The Ledger, every show

“Like the whole idea behind venture capital is we are going to take a bunch of mostly already wealthy people because that's who starts venture backed startups, right? The overwhelming majority, I think something like 90% come from family wealth.”

“And I think, unfortunately, a lot of these folks are going to find that the same thing that happened with Facebook seven years ago, six years ago, where that engagement rate falls from 11% to 0.09%, that will happen. That will happen to you.”

“After I stepped down as CEO, the growth rate sank significantly. It was trending a little bit down, like, the last six months I was there, so I wouldn't put the fault entirely on folks after I left, but, you know, the last, oh my gosh, the last seven years cer…”

“Certainly in 2013, for example, if you were to survey 10,000 SEOs and say, what software do you use and what do you recommend most Moz would have been number one. And by 2018, five years later, Moz was probably number three.”

“Ahrefs is entirely bootstrapped, never Fundraise. They're well over a hundred million in revenue as well.”

“Today, the average, average impression rate for an organic update on Facebook is 0.09%.”

“Instagram is the highest of the organic engagement channels today, organic social networks, and I think it's hovering on average around 1.9%. I wouldn't expect that to last five years.”

“We have 23, about 23,000 paying customers, and so in order to have net negative revenue churn on a self-service model with 6.3% average monthly churn, we would have to be upselling customers at a, at an insane rate, right?”

“Does all the marketing costs go into just pro, which is essentially our you know, the product that I'm talking about, our largest product. Which is responsible for 85 to 90% of our revenue.”

“When we launched, we had maybe 15, 16,000 people on that list, possibly a little bit more, and we were profitable seven months after launch. So breakeven profitable, right?”

“Four or five other companies, not funds, but individual startups have also used SparkToro's model to raise money themselves and use those open source documents.”

“I think at the height, almost 17 or 18% were bouncing, and it was not a, this email address doesn't exist anymore, it was so-and-so doesn't work here anymore.”

“We basically, we are profitable at right around 40,000 dollars a month, and we hit that in, like I said, the end of September of last year, and we've been growing a little bit ever since.”

“In terms of users, we've got about 30,000 free users, a little over 500 paid subscribers.”

“So the full year, 2007, I think revenue was 850,000 dollars. It was 400 K in consulting and four 50 in software.”

“I think we did 300,000 dollars worth of consulting in 2008 and software went to 1.1 million. And then the next year it was, gosh, what was it? It was like 2.2 million in software and 900,000 in consulting.”

“I think we were at 30, was it 39000039.3, something around there.”

“We'll be at the low forties this year.”

“A 119 dollars. A little more than that, like one 19 60, something like that.”

“But the nice thing is it is definitely somewhere between, depending on how you want to calculate it, 90 dollars and a 120 dollars.”

“If you want to call it across the entire cohort, I think average customer life is like 9.5 months or something, 10 months, something like that.”

“Essentially we're being moderately conservative, I'd say with marketing spend, not trying to fill the funnel dramatically more than what we already have, which is between a 152 hundred new free trials every day.”

“I talked with my investors, my board and with my executive team, and we made the call to replace me with Sarah bird, who'd been my chief operating officer for a long time and is one of my best friends in the world.”