The Startup Weekly: #27

The Startup Weekly- actionable, insightful no bull shit stuff you learn and grow with.

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“Don’t Take Advice” and More Startup Advice

Seven lessons learned from a recovering entrepreneur and her first founder flop. A very brave and introspective article, from a founder who tasted success early with her first startup, but hit a wall with her second. Some of the learnings are very insightful. The most interesting one for me — success is not a straight line. Whether you succeed or fail, the outcome will be very far from what you envisaged.

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The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula

All of us love the LTV formula. It’s what justifies us coming back every day to work on our startups — the life time value of the customer is high. In this article, Bill Gurley, VC veteran, talks about how people can misuse the LTV formula, forgetting that it’s a model and not reality. And he lists ten reasons why you shouldn’t “workship at the altar of LTV”. Or, to be less melodramatic, why you shouldn’t base all your decisions on this one derived number.

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Mobile Apps Have a Short Half Life; Use Falls Sharply After First Six Months

Some very scary data for those of us building mobile apps. As this article says, usage of your app will fall sharply within six months. Is that enough for you to extract enough value — you better hope so! The most shocking stat for me — 25% of apps are not opened even ONCE after downloading!

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The 20/20/20 Rule for Marketplaces

After the success of marketplace startups like Airbnb, Uber and several others, a lot of us now are more convinced of the attractiveness of such business models. But hype apart, the economics of each marketplace are different. How do you know they’ll work for your idea?This article shares a quick-and-dirty rule to find out whether your numbers make sense. Can you satisfy this rule and still make money for yourself? If yes, then you may have a good marketplace idea on your hands.

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Avoiding The Wheel Of Meaningless Growth

Brian Balfour of Hubspot talks about how we all get caught up in the “wheel of meaningless growth” from time to time. You create some vanity metrics to get good press, and then justify to yourself that this vanity metric is worth pursuing. But really, is no. of downloads important? Or is it far more critical to measure engagement? He also talks about ways to identify and use metrics that are actually useful and mean something for your business, from his experience as a growth marketer.

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Where Does Your Product Fit in the Market?

Say you’re an entrepreneur and your product is getting little traction. You could go back to the drawing board and re-engineer it. Try different features, to see what clicks with the customer.However, according to venture capitalist Alan Chiu, rather than rethinking your product, it sometimes makes more sense to rethink your market.

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Market Size

One of the most common reasons VCs give for passing on an opportunity is some version of “It’s not big enough”. In this article, Rob Go, a VC himself, suggests five strategies you can use to try and convince VCs (and yourself) of the size of your market.

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Design a Call To Action Button That Converts

Design, like the devil, is in the details. And you need to go into these details while designing call-to-action buttons — even a slight jump in click-through rates can make a huge difference to your business. This article gives tips and best practices, with illustrations, on how to make your “Click here” buttons convert much better.

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