Posts By: Jiyan
The marketing wheel – purchasing as experimentation
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the marketing process in the past year. Trying to convince small contracting businesses with small budgets to hand over their credit card, will do that to someone. More recently, I’ve been looking more carefully at the marketing ASP space and trying to fit the pieces together. […]
How much is spent on marketing each year, in the US?
After digging around for a while to find some reasonable estimates of this number, I used a few data sources to come up with what I think are some reasonable estimates. First, I used US Census data (2007) to establish the number of businesses in the US, along with total revenue, plotted on the following […]
Dealing with churn when selling SaaS to SMBs
After the first several months of actively selling a premium service to contractors who signed-up for BuildZoom, we realized that churn was happening. An annual churn rate of 20% seemed alarming given the ~10% annual churn rates I had been used to in the mid-to-large market SaaS space up to this point in time and much […]
How financial publishers reconcile news with public company profiles
This is a pretty esoteric subject but I’ll try to contextualize to make it a bit more interesting. In the financial publishing business, it’s a common practice to create profile pages for publicly traded companies so investors can easily get all the information they need at a glance. The profile pages are populated with a […]
Post-mortem thoughts on HouseFix
Rip Empson reported today that HouseFix has officially shut down after launching one year ago at TechCrunch Disrupt. In their farewell message, they reiterate their very commendable vision, “to bring the existent relationships between homeowners and contractors online,” before acknowledging they “did not attract a large enough user base to complete [their] vision.” I have to […]