{"id":1139,"date":"2011-03-01T20:05:21","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T01:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=1139"},"modified":"2011-03-01T20:07:29","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T01:07:29","slug":"sometimes-you-learn-more-from-the-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/sometimes-you-learn-more-from-the-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes you learn more from the questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>than the answers.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This was certainly the case at the Tech Coast Angels Fast Pitch Competition at UCLA last Thursday. In this competition, ten finalists are selected to give a 90-second pitch on their start-up. The presentations are rated on investment potential and presentation with members of the TCA holding up cards like a gymnastics or figure-skating competition. Afterward, the raters ask questions of the presenters.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/tca.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1137\" title=\"tca\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/tca-300x165.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"165\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/tca-300x165.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/tca-1024x563.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/tca.jpg 1197w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>If you are curious about the types of questions investors would ask but  you couldn&#8217;t fly to Los Angeles, or didn&#8217;t buy your ticket before the  event sold out, here are some of the questions I found most interesting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you are thinking of starting an e-commerce site or app, be prepared to answer these questions:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>What is the cohort retention? How many people come back one week, two weeks and thirty days?<\/p>\n<p>How do you get customers? (e.g., advertise on sites targeted toward your customers, do you offer a free download and then they can pay to get extra content &#8211; &#8220;freemium&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>What is the cost of customer acquisition? That is, how much money do you spend on marketing for every paying customer?<\/p>\n<p>How are you looking at customer acquisition costs versus modeled life time value?<br \/>\nWhat is life time value of a customer? That is, for each customer you acquire, on average, how much money will you receive from sales to him or her.<br \/>\nDoes your e-commerce website include an app? How will you maintain ranking within the app store? How do you keep from being a very popular app that then goes to zero?<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you have a better version of an existing product &#8230;.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Who are the entrenched competitors and how do you plan to compete with them?<br \/>\nWhy would somebody spend to buy your system versus just going with the competitor?<br \/>\nHow and why did you choose the price you are asking for your product? Have you tried different price points? Higher? Lower?<br \/>\nHow long have you been working on this product? How much does it add to the price of a product?<br \/>\nWhat specifically does your intellectual property protect?<br \/>\nIf you have received previous funding, what has it been used for?<br \/>\nIs this a business to business opportunity or business to consumer?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>=============================================<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Do you have answers to these questions? Well, maybe you should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>than the answers. This was certainly the case at the Tech Coast Angels Fast Pitch Competition at UCLA last Thursday. In this competition, ten finalists are selected to give a 90-second pitch on their start-up. The presentations are rated on investment potential and presentation with members of the TCA holding up cards like a gymnastics&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings","category-the-julia-group"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1139"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1141,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139\/revisions\/1141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}