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Grant Hosford Start-Up CEO, Customer Acquisition Expert

Greater Los Angeles Area

Entrepreneur, Advisor and Data-Driven Marketer. Expert in performance marketing, customer acquisition, start-up operations, lean start-up methods and B2C internet businesses.

Bike nut.

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Customer Acquisition

Digital Marketing

Online Marketing

Conversion Optimization

Customer Retention

Web Analytics

Mobile Advertising

Campaign Development

Educational Games

Member since December 2012

Areas of Expertise

Reviews 1
Answers 8

JP

Very productive conversation with some great insights that we needed. Much appreciated and extremely useful for us!

Source: Clarity Joseph Pigato Feb 24, 2014

Customer Acquisition

Digital Marketing

Online Marketing

Conversion Optimization

Customer Retention

Web Analytics

Mobile Advertising

Campaign Development

Educational Games

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Clarity

Grant Hosford

Greater Los Angeles Area

Entrepreneur, Advisor and Data-Driven Marketer. Expert in performance marketing, customer acquisition, start-up operations, lean start-up methods and B2C internet businesses.

Bike nut.

$4.17/min

3

3 Calls

1

1 Review

41 minutes
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Customer Acquisition Digital Marketing Online Marketing Conversion Optimization Customer Retention Web Analytics Mobile Advertising Campaign Development Educational Games

Call me to talk about

Conversion Optimization

I've consulted for Fortune 500 companies on this or have owned it at a brand for 8 of the last 10 years.

Customer Acquisition

Digital and mobile are my primary areas of expertise but I have experience with radio, print and TV also.

Customer Retention

I've owned customer retention in all of my roles since 2009. Retention efforts for dating sites are a key component of revenue and profit.

Business Development

Creative deal making is a core strength. A recent example is a revenue sharing deal I struck with CBS television to pay for a sponsored advertiser integration in the show "Excused". It was the first such deal in the history of CBS.

Lean Start-Up Methods

I've worked for two tech incubators. Most recently I worked directly for Bill Gross at Idealab for 1 year, vetting and testing early stage ideas. I left to start my company, codeSpark and Idealab provided my seed capital.

Answers 8
Reviews 1

Answers

Grant Hosford answered

What are the world leading organizations that support enterpreneurs?

Hi,
I currently work at Idealab and the body of knowledge and level of support for entrepreneurs is outstanding. I worked at 3 start-ups prior to joining Idealab and feel like I've learned as much in the past year here as I did at any of the start-ups. Plus the people here truly want to help and are good people.

The Idealab model is unusual in that 70% of our companies are ones that we spin up from internal ideas. But the other 30% are companies we invest in during a seed round. Please contact me at grant@idealab.com if you'd like to know more about what we do.
Best,
Grant

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Start-ups

Social Enterprise

New Business Development

Grant Hosford answered

How can I calculate my CAC (cost of customer acquisition) accurately?

The two answers above are great. I would just add that in order for CAC to be useful you also need a reasonably accurate Lifetime Value (LTV) number. It's very important to know if your costs are being amortized over 3 months of revenue or 18 months. I realize you are early in the process of growing this product but its important to make your best guess here, put a stake in the ground with a number and then optimize over time.

Having a LTV number also helps you to decide when to focus on your acquisition costs vs retention costs. Often its not realistic to work on optimizing both at the same time. Good luck!

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Customer Acquisition

Metrics

Grant Hosford answered

How to go past gate keepers in calling?

Some specific tactics to consider based on personal experience:

- First, research the person on LinkedIn, Facebook etc and see if you have any legitimate shared contacts or interests. Do NOT under any circumstances stretch the truth but if, for example, you both went to the same school, both lived abroad in the same country, both love road biking, then arm yourself with that knowledge.
- I'm going to assume that in this case you don't have any shared connections so LinkedIn isn't an option. Now you need to research email and phone number. For C-level execs of public companies you can sometimes find this info in SEC filings.
- If you are targeting someone below the C-suite then the following tactic is VERY effective. Call the appropriate C-level exec. When you get stopped by the gate keeper explain who you need to talk to and have them refer you. An email from the exec asst to the CEO is just as effective as an email from the CEO herself!
- You must be willing to follow a "friendly bulldog" strategy. That means you call, email and send real mail (can be very effective b/c its now a rare tactic) many times with small time gaps in between. The more you ask someone to do something for you, the more they feel obligated to do it. This is a real psychological phenomenon that fund raisers exploit regularly.

