Establishing Research Operations for Revenue Growth Management or Net Revenue Management (Lever wise analysis?)

The first thing you should do (if not done already) is analyze your current traffic. You have to make sure a good percentage of your visitors are actually sticking around to either watch the video or at least enough to look at your other content. If this is not the case, then improving targeting for your ads might be your best bet. It is not just the quantity of the visitors but the quality that makes them worth it. 100,000 visitors that just bounce off immediately after arriving are worth less than 5,000 visitors that actually stay for the intended purpose. A visitor that is on your site for a minute is much more likely to see an affiliate link and/or ad than one that just exits after a few seconds. The next point would be looking at your site performance and formatting. If the site is slow to load, then people are more likely to exit as fast as they came in. Also, if they are there to watch a video clip and all the page is filled with ads everywhere, it does no good to the user experience. Finally, make sure the ads shown on the pages are either relevant to the content in question or relevant to the customer. Good Luck and let me know if you have any questions!

100M+ in revenues in 5 years or less does not happen very often. As an example of one sector, here is an interesting data visualization (circa 2008) of the 100 largest publically traded software companies at that time that shows their actual revenue ramp-ups from SEC filings (only 4 out of these 100 successful companies managed this feat, which themselves are an extremely small percentage of all of the VC-funded software companies): How Long Does it Take to Build a Technology Empire? http://ipo-dashboards.com/wordpress/2009/08/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-technology-empire/ Key findings excerpted from the link above: "Only 28% of the nation’s most successful public software empires were rocketships. I’ve defined a rocket ship as a company that reached $50 million in annual sales in 6 years or less (this is the type of growth that typically appears in VC-funded business plans). A hot shot reaches $50m in 7 to 12 years. A slow burner takes 13 years or more. Interestingly, 50% of these companies took 9 or more years to reach $50m in revenue."

Definitely DON'T go for funding at this stage. It would be just TOO COSTLY for you in terms of the stake you will have to give away for a limited amount. Most likely at this stage, you don't even have a clear picture if you really need the investment. Have you mobilized all the cash you can on your own? All I mean absolutely all. You don't want to ask for money when you are saving some bucks just in case your idea doesn't work. Have you raised some from FFF (Family, Friends and Fools)?. Again, don't go to angels until you have covered your very basics with those. All in all, most probably what is best for you is to grow this a bit more, get some proper biz metrics in place (churn, growth, revenue per user ...), experiment a bit with which marketing tools will work best for you and start a fire. When you have this fire started (i.e. you know, backed by data, what works and what doesn't), then YOU MAY buy some gasoline (i.e. ask for cash). Don't do it before. Always keep this in mind that I read in some book: "A FOOL AND HIS/HER EQUITY ARE SOON DEPARTED" Pere

Start experimenting by putting the 2 things in place you say you are missing: 1. create a validated learning model 2. Stop focusing on vanity metrics; replace with user growth, cohort analysis or growth metrics. Do not just read Lean principles; APPLY them. Also, What are you doing to brand your company? What are you doing to engaging people who have the problem your service solves? Does it actually solve their problem? Do you know what their problems are? What do THEY think their problems are?

The first question I would ask back to you is how many clients you have currently. What is your retention rate? Your capture rate? From there you could develop a strategy to capture the next 5,000. If you haven't enlisted certain marketing channels or networks, you may be able to make a prediction about how many add'l clients that will bring you. Hope that helps!