This seems to be a pretty well thought out and detailed summary weighing the cost of getting a customer to the profit that is generated by them. This is looking at that next step that follows the customer based development process, and is looking at how to define what is a viable growth strategy.
It also includes some useful interactive spreadsheets, so you can play with your numbers in the context of the post.
Reading Niederhoffer’s post I was immediately struck by how much startups can learn from Lady Gaga. Read his full post, but three things in-particular jumed out to me as related to startups:
1) 1000 true fans. If you have read Kevin Kelly’s thoughts, it won’t surprise you that Lady Gaga has gone on record numerous times attributing her success specifically to an early community of devoted gay fans.
2) You have to be technical to be a success. Lady Gaga is no Milli Vanilli. She is a seriously talented technical singer and can write her own tracks. She is both a maker AND a manager.
3) What’s in a name? Changing her name from Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta to Lady Gaga allowed her to create a tremendous brand. Was Lady Gaga a Googlewhack? I bet it was. Gaga is also two syllables — I remember once having Luke Nosek tell me that the Founders Fund only likes to invest in companies with two-syllable names because they are the easiest to remember and brand.
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Tagged as:
founders fund,
Lady Gaga,
marketing,
Victor Niederhoffer
Picked up this story from a @davemcclure tweet.
As we finish up the year, I’m really pleased with the progress the Startup Visa gang is making. I started thinking about, writing, and working on this on 9/10/09 when I wrote the post The Founders Visa Movement. One quarter later, we’ve:
- Put together a core group of entrepreneurs, angels, and VCs who are working on this.
- Received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from entrepreneurs and investors who have struggled with this issue.
- Verified that this is a real issue, there is no current solution under the existing visa system, and even though there are plenty of immigration lawyers who say “no problem, I can get around this”, there aren’t clean solutions.
- Engaged with a number of Congressmen in both the house and the senate.
- Found a member of the house who is sponsoring a bill addressing the issue.
- Talking to several folks on the senate side to find a sponsor.
- Codified a first clean draft of language around this.
- Build lots of grassroots support and enthusiasm.
- Gotten plenty of discussion going in the blogosphere and mainstream media.
Getting a working visa for the US is a hit or miss proposition. If you are the founder of a bootstrapped company that happens to be based in the US, but you are not holding a US passport, this could be a difficult situation at best. I just came across this post by someone that is working on getting a visa class set up for those intelligent, enthusiastic people that want to set up a venture in the states.
