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How to estimate market size

by Jeremy Liew, May 9, 2011 | Comments

	There's a lot of confusion about how to estimate it As an entrepreneur, your time is a very valuable asset. It takes as much time and effort to build a business whether you’re attacking a small market or a big one. But the rewards for success in a big market are much greater, so it makes sense to attack big markets. For the same reason,VCs are often very focused on ...
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Tips on Facebook ad campaigns

by Jeremy Liew, February 24, 2011 | Comments

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Six tips, including people who didn't attend college click more than people who did!

A few of weeks ago Webtrends analyzed 11,529 Facebook ad campaigns representing 4.5bn impressions to see what conclusions they could draw. It’s worth reading their short white paper on Facebook Advertising Performance Benchmarks and Analysis. Some highlights include: Click through rates steadily increase with age up to 65 State by state CTRs are relatively flat with the exception of North ...

LivingSocial's Aaron Batalion on pivots

by Jeremy Liew, January 14, 2011 | Comments

Lessons learned: The road to success often includes major pivots

Late last year, Aaron Batalion (one of the co-founders of Living Social, a Lightspeed Portfolio company) gave a talk about the many pivots that led LivingSocial to its current business of local deals. (You can see the accompanying slides here). I think this is a fascinating topic. I had dinner with some terrific entrepreneurs recently, including the CEOs of ...

How to estimate lifetime value

by Jeremy Liew, July 21, 2010 | Comments

Use cohort analysis; many social games use this on a daily or weekly basis

In many businesses, repeat purchase behavior is a key driver of value. Many companies track percent of repeat purchases as a key business metric. This is useful in steady state, but can sometimes be quite misleading if the company is showing substantial growth. By definition, growth implies many first time customers, and the mix of these new customers can distort ...

Online brand spend will create new winners

by Jeremy Liew, July 16, 2010 | Comments

as brand advertisers increasingly turn to ad networks to improve their online efforts

One of Lightspeed’s consumer internet predictions for 2010 is that brand advertising dollars are going to start to flow online at scale. Two thirds of all ad spending in the US is for brand advertising, yet three quarters of online ad spending is direct response. The recession of the last couple of years has provided a catalyst to drive more ...

How can you improve LTV and CAC?

by Jeremy Liew, June 23, 2010 | Comments

Both lifetime value and customer acquisition cost metrics are key metrics to keep improving

A lot of the startups that have quickly reached millions in monthly revenue rely on the arbitrage of being able to acquire customers through paid marketing for less than the lifetime value of that customer. CAC < LTV As a reminder, lifetime value, or lifetime contribution as it should perhaps more accurately be named, is given by the formula: LTV ...

Engagement in social games

by Jeremy Liew, May 17, 2010 | Comments

Lessons from leaders across Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and Crowdstar

On Friday, I moderated a panel at the social gaming summit featuring speakers from Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and Crowdstar on the topic of engagement best practices in social games. Socialtimes has a brief writeup of the session: Social gaming giants tend to focus on hits. An under-performing game can be a cause for concern and even shutdown in some cases. ...

We estimate Zynga revenue at $270m in 2009

by Jeremy Liew, May 10, 2010 | Comments

... and at $240 million year-to-date

There has been a lot of speculation about Zynga’s revenue. Last week Business insider said: Zynga, the social gamesmaker behind Farmville, has a revenue run-rate around $600 million, a source close to the company tells us. Another source confirms that Zynga is doing well over $1 million in revenue a day. Businessweek says: More than 120 million people play Zynga’s ...

Interview with CEO of Serious Business

by Jeremy Liew, January 8, 2010 | Comments

Transcript gives info on Serious Business' revenue split between digital goods and ads and more...

In December I posted an interview with the CEO of Playdom that Atul Bagga, the gaming analyst at the investment bank ThinkEquity, recently conducted. Atul interviewed the CEO of Serious Business, Siqi Chen. Serious Business is also a Lightspeed portfolio company. The transcript gives some info on Serious Business’ revenue/DAU, conversion rates, demographics, and revenue split between digital goods and ...

2010 consumer Internet predictions

by Jeremy Liew, December 14, 2009 | Comments

Predictions from Lightspeed in the areas of Consumer Internet, Mobile, Cleantech and Enterprise

Once again, Lightspeed is going to go on record and make some predictions for 2010, in the areas of Consumer Internet, Mobile, Cleantech and Enterprise. I am leading off with our 2010 Consumer Internet Predictions, with my partners posting the other predictions coming over the course of the next week or so at the Lightspeed Blog.This is the fourth year ...

Communications becoming more public 3.0

by Jeremy Liew, October 8, 2009 | Comments

	Birthday greetings are the proxy for that This is the third year that I’ve tracked my birthday greetings as they have moved from private channels to public channels, primarily facebook. As I noted previously, in 2007 and 2008; Social networks have changed the dynamic – it isn’t enough to wish someone a happy birthday, but it is also important to be SEEN to wish someone a happy ...
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Launching businesses from ashes of failure

by Jeremy Liew, September 2, 2009 | Comments (1)

How did Josh Hannah and Jack Herrick turn around eHow after buying it at distressed prices?

One of the great stories of Silicon Valley is how Josh Hannah and Jack Herrick bought eHow’s assets at a distressed price after the company went out of business, turned it around with a very low cost model and sold it to Demand Media two years later for a big profit. As Wikipedia notes: eHow.com was founded in March 1999. ...

What game designers need for players to pay

by Jeremy Liew, August 24, 2009 | Comments

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Engagement (more involved) is better than retention (returning)

Dan Cook follows up his great post on how freemium beats advertising as a business model for flash games with a second great post on how you can get your players to pay you. After discussing the historical reasons that most flash games today are such lightweight affairs, he recommends the following checklist to see if you’re building enough value ...

When your brand becomes a verb

by Jeremy Liew, July 26, 2009 | Comments (2)

You know you've reached mass-market consumer recognition

Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review writes about the power of the brand as a verb: Perhaps nothing better illustrates how far behind Microsoft is in the search engine wars than a recent comment by the company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, about why he liked the name Bing for Microsoft’s new competitor to Google. The name, he told The New York ...

New media companies should emphasize 'media'

by Jeremy Liew, July 2, 2009 | Comments

Place significant attention on revenue-generating activities

AdAge has a good article today about how AOL has been attacking Web publishing where it notes: In the heady days of early 2000, the mega-merger of AOL and Time Warner heralded the Web-based future of publishing. It would create a digital platform for Time Inc., the biggest, most-prestigious magazine group in the world. Needless to say, that didn’t pan ...

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Jeremy Liew Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners

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