Weekly Startup Episodes – TikTok

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How well do Robinhood’s financials stack up against incumbent online brokerages? While we wait for the seven-year-old company’s long-planned IPO, Alex Wilhelm examined Morgan Stanley’s big $13 billion purchase of E-Trade for fresh data comparison points. Robinhood has 10 million accounts — twice what E-Trade has — but it also appears to make much less money per user and has far fewer assets under management, as he covered for Extra Crunch. So while its fee-free approach has destroyed a key revenue stream for competitors, it still has to grow its own “order-flow” business into its private-market valuation.

One solution is to make the platform stickier via social features. On the same day as the E-Trade deal announcement, Robinhood launched a new Profiles feature to encourage users to share stock tips. Josh Constine explored the offering and where it is headed on TechCrunch, concluding that “Profiles and lists, and then eventually more social features, could get Robinhood’s users trading more so there’s more order flow to sell and more reason for them to buy subscriptions.”

Alex also took a look at a new report on fintech funding, which found last year was a peak overall — but skewed towards later-stage companies. Certainly, the wealth management segment is looking mature.

But the category is massive, with many more incumbents left to disrupt. What are fintech investors looking for? Check out our popular investor survey on this topic from November.

How your startup can use TikTok for growth

Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace: the proptech sector is hot despite WeWork

“Our mandate is any technology that can be strategic to the real estate industry,” the prolific investor told Connie Loizos in an extended interview for Extra Crunch this week. While WeWork may have depressed some investor interest, plenty of models are working great across various segments — so he and his partners are raising more funds. One of the hottest sectors, perhaps surprisingly, is in sustainable buildings. As Wallace details, public pressure, large-tenant pressure, large-investor pressure and new metro requirements have removed any choice that the industry has in the matter:

Make no mistake; we are front-and-center to what is happening in the real estate industry and the collision with technology, and this is the single-most-important thing that has happened to the real estate industry in the last five decades. The real estate industry is going to have to go carbon-neutral and that is brand-new.

Is this sector also your focus? Be sure to check out our survey of investors in construction robotics from last week to find out some of the latest opportunities, plus our overview survey of real estate and prop tech investors from November.

The future of manufacturing and warehouse robotics

Ahead of our big robotics conference at UC Berkeley in early March, we have been producing a whole series of surveys on robotics verticals. This week, our resident financial analyst Arman Tabatabai teamed up with our hardware editor turned conference organizer, Brian Heater, to do a series of interviews with VCs who are focused on warehouse and manufacturing robotics. Investors include:

• Rohit Sharma, True Ventures
• Ajay Agarwal, Bain Capital Ventures
• Rick Prostko, Comcast Ventures
• Fatima Husain, Comcast Ventures
• Shahin Farshchi, Lux Capital
• Cyril Ebersweiler, SOSV & HAX
• Kelly Coyne, Grit Ventures

Read more here.

Tell TechCrunch about gaming startups and remote work

Our media columnist Eric Peckham wants to feature your advice in two upcoming articles. If you have relevant expertise, click the links below and share your opinions.

• What are the best cities for gaming startups and how should gaming entrepreneurs compare which city is right for them?
• Have you helped lead a startup whose team is split 8-10 time zones apart between offices in Europe/Israel and the West Coast of the US? What tips do you have for others navigating this challenge?

Across the week

Do AI startups have worse economics than SaaS shops? (EC)

Elon Musk says all advanced AI development should be regulated, including at Tesla (TC)

SpaceX alumni are helping build LA’s startup ecosystem (EC)

Dear Sophie: I need the latest details on the new H-1B registration process (TC)

Tracking China’s astounding venture capital slowdown (EC)

The rise of the winged pink unicorn (TC)

Voodoo Games thrives by upending conventional product design (EC)

Ex-YC partner Daniel Gross rethinks the accelerator (TC)

How companies are working around Apple’s ban on vaping apps (EC)

Rippling starts billboard battle with Gusto (TC)

#Equitypod

This week was a fun combination of early-stage and late-stage news, with companies as young as seed stage and as old as PE-worthy joining our list of topics.

Danny and Alex were back on hand to chat once again. Just in case you missed it, they had some fun talking Tesla yesterday, and there are new Equity videos on YouTube. Enjoy!

This week the team argued about org-chart companies, debt raises, some of the items mentioned above, and much more. Details here.

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No matter what your startup sells or who you’re selling it to, companies that survive — and grow — need big customers and lots of them. But how do you land million-dollar deals with limited resources and no credibility?

In more than 20 years of building companies and products, I’ve learned that in the grand scheme of the startup lifecycle, while you scale your way through growth to eventual sustainability and success, acquiring your first customer is relatively easy. Any good salesperson can sell a good product to the prospect of their choice. Hell, any mediocre salesperson, even when they’re hawking complete crap, can get lucky once. Your first customer is a great signal, but it’s just a signal, not a savior.

What actually matters is what we learn from that first signal and all the signals that follow.

Aggregate value to target prospects

The process starts way before the first sales pitch. Your chances of closing your first big sale are going to be directly related to how well you’re targeting your prospective customers. So let’s begin with a discussion of aggregation and targeting.

All product and service sales come down to usage and aggregated value. It doesn’t matter if your target customer is a consumer or a business. It makes no difference if your price point is dollars or thousands of dollars. It doesn’t matter if your transaction is completely frictionless or requires a six-month hand-hold by your sales team.

If your customer is a consumer, they’re going to have limited usage with your product or service and the value needs to be tightly wound into that small usage window. If your customer is a business, they’re likely going to have multiple users and almost continuous usage of the product or service, so the value will be delivered over time.

So a “lot of customers” for your product or service might be 100, or it might be a million. Either way, you’re offering the same value per dollar based on usage. You’re aggregating that value into the sale, so you need to be targeting those customer prospects with the highest expected usage.

Classic Rookie Mistake

A classic rookie mistake made by most entrepreneurs is spraying and praying at large prospect audiences for the sake of their largeness alone, hoping that those shards of value surface for the right people at the right time.

Don’t do that. Instead, for B2C sales, you’re going to need some intelligence about your prospect list, which means more than Facebook ad demographics — it’s being able to predict the usage based on the source of the prospect. For B2B sales, you need to determine the optimum type of business to sell into: their size, their industry, their appetite for innovation, and anything else you can use to narrow your focus.

Figure out who is going to get the most aggregate value for their usage and target them.

Targeting customer prospects based on value aggregation is not only going to increase the chances of closing, it’s also going to dictate the near future in terms of the growth of your startup. A targeted, good customer is going to make your life a lot easier. A random, poor customer is going to fill your world with complaints, support requests, change requests, feature requests, and ultimately severe changes to your product roadmap.

Consolidate and find a champion

When you’re a startup, your customers are buying innovation. The tricky thing is, no one needs innovation. Rather, they need the derivatives of that innovation  —  time, simplification, throughput, security.

In order to close a big sale, in other words, the aggregation of many, many units of that usage and value, you’re going to have to consolidate that usage and find a champion of value on the customer side.

So the question becomes: Who benefits the most from the derivatives of innovation brought about by maximizing the usage of your product or service?

Joe Procopio
Contributor

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