Tag: Growth

I have recently met with a variety of startups that have business models that are entirely dependant on hyper user acquisition, activation, and retention. Dave Mcclure’s Pirate Math (AARRR) remains the text book to follow http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics.html. In these discussions I was drawn into a discussion about valuation, which turned into an email I have paraphrased below for your feedback.

First a qualifier, I don’t imagine I am the best person to discuss valuation from any angle. In my role making funding decisions, I am lucky to not have to price rounds, so valuation isn’t something I have done professionally. Similar on the pricing (revenue) side (solution value) to the market, my experience is all value (ROI) or market based (competitive) pricing in enterprise B2B, so not well aligned to the B2C startups.

To give you my 2cents, my view is that all the companies I encounter that work on user dependant models are way to early to have any concern about valuation. On the pricing front, most are not even ready to start testing, as they need to build a value proposition that is coherent. Note a problem – solution statement and a value proposition are very different though related things. Those that have a value prop and a MVP should be running pricing experiments at as high a volume as possible; inability to do so illuminates other issues (CAC & Value).

My experience with companies that are pre-funding and typically pre-revenue is that there is nothing to price in order to derive a valuation. In the seed round my view is to do a convertible note. The only logical pricing mechanism at this early phase is the value of the team’s time. Two founders who could reasonably earn $100k/ year each working for the man have a company that is worth no more than $200k pre-traction (NPV). Generally speaking investors set the price, the only say the entrepreneur has is their ability to create a market for the equity and negotiate a deal. Your company, in the early stages, is only worth what someone is willing to pay.

Most teams do not have anywhere near enough evidence to establish comps for their valuation. This makes hunting for investment a very dangerous use of time. Money goes to teams with traction, spend nearly all your energy on activity that demonstrates traction (signups, downloads, revenue, etc). Investors will not make your business work, customers will.

Here is an easy example to think about B2C valuation. A Facebook user is worth $100 (roughly) and provides the peak market comparable for every other Ad driven social consumer platform in the market. Every other company with a similar business model has a user value less than $100 per account and the drop of is extremely steep. FB has dominant market position, continued up and to the right growth, proven revenue, extreme stickiness etc. Tomorrow’s hot startup only has user acquisition on its side with no sustained track record of activating, retaining and converting those users to VALUE. Pre-value users occur at a negative run-rate (basic costs of the business, dev ops, and user acquisition costs). The amount of traction to overcome the disadvantage is huge, and to my knowledge no one in Canada has pulled anything like that off (Wattpad is working on it).

This is driving 10m users as the benchmark for a startup to become a candidate for a priced round (see http://cdixon.org/2012/08/03/ten-million-is-the-new-one-million/). If you can get that many users without spending a tonne of money you likely have some foundational value to build on. Before that you are pissing in the wind trying to raise money IMHO. Metrics change based on models but the mountain is just as daunting if you are SaaS b2b etc. The reason i dislike user models so much is that I don’t believe Canada has any sherpas that have been up that mountain, we have plenty of folks who have climbed b2b peaks.

This rant has come out of on going discussions about Canada’s accelerators and their propensity towards B2C startups. Generally speaking; asking for investment is a waste of time on Demo Day. The only route to funding is through traction. I want to see these companies make asks that drive against traction milestones, ie help the startup get on a growth curve to 10 million users. Make asks against milestones ❤ months out from demo day, ones that generate momentum and move the needle on the key performance metrics of the model. “SIGN UP for the APP now! please;) but seriously the bar will not open until you have downloaded the app”. Boom 300 users at zero hard cost, not a bad 30 minutes.

Part of the challenge is the accelerators are serving a segment of entrepreneurs that are drawn to b2c, but that is another post. What I want to see is better understanding & demonstration of growth hacking and better asks from b2c founders, because cash ain’t it.