Money talks. But what does money say? That’s what people pay thousands of dollars to find out by attending elite conferences and/or annual shareholder meetings. Witness…
Hot Takes from the Arizona Desert
Bond Capital founder and former Kleiner Perkins general partner Mary Meeker delivered her Internet Trends Report for 2019 at Vox/Recode’s Code Conference at The Phoenician in Scottsdale, Ariz. on Tuesday.
The “Queen of the internet” made references to Slack, Stripe, Spotify, Dropbox, Discord, Twitch, Zoom, Stitch Fix, Instagram, and Bond portfolio company Canva as she reviewed her slides.
The lady covers a lot of ground in her brisk talk. Starting at 4:30, Meeker says, “Customer acquisition costs are rising in many highly competitive and highly capitalized sectors…the reality is customer acquisition costs can’t exceed lifetime valve for very long.”
FYI, lifetime value, or LTV, is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.
Meeker says, “The most efficient and effective marketing is one’s own product, plus happy customers, plus recommendations.” It all sounds so simple, does it not?
Meeker points to Spotify and Zoom as great examples of companies that acquire customers via free trials, before converting a high percentage of their users into paid subscribers. She’s got a point. I subscribe to both services.
Meeker also mentions Stich Fix and says the company is one of the best examples of a recommendation engine—both human and AI-driven—being used to acquire revenue-generating customers.
Stitch Fix is an online styling service that delivers a truly personalized shopping experience, for you and your family.
In Other News from Scottsdale, @Ev is Bullish on Subscriptions
For a long time, says @ev, asking people to pay for information on the internet was “like asking people if they want to buy a sandwich when they’re sitting in front of a free buffet.”
Here’s what he says will happen now that the buffet is going away: #CodeCon pic.twitter.com/ooUtCNejCF
— Recode (@Recode) June 12, 2019
The founder of Twitter and Medium says, “It will be very hard for most websites or stand-alone publications to drive a subscription on their own because it’s not a great consumer value proposition, both for convenience and cost reasons.”
I have to agree with him there. I’d love to have paid subscribers here, but first, we need a platform of other indie business sites to make it work.
Ev continues, “We don’t subscribe to TV shows individually, we don’t subscribe to musical artists individually. The big bundle subscription that gives you a lot of value, a lot of optionalities, and is personalized around a great experience—that’s a great consumer value proposition.”
