To be successful, a business should have a short-term revenue plan and long-term profitability. Early-stage founders may be tempted to come up with half a dozen ways for the company to make money. Don’t fall into the temptation: five unproven solutions will not yield one correct solution.
Having said that, there are several business models that can sometimes lead to profitability. A business model canvas presentation, with each aspect of the business condensed on one slide, provides an overview of all aspects of your business. But for Pitch Deck, I think it’s important to narrow it down to two things: customer acquisition and lifetime.
For acquisitions, focus on where you find your customers, whether those acquisition channels are scalable and what it costs to acquire a new customer, typically the customer acquisition cost or CAC.
In terms of lifetime value, examine how much each customer is worth, from the time they appear in your product until they stop using your product. Every dollar you spend on the road is the lifetime value of an individual customer. From there, you can segment your customers into different segments. Another category can be customers who stay for weeks or months or years.
For simplicity’s sake, it’s usually enough to take the total amount made from customers and divide that by the number of customers – this is the average value of those customers so far. The challenge is to model how long they last. By definition, they only know the client’s. is true. lifetime value after departure; So here you have to build a model and make some assumptions about how much time your customers spend with you and how much money they spend down the road.
A startup’s sole mission is to find a repeatable business model.
I’m very partial to Steve Baddock’s definition of a startup: “A startup is a temporary organization used to find a repeatable and scalable business model.” Or, put differently, your company is going to be a machine that turns the $100 you put up top into $150 down. Take $150, throw it back into the top of the machine, and you have a business model that grows, works, and is repeatable.