I hope these ideas help. Happy to talk and share more...

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Cold Calling

Grant Hosford answered

What are the pros/ cons of outsourcing app development vs. building an internal development team? Would this affect the value of the company?

Don't Outsource. Period.

While there are big drawbacks with outsourcing related to building internal expertise the real reason I would never outsource at your stage is the need for speed and flexibility.

Per your description, you are an early stage start-up with a MVP that is gathering data. Congratulations as that is a big accomplishment! However, you inevitably have a ton to learn about what your prospective customers need most and what customers deserve your attention most.

The means you will be tweaking your product constantly for the foreseeable future and having to submit ideas to an outsourced team, make sure they understand what you want, wait for the new feature to be scheduled, etc is just too slow and too expensive.

You should have your developers literally sitting next to you and (if you have one besides yourself) your product person so you can quickly and constantly share information.

Good luck! You are in for a fun ride...

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Application Development

Valuation

Product Management

Grant Hosford answered

Many businesses hire an Internet advertising agency to run their online marketing campaigns but fail to get positive ROI, why is that?

In my experience (and I've been on the agency and client side) there are a handful of mistakes that get repeated regularly by both sides.

Client:
- There is no one on the client side who understands digital marketing and can hold the agency accountable
- Expectations for ROI are highly unrealistic in terms of timing. It generally takes at least 3-4 months of testing before you can sort out which channels and campaigns have promise
- There is an idea that digital channels can work very well alone. Generally this is not the case. Digital is most effective when awareness is being driven by other channels, good PR, content strategies, etc.
- There are no clear goals for the engagement other than wishful thinking metrics. Goals should be based in reality, incremental and core to your business.

Agency:
- They don’t do their industry and client homework up front and/or they don’t make the client do theirs - especially when it comes to audience demographics and habits.
- They spend too much too soon. The best campaigns start small, find things worth repeating and THEN ramp up.
- They misapply lessons from a past client to the current client. Past knowledge of an industry is always helpful but good campaigns focus on the very specific needs of each company. Apple and Samsung are very similar in many ways but their marketing needs and strategies are highly differentiated.

I can recommend a good digital agency if you are having trouble finding one you like. I’ve personally hired them three different times. And I’d be happy to chat if you wanted to dig in on any of the points above.

Good luck!
Grant

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Internet Marketing

Online Marketing

Grant Hosford answered

How to price conversion rate optimization?

I used to sell similar services and now advise a company that works in the optimization space. I agree that monthly fees are ultimately the way to go and that the connection to your time spent should be loose at best. The main price driver should be to the ROI you deliver. One thing to consider, an option with a more modest fee in return for a "bonus" related to the creation of incremental revenue and profit. Most companies won't bite but it shows you believe in your services.

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Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion Optimization

Digital Marketing

Grant Hosford answered

What's the best data analytics dashboard software for an app start up to use to manage user analytics AND marketing?

Like many posted questions I would need more detail to be able to give you meaningful advice. My experience in this area is that I co-founded a web analytics consulting practice that was acquired by WPP in 2006 and have been working in customer acquisition since 2002.

What is your product or service? What are you key goals for setting up a dashboard? Have you done the most important work - carefully selecting 5-10 metrics that are both actionable and drive your business?

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Data Analysis

Email Marketing Software

Digital Marketing

Grant Hosford answered

Any recommendations for office entertainment for a growing startup? Looking for inspiration - not just the stereotypical foosball table.

I'm a big fan of board games and Card Games in general. We play board games as a team almost every Friday. Some of my favorites are Survive, Star Wars Armada, Takenoko and Sushi Go. Star Wars Armada in particular was super fun and super geeky - which we like. Great question and smart thing to think about...

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Company Culture

Startups

Lean startup

Reviews

Very productive conversation with some great insights that we needed. Much appreciated and extremely useful for us!

Joseph Pigato Source: Clarity

Member since December 2012