You May Be Copying a Bad Business Model
About five years ago, I was involved in a new consumer services business that was the talk of the town. Friends and colleagues, seeing the flood of customers and press, often commented that “you guys must be making money hand over fist.” Truth was, we weren’t. Providing our services was expensive, and we were struggling…
Get to Revenue As Fast As You Can
If you have ever talked with Acceleration Partners about your new online business idea, you are sure to have heard us say “get to revenue fast.” This was tough advice to give when the market seemed to reward top-line user growth over revenue and profitability, but now things are changing in a hurry. It’s one…
Affiliate Marketing FAQ’s for Beginners
A lot of people ask the same questions when they are trying to learn about affiliate marketing, so I have tried to compile all of the answers here in one place. Q. What Is An Affiliate Program? A. An affiliate program is a system where your website posts a link to another website, and if…
Focus Your Business With The Sales Lens
If you run a small services business, you spend a lot of time thinking about where your next customer will come from. Given the time you invest in building a sales pipeline, you might be surprised to learn that almost everything you have been told about the sales process is wrong. Traditional sales thinking puts…
The Business Plan vs Executive Summary Debate
Which is better, the business plan or the executive summary? Academic institutions and the marketplace appear to be moving in opposite directions on this question. While many business students are required to develop 30- to 50-page business plans, we’ve found that these lengthy documents are used less and less in the real world, with the…
To NDA or not to NDA – The Relevance of Non Disclosure Agreements
In my career, I have probably read over 2000 business plans from entrepreneurs seeking their first round of investment capital. I tend to cringe (as do all venture investors) a little bit when folks ask me for an NDA simply to hear their idea. As a general rule, I believe the entrepreneurs who are taking…
The Top 10 Do’s & Don’ts of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing segments of online commerce. Many people often ask me, what is affiliate marketing exactly? The easiest answer I can give is that it is the process by which online businesses give other websites access to tools and marketing collateral to sell products from their website on the…
Outsourcing: You Have To Drive the Bus
One of the great things about starting a business today is the number of smaller consulting firms that can help you. These outsourced partners can serve as an integral resource for your team at an early stage but there is a catch. You can’t do it all so that’s why you hire the experts. This…
Execution as a Last Resort?
So I am reading the lead Wall Street Journal article this morning about the failed performance of the Sprint/Nextel merger. The author goes into all the ways that Sprint has botched the integration, from diluting the Nextel brand to failing to integrate the two networks. He also talks about how the company has had massive…
Bubble 2.0 – Here We Go Again
We swore we’d learn from the meltdown of 2000, but we haven’t. In many ways it’s almost worse this time, because we know how the story ends. Here are my Top 5 reasons for believing we’re in a Web 2.0 bubble. 5. Too Much Money While it is a bit harder to get financial backing…