Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More - Ten Recent Great Startup Posts

Here are some recent great posts that I’ve come across that generally fall in the intersection of startups and CTOs.  Enjoy.

1. Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs, February 2, 2010

   Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth.  Great stuff.  Of course, one of the best ideas around this is to have Negative Customer Acquisition Costs.  They have a related post: Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior | For Entrepreneurs, but I think that looking at my Startup Metrics post provides a bit broader set of metrics to consider.  And while I’m at it, a great post by Steve Blank No Accounting For Startups looking at early stage score keeping.

2. HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback- Niall Kennedy's Weblog, February 8, 2010

   The emerging HTML 5 specification lifts video playback out of the generic element and into specialized handlers. Explicit markup for audio and video places elevates moving pictures to a similar native rendering capacity as markup we are used to but with more fine-grained details about underlying formats and compression available before loading. This post looks at the implementation details of HTML 5 video.

3. My experiments in lean pricing- Venture Hacks, February 16, 2010

   Ash Maurya, a lean entrepreneur who runs a bootstrapped startup called CloudFire, discusses pricing issues for first versions (Minimum Viable Product – MVP).   This relates to another great post Freemium Founders: Start Charging for Things Today! where Tony Wright suggests charging right now.  This is tough stuff to get right and my recent experience in a startup where we charged out of the gate and then wonder the effects of other pricing makes me appreciate Ash’s perspective.

4. Sunk Costs: An invisible, pervasive peril- A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks, February 15, 2010

   I literally had this conversation yesterday with a startup.  Jason looks at the issues around "sunk cost."  The emotions around sunk costs run deep.  Good stuff from Jason.

5. Do I Need a Co-Founder: The 90/50 Rule of Startup Founders- FairSoftware's Blog, February 1, 2010
   Another post that relates to my recent post on CTO Founders and Cofounders.

6. StartupList — a new way to reach angels- Venture Hacks, February 3, 2010

   AngelList is a curated list of angel investors, representing $80M going into early-stage startups this year . They now have a cool new way to get intros to these angels: StartupList . It’s a weekly email we send to AngelList, with 3 high-quality startups who want intros.

7. Death By Revenue Plan- Steve Blank, February 16, 2010

   Steve talks about the problem created when you start to manage according to your Revenue Plan.

8. How Unique Is A Unique Visitor?- A VC : Venture Capital and Technology, February 18, 2010

   Great post from Fred Wilson that questions a common metric – unique visitors.

9. Why Venture Capitalists Avoid Innovation: They Like Making Money- OnStartups, February 18, 2010

   Andy Singleton, the founder of Assemba, talks about innovation and VC with an interesting perspective.

10. Seed funding best practices- StartupCFO, February 11, 2010

    Good post looking at seed funding which often doesn’t get quite as much attention.