startups 101 by danny boice

Startups 101Danny Boice, Co-Founder & President

Speek

About Me

Speek Co-Founder

Harvard & MIT

Exited First Startup in 2006

Georgetown Professor

Forbes Columnist@DannyBoice

About Speek

$6 Million In Venture Capital

2 Years Old

Hundreds Of Thousands Of Users

Millions Of Calls

Exponential Growth @SpeekAppwww.Speek.com

Speek Press

We just closed our Series A round and surpassed hundreds of

thousands of users. What did I learn in retrospect?

How Is A Startup Different?

Startups vs Small Businesses

A Restaurant, Barber Shop, bookstore, consulting company, etc. is NOT a startup!

Different DNA (Exponential Growth)

Staff Size Does Not Equate To Revenue

Technology (Web & Mobile) Not Physical Locations

The “Trough of Sorrows”

The Startup Lifecycle

Success Requires 3 Things

Product

Users

Money

Product

The Lean Startup Methodology 101

Most startups fail because they build something nobody wants

Startup success can be engineered

Validate your product ideas with quick experiments

For details see this great article by Grace Ng

To see it in action do a Lean Startup Machine weekend

Lean Steps

• Should I build my idea?

• Construct a hypothesis

• Identify the riskiest assumption

• Pick a test (Exploration, pitch, concierge)

• Agree on success criteria

• Run the experiment

• Analyze the results

• Repeat

Users

User Acquisition 101

Acquisition

Activation

Retention

Referral

Revenue

AARRR, cap'n!

Get to know your subscribers.

Tactics

Viral Loop

Word of Mouth

Freemium

Referrals

Content

SEO / Google / Bing

Social Media

Press

Paid / Ads

The Holy Grail

Money

Revenue 101

Common Revenue Models

Subscriptions

Freemium

Ads

Pay As You Go

License

Venture Capital

** Punting For Future Conversation **

Let’s Discuss!