM that creates daily tools that salespeople can use to set their meetings, do their email and phone calls, share presentations and documents, and research etc. 02:31 – Propeller is a SaaS business and they have monthly and annual subscriptions 02:50 – Average revenue per customer monthly 02:54 –$50 per month 03:15 – How does Propeller win on a very crowded market? 03:24 – There’s a lot of companies who try to make their own niche 03:42 – Propeller has a unique mix of deep integration with Gmail combined with the ability to do multiple step campaign 04:45 – Propeller is an all-in-one CRM – you won’t be needing another product 05:10 – Propeller was launched September 1st 05:15 – Growth is 21% month over month 05:22 – A little over 50 customers at the moment 05:26 – Propeller is bootstrapped 05:39 – Eric got decent money from the exit 06:23 – No revenue churn at the moment 07:00 – Team size, they are also remote 07:36 – Eric is not open to acquisition talks at the moment 08:00 – The leading companies in the CRM space are Salesforce and Dynamics 08:35 – Pipeline and Hubspot are getting positive feedback as well 09:00 – Eric shares his opinion of Outreach 09:25 – Eric mentions Propeller having an AI 09:55 – The core differentiator of the products 10:04 – An example of how Propeller makes getting your emails done easier 11:00 – Nathan’s acuity to batch schedule 11:20 – CRM pricing 11:42 – Deliver the VALUE 12:00 – Eric shares their vision as a company to make salespeople more effective 12:12 – Eric shares how he got their first 5 customers 12:46 – Eric has also spent for paid marketing 12:58 – LTV is $1500 13:30 – CAC LTV ratio 15:10 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: If your market is crowded, you have to work HARDER to differentiate yourself. The value is not in losing sales or making more sales—the value is found in whether or not you provide an effective product.  Don’t live with regrets—it’s gotten you to where you are now.   Resources Mentioned: Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. The Top Inbox  – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Jamf – Jamf helped Nathan keep his Macbook Air 11” secure even when he left it in the airplane’s back seat pocket Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Carlo Cisco, the founder and CEO of Select, a private membership community that offers discount deals with thousands of premier brands. Carlo was an early builder of Groupon. He’s also a canny investor who made $75k in stocks by investing during college. Listen in to hear Nathan and Carlo break down the numbers behind Select, discuss Groupon’s meteoric growth, and explain Select’s unbelievable CAC:LTV ratio. Famous 5 Favorite Book? – The Intelligent Investor What CEO do you follow? — Mark Zuckerberg What is your favorite online tool? — Intercom Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? —To get ready for some crazy stuff Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:30 – Nathan’s introduction 01:43 – Welcoming Carlo to the show 02:00 – Carlo started an events planning business while he was in college 02:20 – Actively invested in tech companies while he was in college 03:16 – Carlo put about $9k into stocks and turned it into $85k 04:11 – Joined Groupon and helped build their operation in Japan 05:30 – Groupon hasn’t helped businesses enough...most businesses aren’t getting repeat customers from Groupon or LivingSocial deals 07:35 – Started Select in 2013 08:00 – The goal was to work with premier brands in an ongoing, sustainable way 08:50 – Select generates revenue through a $250 annual membership fee 09:55 – Currently have around 9000 members 10:20 – Annual revenue is $725k - average revenues are down because of a discount deal that generated members early on 11:20 – Currently at over $1 million run rate 11:45 – Annual retention rate is around 75% - which is unusually high for the sector 12:20 – Have raised just under $800k in funding 13:00 - Had equity funding from an accelerator programme - “The network is incredible” 14:00 - Currently happy to break even on customer acquisition 14:40 - Current lifetime value is around $900 per customer 15:22 - Currently have a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:7 15:40 - Ideal customer: High-income professionals, 25-45 years of age 17:02 – Connect with Carlo on Twitter and Linkedin 18:30 – Famous Five 3 Key Points: Accelerators have value beyond just funding - their networks and support can seriously pay off Invest wisely and early If you want excitement: prepare for it. Life can be crazy if you’re only ready. Resources Mentioned: Freshbooks - The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts. Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible. Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+ Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books. Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives  

