Sean Percival, Partner 500Startups: Marketing 101 for Startups: How to grow your Business and Talk to Investors about Marketing. Sponsored by AT&T Foundry & Ericsson

1. MARKETING 101
FOR STARTUPS

2. About Me
• Sean Percival
• Partner, 500 Startups
• Run the Mountain View Accelerator
• Based in Silicon Valley
• On Twitter @Percival
Previously
• Founder
• Vice President Marketing, Myspace
• Janitor

3. Most people suck at marketing.

4. General Pro Tips
• You’ll might need to try 10 things to get 1 thing that works
• 98% of visitors don’t convert so how do you bring them back?
• Marketing at it’s core is about moving emotions and feelings like
• Desire
• Greed
• Nostalgia
• FOMO
• Etc etc
• Knowing your stuff with regard to marketing (or at least acting
like you do) is key to fundraising
• Never say “We did all this with no marketing!” or “We are totally
going to go viral!”

5. Marketing Hiring Tips
• In the early days, the founders need to do
everything. Sorry not sorry!
• Post Seed/Series A, make your first senior
marketing hire
• At any time bring in a jr analyst and/or media buyer
• Avoid the early CMO trap
• Consider performance based comp

6. Reasons Your Marketing
Hire Will Not Be Successful

7. They don’t have the budget
they need to be successful.
Expectations Actual Budget

8. Actual Budget
Your CTO is kind of
a jerk and doesn’t
really care about
marketing
Or there’s no
developer
resources available
for marketing
needs.

9. Measurable and sustainable
growth is not encouraged.
"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful
moment in time we created a lot of value for
shareholders."

10. The Lingo

11. • CAC/ACQ/CPA = Customer acquisition cost, acquisition, cost per acquisition
• CPL = Cost per lead
• LTV = Life Time Value
• LTV net ACQ = Life Time Value net acquisition costs
• Funnel = A series of pages/events a user must navigate
• CPC = Cost Per Click
• CPM = Cost Per 1000 Impressions
• CTR = Click through rate
• IO = Advertiser Insertion Order
• Churn Rate = Loss of users from one cohort to the next
• Earned Media = Free(ish) organic traffic usually driven from social
• SEM = Search Engine Marketing (paid)
• SEO = Search Engine Optimization (Freeish)
• SERP = Search Engine results page
• Above the fold = Viewable to the user without having to scroll
• Back Links = Links from external websites into yours
• White Hat/Grey Hat/Black Hat = Legit/Somewhat shady/Way shady
• Pagerank = How Google determines authority and rankings of websites in search
• Edgerank = Facebook’s version of page rank
• Open rate = The rate at which an email campaign emails are opened

12. Talking To Investors
About Marketing

13. Investor Pro Tips
• Really know your numbers
• Never use ranges with your metrics
• If you don’t have the data, get it
• Talk about cohorts and how they are
improving over time
• Sell your momentum

14. Acquisition Sources
Email
27%
Refer-a-Friend
18%
Affiliates
12%
Organic
13%
Daily Deals
10%
Facebook
(Paid)
6%
Adwords
2%
Retargeting
10%
We have tested XX sources and know what works.
We’re ready to XX our user acquisition efforts.
Top Performing Channels:
• Email
• Facebook (Paid)
• Refer-A-Friend
Worst Performing or
Non-Scalable Channels:
• Daily Deals
• Adwords
• Grandma’s Bingo Team
Recent Month’s Acquisition Sources

15. Final Pitt falls to avoid
• Doing too much discounting
• Acquiring bad customers/users
• High overhead low yield partnerships
• Pricey PR engagements

16. Q&A