The Power of Visualization in Advertising

February 04, 2015 by Drew Beechler in advertising, marketing

I've recently seen a great deal of Liberty Mutual's new commercials around accident forgiveness and new car replacement. They have a number of these commercials where a Liberty Mutual customer tells a story about their accident in front of the Statue of Liberty.

These commercials, though, are a little lackluster and bring no specific affinity toward Liberty Mutual or their brand. I think the lackluster performance of these commercials is a perfect way to demonstrate the power of visualization in advertising.

The Problem With Average

January 13, 2015 by Drew Beechler in marketing, startups

From Average is just another word for mediocre by Seth Godin

If you think your organization needs a bigger marketing budget, maybe you just need to be less average instead.

The Economies of the Freemium Business Model

December 23, 2014 by Drew Beechler in startups, VC, technology

From The First Law Of Internet Physics by Fred Wilson:

many users * low arpu >>>> few users * high arpu

I’ve seen so many people try paid content on the Internet and the result is less users, a lot less. You can extract a higher average revenue per user (arpu) from a paid model, but you get so many less users that is it better to extract a lower arpu with a free model and get many more users.

Startups: Know When to Hold'em and When to Fold'em

December 17, 2014 by Drew Beechler in technology, startups

As a follow-up to my recent post on reasons to take and not to take venture capital money, I found Jason's advice on when not to sell a business extremely pertinent.

From Jason Lemkin:

When not to sell. My learnings:
1. Do not sell if you are at scale and have a committed team. This is pretty much it for me. E.g., in SaaS, if you are at $10m+ ARR, and growing nicely, and the team is killing it — just don’t sell. Once you are at Scale in SaaS, you can’t be killed. Why sell? Really.

To Take, or Not to Take VC Money, That Is the Question

December 15, 2014 by Drew Beechler in VC, startups

From Ten Realities of Taking Venture Capital Money by Charlie O'Donnell:

If you take venture capital money...

1) You increase the chances that you may not be CEO of your own company one day--and that also might be the best thing for its long term success.

2) You are signing up to sell the company one day--to another company or to the public market, but definitely to someone.

3) You will almost certainly take more venture capital money after that.

4) You will almost certainly go cashflow negative, increasing the risk that your company will fail.