October 2020

2020 Startups – A Year in Review

This year has been marked by one of the most unprecedented, and challenging global economic environments of the last one-hundred years. Despite the aforementioned, startup investing continues to rip at a feverish pace, marked by technology, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and enterprise software firms. According to this CrunchBase report, “Overall, total global venture dollars for 2020 …

Reagan Pollack

2 weeks ago

How does a top-tier Venture Capitalist view a startup’s traction? I asked fellow @babsoncollege alum and friend Ryan McDonald (Vice President & Partner, Norwest Venture Partners @norwestvp - $9.5B AUMs) how he thinks through lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC) - arguably two of the most important metrics for gauging traction:“Quality of revenue is one of the most important traction-based metrics to me. Growth, market, proprietary advantages or IP, team and other factors are all incredibly important and also very obvious. Everyone is looking at these. But often times, investors value revenue and revenue growth at face value without taking into account the deeper properties of that revenue. How difficult was it to sell this revenue? Even if it was low cost, making the LTV/CAC metrics look good, did it take three years to win the contract? Is there something inherently off with the margins? Maybe gross margins look good, but there is a lot of embedded SG&A [selling, general & administrative] cost or CapEx [capital expenditure] associated with serving this customer. Maybe the revenue is great, and margins are solid, but there is no real stickiness to the revenue. Are customers, either B2B or B2C, going to pull away from your offering once they have extracted full benefit from it? Will you be undercut on cost when a competitor offers an inferior, but much cheaper offering? Just because it is recurring, or SaaS, does not necessarily make it valuable revenue!"#nostartupleftbehind #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #founder #supportsmallbusiness #vc #venturecapital #businessowner ... See MoreSee Less

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Reagan Pollack

2 weeks ago

I truly love helping #founders of all kinds from around the world, and am so grateful for their kind feedback after a coaching session! Having now worked with #startups across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America at P18, Babson College, and Hustle Fund, I am so impressed with the caliber of amazing entrepreneurs working on incredible businesses across a myriad of sectors (AI, e-commerce, SaaS, consumer products, enterprise and more). While there’s a lot of useful information out there, I find one of my personal strengths in helping founders navigate early stage phases derives from my own startup experiences (the wins and a lot of failures); the challenges that helped me learn what not to do at each stage are the little gems that help others move more quickly to gain traction and leap over competitors in their respective fields. I never dreamed that my struggles could be turned into something positive, but I’m incredibly grateful to have reframed my experiences to become learning lessons. That’s why I wrote No Startup Left Behind - to crystallize learnings across a decade of being inside of the startup trenches, breaking down each phase of the journey into manageable chunks to help entrepreneurs see what’s most important to focus in on and how to keep pressing on when headwinds hit their businesses. If you’re interested in growing your business, feel free to grab a copy of the book or audiobook on Amazon Kindle Amazon.com, and if you’d like to get one-one-one consulting I’ve now made a few slots available for June. To learn more and book time with me, see details here: reaganpollack.com/product/consulting-session/ ... See MoreSee Less

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Reagan Pollack

2 weeks ago

I often get asked by founders and small business owners, “Why are we not winning in the market, and how can we better understand where we can focus our attention and resources on to improve the customer experience?” I respond by saying:“Find areas where your competition ignores or fails the customer and use that to delight them instead.”G.P.S. Rank (goals, problems, solutions) is a powerful tool to use as you launch or grow a business. Customers may not be able to explicitly explain to you what they didn’t like about your product or service or what they really did love about the competition, but this breaks a multi-touch point experience down into bite-size chunks that your team can focus in on and improve. By splicing these moments into manageable user experience segments, you can raise the bar for your company, and in the process, delight more customers, and bury your competitors because you will more clearly see the entire experience from your customer’s eyes, and not just from up in your corporate tower or behind a P&L statement.By spending time walking in the shoes of your customers, identifying friction points with your product’s on-boarding, transactions, and post-experience, as compared to your competitor’s offerings, you’ll begin to see and numerically rank the touch-points to uncover hidden problems and opportunities to improve. The net sum of those improved components will yield higher retention, transactional volume, and deeper loyalty. This applies for nearly every business of every kind across all industries and sectors. #nostartupleftbehind #startup #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurlife #entrepreneurmindset #smallbusiness #businessowner #businesstips ... See MoreSee Less

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Month: October 2020

2020 Startups – A Year in Review

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