By Stefania Aulicino
YouTube, Twitter, Groupon, and Zynga are members of a new club– “fastest from founding to $1B valuation” club, — Zynga, the social gaming pioneer, earned its membership in just 19 months.
Explosive growth is not confined to social media companies.
Costco (the membership warehouse retailer chain was the first company to grow from zero to $3 billion in sales in less than six years and today is $78 B in revenue.
Think of other fast growing companies you admire.
Disney, Four Seasons Hotel, Patagonia, South West Airlines, Harley Davidson, Green Mountain Coffee, Target, Legos
Why do all these companies grow so fast?
My interpretation is that successful fast growing companies leverage cheap customer acquisition models!
To be a sustainable growth company in the 21st century you need to build a cheap, scalable, automatic model to acquire customers
Please note: customer acquisition is NOT the same as sales acquisition.
• sales and marketing strategies are about how to get people to buy what you have to sell today
• customer acquisition is building a continuous pipeline of people who will buy
anything you can sell them today and in the future at, at higher prices, with accelerating frequency.
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