If you are a CMO or marketer complaining about rising CPMs, you are outing yourself as a bad marketer. Short 🧵
FB and other platform CPMs are set by the marketplace bidding on impressions (what other companies are willing to pay). If your CPA is growing at the same/faster rate as market CPMs, it means your marketing is not improving relative to other marketers.
Consistently and rapidly testing TO find better creative, better LPs, better offers, etc is the only way to improve your yield per impression. And then your CPA should DECREASE even as CPMs INCREASE.
The goal is to be one of the companies bidding higher on CPMs than everyone else because you’re that much better. Be a price maker not taker.
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A lot is written about metrics for a VC funded entrepreneur: burn rate, mos of runway, time to next funding, etc. I have bootstrapped multiple cos to 8 figures in revenue + invested/see into several more. What metrics matter for the bootstrapped entrepreneur? A thread…
Below are my "top 5" metrics + examples + tactics for an early stage company with little to no funding Note: these metrics can be used by VC backed entrepreneurs trying to stretch a dollar/be resourceful with cash. Let the countdown begin...
#5 - Debt capacity against assets/sales - one of the most important things we did early @ampush was we borrowed (factored) against our receivables. Back then, it was still pretty old school/sharky but today there are myriad of options like @getclearco, @AssembledBrands & settle
Do yourself and spend 5 mins watching this TED talk by my friend @RicElias. The 3 things he learned while his plane crashed never get old... 👇🏽ted.com/talks/ric_elia…
1. What would you get done that you’re waiting on because you think you’ll be here forever?
2. How would you change your (most important) relationships and the negative energy within them?
This thread is for first time entrepreneurs who are struggling. It is 11 years ago.. 6 mos after leaving Goldman Sachs to bootstrap, work 100+ hour weeks, we launched @ampush. After 3 days and $10k spent in ads, we had generated <$500 in revenue. In short, we had failed...👇
First, what was the biz? We found potential students for online universities by buying search ads that went to our "matching engine." If we paid $1 per click and 5% of clicks matched, our cost would be $20 and the schools would pay $40. We would print $, right? wrong!
Our conversion rate was closer to 0.1%. We were F****d. But how could that be? Our financial model said we'd print $, we built keyword scrapping tools, we had a unique bidding framework from "wall street", our matching engine was built with super slick javascript...
In this podcast: What is the biggest mistake in customer acquisition... I have seen inside the mktg orgs of 250+ startups over the last 10 years. It has nothing to do with FB ad creatives, GOOG keywords or LP optimization.
Here's the concept: every biz has a “revenue event,” the moment the cash register rings. E.g., For Zynga, it’s when virtual gold is purchased, for DSC, it’s when you enter your CC, for Rocket Mortgage, it’s the CLOSING of a loan, for a SaaS company, it's when the bill is paid
I believe all customer acquisition (and arguably the entirety of the business) starts by identifying and deeply understanding this revenue event. Everything prior to the revenue event is your marketing, everything after the revenue event is retention.