Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 14, 2021

As an advisor to new business owners, I’m accustomed to seeing primarily the simple traditional product pricing strategies , usually driven by competitor prices, or cost plus a reasonable margin. I often wonder whether you as the entrepreneur have worked as hard on your pricing strategy as you have on your innovative solution.

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Pricing Startup Competition Examples 145

Berkonomics

FEBRUARY 9, 2023

The rest of the purchase price was concocted from a brew of zero-coupon bonds (where the face value is many times the invested amount until the reduced cost bonds mature thirty years later), and borrowing using the target company’s accounts receivable and other assets as collateral for a loan to purchase the company. What power!

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Pricing Sales Examples Tool 156

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

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Startup Venture Capital Sales Technical Review 418

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 31, 2012

Jeff (also an HBS alum) co-teaches the LTV course with Professor Eisenmann about a student of theirs who had written a blog post about sales taking on some of my previous assertions. That student is Erin McCann who formerly worked in sales at Google, so she has some ground to stand on in her assertions.

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Startup Sales Course Competition 319

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

When convertible debt first started being introduced as a “faster, cheaper way to get startups funded” they didn’t have pricing built into them. ” And some seed stage investors told me, “I prefer not to fight over price now. They’ll get priced soon enough by a VC.” Enter “the cap.”

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Startup Pricing Equity Venture Capital 354

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 21, 2013

So when I meet with GRP portfolio companies that do enterprise sales I try to emphasize the following: 1. This might mean helping customers buy traffic, arb’ing deals, helping with RTB pricing or trading, etc. Often your sales engineers can do the customizations without bugging the core eng team.

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Software Review Software Services Companies 321

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

2 preamble issues having read the comments on TC today: 1: I know that the prices of startup companies is much great in Silicon Valley than in smaller towns / less tech focused areas in the US and the US prices higher than many foreign markets. You can be pissed off, but I don’t set prices. That’s stupid.

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Startup Pricing Technical Review Marketing 336

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

Yet in this age when customers have a thousand alternatives, and are overwhelmed by a multitude of messages, sales efforts can make or break a business. In fact, I believe modern entrepreneurs need to be super sales people, in the most positive sense, to their team as well as customers. No pain usually means no sales.

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Sales Training Startup Customer 139

Berkonomics

JANUARY 26, 2017

The rest of the purchase price was concocted from a brew of zero coupon bonds (where the face value is many times the invested amount until the reduced cost bonds mature thirty years later), and borrowing using the target company’s accounts receivable and other assets as collateral for a loan to purchase the company. What power!

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Pricing Sales Tool Equity 120

socalTECH

JULY 18, 2019

Santa Monica-based Cornerstone OnDemand , which provides cloud-based learning and talent management tools, has linked up with a sales training company, Sandler Training, on a new sales training subscription, the two said today. Pricing on the new subscription was not announced. READ MORE>>.

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Cornerstone OnDemand Training Sales Santa Monica 113

TechCrunch LA

MARCH 3, 2019

Tesla said that to achieve this lower price it will shift all sales globally to online only, meaning the company will be closing many of its stores over the next few months. The $35,000 Tesla Model 3 has arrived — but it comes with a price. Musk later said they would be hiring more service technicians.

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Design Layoffs Pricing Los Angeles 272

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 9, 2012

The median VC exit price for deals is $70 million (FLAG Capital via Bryce.VC). There is a mythology amongst some LPs (funds that invest in VCs) and some VCs that “entry price doesn’t matter – only investing in the absolute best entrepreneurs.” So entry price matters a lot. ” That’s b t.

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Startup Technology Venture Capital Santa Barbara 323

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 30, 2014

On sales I often talk about “ Why Buy Anything, Why Buy Now, Why Buy Me ” as a tool to think about a sales process. On teams I have a framework for tech teams “ CTO vs. VP Eng ” or on sales I have “ Journeymen, Mavericks & Superstars ” 5.

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Startup Framework CTO Coach Sales 407

Berkonomics

JULY 26, 2018

These are so succinct, so well defined, so precise that everyone in sales and everyone involved in marketing must be able to answer these three questions without pause, and convincingly. It would pay you to work over this set of questions in a special session with sales, marketing and senior management in the room at once.

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Sales Customer Custom Pricing 226

InfoChachkie

APRIL 13, 2015

Avoid a simple pricing mistake which could sink your startup. Because I am cheap and I know that car dealers are incentivized by the manufacturer to hit quarterly and annual sales goals. Thus, the value of a sale at the end of a quarter can be significant, if the sale contributes to obtaining a manufacturer''s incentive.

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Pricing Startup Sales SaaS 100

Berkonomics

AUGUST 10, 2023

From the moment such an investor looks seriously at your company, the investor or VC partner is thinking of the end game, the ultimate sale of the company or even of an eventual initial public offering. There is no middle ground. Resetting your priorities Taking money from these sources involves resetting priorities over time.

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Venture Capital Sales Invest Class 292

InfoChachkie

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

And then they said one thing that most marketers go their whole career never hearing, 'Listen Steve, price is irrelevant, it is speed that matters.' We had been pricing our graphics cards to be a low-cost provider. The first thing I did was raise our prices.". the VP of Sales the richest person in the company.

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Marketing Startup Sales Customer 271

Berkonomics

AUGUST 17, 2023

Preparing for the game… If you have been following our recent insights, you’ll be up to speed knowing that professional investors negotiate tough terms, from provisions of control over asset acquisition, eventual sale of the company, future investments, forced co-sale when others attempt to sell their shares and more.

