Sterilize. Sanitize. Disinfect. Decontaminate. Wipe Down. Rinse Off. Repeat. Welcome to the Contam Culture – a new “normal” modus operandi if you will, we’ve been forced to accept in a pandemic induced world. As the weeks become months under the quarantined, sheltered, physically-distanced era, businesses and consumers have had to adapt to this radical shift …
Wondering if your marketing and sales activities are actually yielding a positive ROI?
Here’s a good breakdown on unit economics for #startups including customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and unit profitability by Hustle Fund.
#vc #cac #ltv #economics #entrepreneur
The Mechanics of Unit Economics
www.hustlefund.vc
The days when investors overlooked profitability in favor of hyper growth are behind us. It is crucial for startup founders to understand their business’ unit economics, not just to fundraise succes...Happy New Year to all of the entrepreneurs around the world building their dream! Let’s make you successful in 2021!!
This week, I sat down over Zoom with an entrepreneur based in Puerto Rico who is building a web-platform in a very crowded industry.
As a solo founder, he’s the waiter, cook, and dishwasher - having to multi-task to design the product, code, and sell it to the market.
A technical founder by nature, he understands the engineering side to running a web startup (having been through a few before), however, when it comes to Marketing, Sales and User Experience Design, he faced a challenging uphill battle to understand how to not think like an engineer, but instead, think like a designer.
In order to help him reframe his startup, I had him first walk through the competitive landscape and understand how they have positioned their companies to attract customers.
I had him break down the competition in simple, broad-stroke terms - “This company is helping people learn how to get started doing “x”, and this one is helping advanced professionals better monetize their content, and this one is helping them distribute their content to more platforms” he answered confidently.
I then prodded him next to see the content that their customers were creating, and define it in one phrase.
“So this appears to me, that the user’s content is being forced into very general categories like “business, technology, politics, etc., right?” I explained further.
“Yeah, so?” he replied.
“Well, it seems that every company is hovering over here, and what about if you have a niche piece of content that a select audience wants to engage with, how can they locate that with any of these companies?” I inquired.
“They can’t, I mean, it would be challenging to find that on those websites” he responded. A lightbulb going off at that very moment.
“What if, you focused your user-generated content on the ‘long-tail’ model to attract very specific audiences who simply can’t find that type of content on these general websites?” I asked rhetorically.
“Yeah! That would be amazing. I’d even use it!” he exclaims with a fresh, enthusiastic wave.
“And let’s go one step further...what if...you set a limit on the time of the content to create a sense of urgency so they want and have to engage with the content before it’s gone?” I further prodded his mind along the design-thinking journey.
“That could be interesting....they would have to visit my site or else risk never learning that new lesson.” he replies.
As we rolled our session into hour two, I asked to do a full walk through of his beta and provided honest feedback as if I were an actual user, often exclaiming out loud in frustration, “Ok. What do I do next here?! I’m lost.”
As an engineer, he knew all of the ins and outs of the beta, but in walking through it one thousand times before, he forgot what it’s like to walk through it for the very first time as a new customer.
“I guess I didn’t see that friction point there in the on-boarding process” he replies regretfully. “I’ve got my work cut out for me to fix that and remove that friction, and then look to reimagine the positioning so we are the opposite of what everyone else is doing today” he replies.
“Now you got it!” I say.
Entrepreneurs come in many different flavors and backgrounds, and while technical knowledge is very helpful in the building process, it provides a myopic view with which we view the design process.
By changing out the lens with which we view our product’s experience, we get a completely different lay of the land - pivoting from portrait to landscape mode, from black and white code to techni-color experiences that delight, intrigue, and engage users in a new way.
To me, founders who can zoom in and out between the detailed view and the big picture, to capture the full experience, simply take better pictures.
#startups #startup #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #growth #designthinking #ux #userexperience
📸: Paul Skorupskas
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