The Equity Kicker - Latest Comments in Traction or revenue

Re: Traction or revenue

brisbourne — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:17:43 -0000

Jens - I think the point is that the revenues available before you get to critical mass in traffic are not meaningful in the context of a venture funded business.

The credit crunch has probably changed that a bit, but not too much. IMHO anyway.

Re: Traction or revenue

brisbourne — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:15:42 -0000

Monthly

Re: Traction or revenue

Jens — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:56:19 -0000

I don't understand the difference, but maybe I am not thinking straight:

1) I think you should ALWAYS try to get to the point of generating meaningful revenue as quickly as you can, however,
2) If you are an advertising-based company, then generating meaningful revenue might not be possible until you reach a certain point. In which case 'as early as you can' simply means somewhat later. So, obviously you should focus as much as you can on getting to that point as quickly as you can. That means focusing on traffic.

The current environment doesn't change this one bit.

What has changed though is that 'meaningful' is suddenly somewhat less than it was before, so people are trying to bring money in earlier than a few years ago.

Does that make sense?

Re: Traction or revenue

chrish — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:12:16 -0000

Quick query on the figures you quote. Does the 1million uniques for a UK site refer to monthly or yearly uniques?

Thanks

Re: Traction or revenue

Alx Klive — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:46:55 -0000

Nic, it's like you and I discussed not long ago. You have to "do what you have to do".

We were executing a strategy of actively looking for VC funding until the current crisis rendered that a vastly less certain proposition. We scaled back expenses (including markteting), focused the 40-50% of our (my) time we were spending on 'fund raising' into monetization.

With the results from that (better monetization and lower costs), we're in a sustainable position now and can look again at raising funds to fuel growth as and when the 'sun comes up'.

In the meantime we're comfortable to take slower or even static user number growth, and (following your valued suggestion) would look to kick that into higher gear again before we started the fund raising process again.