Customer success leverage can sometimes be the difference between a winning and losing SaaS business when operating in low ACV environments. The theory is basically that if you are selling software at low prices you must be focused on extracting the highest degree of leverage out of your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to build a highly efficient business that wins. To discuss this topic we brought on our good friend and ultra-marathoner Jason Mills from Expensify to talk through how his business gets leverage through the customer success team. Expensify is a great example of how to build a wonderful engine here with millions of happy customers already served. Jason has learned a ton about this over his almost 4 years with the company. He was one of the early sales hires and really drove home the notion of gaining a lot of leverage out of the customer success team. We start the discussion on what specifically we mean by customer success leverage and how Jason and his team think about this topic. We really focus the podcast on how Expensify gains leverage without a substantial amount of money to spend. Jason talks about what makes a great customer success person that can give you leverage and lays out how the team works at Expensify (it is quite unique). We then move into how the founding team thought about this from the beginning of the company and how it has evolved over time. Next, we cover some of the thinking around the CAC / LTV specifics of their business and how Jason thinks about spend within his team here. From there we move into the specific tech stack that Expensify uses on this front and some of the tips and tricks that Jason has learned along the way when thinking about how IT can give his team leverage. You will be surprised to find that the company really only uses two pieces of software to handle all of the needs on this front (talk about focus and leverage!). We move on to some thinking about cadence of customer communication as well as how to train customer success team members to think outside the box and give any SaaS founder leverage. Finally, we close on Jason's thinking about how product and customer success are aligned at the hip in his organization and Jason closes with some tips and tricks on gaining customer success leverage in any low priced SaaS business. We hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

Customer success leverage can sometimes be the difference between a winning and losing SaaS business when operating in low ACV environments. The theory is basically that if you are selling software at low prices you must be focused on extracting the highest degree of leverage out of your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to build a highly efficient business that wins. To discuss this topic we brought on our good friend and ultra-marathoner Jason Mills from Expensify to talk through how his business gets leverage through the customer success team. Expensify is a great example of how to build a wonderful engine here with millions of happy customers already served. Jason has learned a ton about this over his almost 4 years with the company. He was one of the early sales hires and really drove home the notion of gaining a lot of leverage out of the customer success team. We start the discussion on what specifically we mean by customer success leverage and how Jason and his team think about this topic. We really focus the podcast on how Expensify gains leverage without a substantial amount of money to spend. Jason talks about what makes a great customer success person that can give you leverage and lays out how the team works at Expensify (it is quite unique). We then move into how the founding team thought about this from the beginning of the company and how it has evolved over time. Next, we cover some of the thinking around the CAC / LTV specifics of their business and how Jason thinks about spend within his team here. From there we move into the specific tech stack that Expensify uses on this front and some of the tips and tricks that Jason has learned along the way when thinking about how IT can give his team leverage. You will be surprised to find that the company really only uses two pieces of software to handle all of the needs on this front (talk about focus and leverage!). We move on to some thinking about cadence of customer communication as well as how to train customer success team members to think outside the box and give any SaaS founder leverage. Finally, we close on Jason's thinking about how product and customer success are aligned at the hip in his organization and Jason closes with some tips and tricks on gaining customer success leverage in any low priced SaaS business. We hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

*Anna Barber* ( https://www.techstars.com/mentors/anna-barber/ ) *is the Managing Director of* *Techstars* ( https://www.techstars.com/ ) *- Los Angeles. Techstars is a global seed accelerator and worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed and is currently in over 150 countries worldwide. Some of their alumni include Classpass, Pillpack, and Contently. Previously, Anna has experience as a corporate lawyer, McKinsey consultant, product executive and entrepreneur in ed tech, retail and e-commerce.* *For all founders in the Los Angeles area, applications to be part of Techstars LA Accelerator 2020 cohort are open! You have until April 5th 2020 to apply.* *Click Here To Apply* ( https://www.techstars.com/los-angeles-program/ ) *Three books that inspired Anna personally and professionally are* *Dare to Lead* ( https://amzn.to/2uH2RXD ) *by Brene Brown,* *Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up* ( https://amzn.to/2Tk261c ) *by Jerry Colonna and* *Why We Buy* ( https://amzn.to/36P0m3M ) *by Paco Underhill.* *On this episode you will learn -* * *Why Anna became an investor in Tech? What is the criteria for startups looking to apply to Techstars accelerator? The three different phases in the Techstars 12 week program.* * ** * *What are some qualities she looks for in founders and founding teams? Why engagement metrics are so important. Why in the early stages, CAC/LTV is not an important metric.* * ** * *“The Pied Piper Effect”. If you have a better name, she's all ears. Why is investing in consumer so challenging? What are some of the consumer trends that she's most excited about? Why consumer is not formulaic.* * ** * *Why it is such an exciting time to be in the Los Angeles tech ecosystem? What are some of the reasons why a Techstars alumnus startup might fail to raise the next round? What's one thing she would change about venture capital? Tips how to reach out to venture capitalists* * ** *You can follow Anna on Twitter @annawbarber. You are also welcome to follow along behind the scenes @mikegelb and @consumervc*