Summary of “Nine Business Models and the Metrics Investors Want”

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

This is my personal summary/notes from a talk by Anu Hariharan, Y Combinator

These are 9 common business models for startup along with their common growth metrics:

  1. Enterprise: selling software/service for big companies. Eg. Docker, Cloudera
    • Number of bookings
    • Number of unique users
    • Revenue
  2. SaaS: software as a service. Eg. Google Suite, Sales Force
    • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
    • Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
    • MRR Churn
    • Paid Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  3. Subscription: similar to SaaS but usually has lower revenue per customer. Eg. Linkedin, Netflix
    • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
    • MMR Compound Monthly Growth Rate (CMGR): because usually subscription revenue is smaller
    • MRR Churn
    • Paid CAC
  4. Transactional: charges a fee for each transaction. Eg. Paypal, Stripe
    • Gross Transaction Volume
    • Net revenue
    • User Retention: cohort metric
    • Paid CAC
  5. Marketplace: similar to transactional but usually C2C. Eg. AirBnB, eBay
    • Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)
    • Net Revenue
    • Net Revenue CMGR: similar reason as subscription’s
    • User Retention
    • Paid CAC
  6. E-commerce: sell products online with own brand (unlike marketplace). Eg. Amazon Store
    • Monthly Revenue
    • Revenue CMGR
    • Gross Margin
    • Paid CAC
  7. Advertising: offer free services to customer and get revenue from advertisers. Eg. Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit
    • Daily Active Users (DAU)
    • Monthly Active Users (MAU)
    • Percent logged-in
  8. Hardware: similar to e-commerce but specifically selling hardwares. Eg. Fitbit, GoPro, Xiaomi
    • Monthly Revenue
    • Revenue CMGR
    • Gross Margin
    • Paid CAC
  9. Usage-based: not explained/skipped. But most likely similar to Transactional
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