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Invest Capital Startup Entrepreneur 296

Berkonomics

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

The document should also contain clear buy-sell clauses, forcing any sale of shares to first be offered to the corporate treasury, then to the other founders in proportion to their holdings, and then if no interest, to outside investors. How about the price per share? a share, then options must be priced at that amount.

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Equity Class Pricing Sales 256

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 21, 2013

While still owning the business he now does $60 million in annual sales built from nothing. He wanted to keep his prices low (apparently he has never raised his wholesale price in 30 years). Focus on the customer and provide value - ”We just do our own thing and try to keep the price low. What touched me?

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Entrepreneur Startup Pricing Product 415

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Most of them are completely mundane such as choosing which: bank, office space, 1-year lease vs. 2-year lease, logo, URL, pricing structure or which VC. Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. We missed our sales target by more than 66% for the year but we had great slides explaining why. What lovely charts!

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Entrepreneur Technical Review Slides CTO Coach 414

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 11, 2012

Sometimes I even say, “I will change price / terms if I need to. Your job is to offer a price (or terms) and walk. If you get to the end of the road and turn right and they’re not following you then you know you offered a price that was too low. In that case my price was too low even for him. I prefer not to.

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Pricing Startup Examples Writing 305

TechCrunch LA

DECEMBER 8, 2020

He did note that in the four markets where the company has gone live since launching its business in January 2019 — San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire , and Sacramento — has yielded an annualized revenue run rate of over $400 million in gross merchandise value (the total value of home sales transacted on its platform).

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Sales Demand San Diego Funding 282

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 6, 2015

Many people are too cautious in sales processes and as a result when they present their solutions they end up sounding milquetoast and undifferentiated from anybody else in the market. I recently wrote about the three rules of sales. In sales we often call these USPs (I wrote about them here: Unique Selling Propositions ).

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Sales SaaS Startup Venture Capital 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 4, 2013

Put simply – you need enough users in a segment who care about what you’re doing to dictate investing further in the product or in sales & marketing resources. One of the things I have observed over the years is that a hard charging sales oriented founder/CEO can often hide the defects in a product. Like DeviantArt.

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Startup Customer Custom Technical Review 401

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 22, 2010

The price / share is actually $2.40 (not $3.00), which is $3,000,000 pre-money / 1,250,000 shares (because you had to create the 250,000 share options). Term Sheet Overview : The second most important economic term in the term sheet other than price is “liquidation preference.&# Thus the “true&# pre-money is only $2.4

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Venture Capital Pricing Startup Funding 405

Berkonomics

DECEMBER 21, 2017

Almost always, professional investors, including angel groups and venture capitalists, also require at least one seat on the corporate board.

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Invest Sales Resource Email 243

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 1, 2014

You enter your make, model, trim & year and out pops a price curve of purchases in your area and in most states you will then be offered a fixed price to purchase that car. So what could be wrong with price transparency in the auto sector? I can’t imagine buying a car any other way.

Truecar 338

Truecar Startup Hulu Pricing 338

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 26, 2012

” The post talked about how to find the lowest acceptable price & terms in a deal through testing. You’ve got to have some wiggle room on price and on terms. She got you to drop price and include more licenses for free. All of your sales training techniques are useless to their procurement Teflon.

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Development Team Review Software Review Pricing Startup 293

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 7, 2014

I spend a lot of time with startups and thus hear many companies talk about their approach to sales and their interactions with customers. Given customers & sales are the lifeblood of any organization you’d imagine everybody would respect their customers. Contrast that with a VC conversation I had. Startup Lessons'

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Custom Customer Venture Capital Software Review 341

Berkonomics

JUNE 15, 2017

From the moment such an investor looks seriously at your company, the investor or VC partner is thinking of the end game, the ultimate sale of the company or even of an eventual initial public offering. Taking in angel or venture money requires a setting of an entrepreneur’s expectations that may come as a shock at least at first.

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Venture Capital Sales Invest Class 243

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 senior sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business 6 months. COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 227

Startup Venture Capital Sales Course 227

Berkonomics

JANUARY 6, 2022

First, the marginal exit event: Sometimes the end game or sale of the company is not a happy event for the early investors, including the entrepreneur or the founders. Most sophisticated investors will take either a promissory note or preferred stock, both of which come before founder or management stock in a sale or liquidation.

Venture Capital 156

Venture Capital Sales Pricing Equity 156

Berkonomics

JUNE 29, 2017

If you have been following our recent insights, you’ll be up to speed knowing that professional investors negotiate tough terms, from provisions of control over asset acquisition, eventual sale of the company, future investments, forced co-sale when others attempt to sell their shares and more.

Invest 243

Invest Entrepreneur Sales Startup 243

Berkonomics

MARCH 8, 2018

The option price should be set by appraisal under IRS rule 409a, and certainly should be low enough to recognize that common stock options are not worth as much as preferred stock, given the many preferences of the latter. You do not pay professional investors who are serving on behalf of an investment company or VC and paid by that company.

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Venture Capital Equity Sales Invest 256

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 15, 2013

And a natural sales person. You can’t just name your own price.” I’ve sat through so many meetings where sales reps didn’t ask for the order. Any great sales person will ask you at the end of the meeting, “So, how’d I do? She was a nurse but was never graduated from a 4-year college.

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Sales Class Training Technical Review 416

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 19, 2011

We had the final terms of our agreement fairly well boxed in within a range of about 5-7% on price and within 30 days on move-in date. I obviously preferred the lowest price and I wanted the latest move-in date. She told me, “start with the price you want but the move in date he wants.&#. I told my agent. She way annoyed.

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Venture Capital Pricing Startup Outsource 319