For Entrepreneurs Blog

Optimizing your Customer Acquisition Funnel

David Skok — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:12:20 +0000

Almost every sales and marketing funnel has blockage points where the conversion rates are lower than hoped, or the process cannot be scaled. This blog post talks about how to solve those blockage points using an intense study of the customer's concerns, and brainstorming to see what motivations can be used to over come the friction that comes from these concerns.

What drives great entrepreneurs

David Skok — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:36:14 +0000

If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.” I recently watched an outstanding presentation called “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek (embedded at the bottom [...]

Two Excellent Startup Presentations

David Skok — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:31:10 +0000

Readers of this blog will likely really enjoy the following two presentations that discuss lessons learned by the founders of both DropBox and Xobni. There are lots of great lessons to be learned here. Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned From Zero to a Million Users – Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned

How Sales Complexity impacts your Startup’s Viability

David Skok — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:30:19 +0000

This post looks at how sales complexity impacts the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) in B2B software and hardware companies. It also introduces a zone system for evaluating different startup sales models.

SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters

David Skok — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:10:27 +0000

Looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down to expose the key metrics. Provides a detailed look at what management must focus on to drive a successful SaaS business.

Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior

David Skok — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:51:00 +0000

Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. And great management teams know that the only way to improve a process is to start by measuring it. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In this post I hope to help show how to figure out which metrics matter the [...]

SolidWorks: The best VAR management program in the world?

David Skok — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:57:52 +0000

How Solidworks evolved its VAR management program into arguably the best in the world, by Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition

David Skok — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:56:02 +0000

In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup [...]

Lessons Learned – Viral Marketing

David Skok — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:24:17 +0000

A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: Viral customer acquisition with good monetization. However viral growth turns out to be an elusive [...]

6 things VCs look for in an investment

David Skok — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:13:16 +0000

Alternative title: “6 questions to help validate your startup idea” As a serial entrepreneur, I learned a lot of lessons from things that didn’t work. These lessons later on shaped my ideas on what would be needed to build a successful startup company. When I became a VC, I realized that these same lessons could [...]