netactr

As I am planning our next steps at CueSense, I am heavily relying on Bryan Starbuck’s (CEO of TalentSpring) ideas from his December STS talk and this deck. Bryan’s 10x philosophy has already caused me to sharpen our mission. Although CueSense addresses many user needs, one must find needs urgent enough to make users jump through hoops and give your service a try. The social content flood is real, immediate and rising and CueSense will be the best site to find the gold nuggets in this river of shared tweets, bookmarks and blogs.

Another practical recommendation from his talk is the heavy attention to customer acquisition costs. Viral adoption is still important, but the right mindset is to start with paid-for customers (CAC of $15-20) and figure out if your service’s virality (K-factor) will drive the average CAC down to $5-10. Then, if your users remain with the service for 18-24 months before they move to greener pastures, and your COGS (cost of goods sold aka servers) is reasonable, you can break even on a per-user annual revenue of $5.  Which is doable.