Agreed, but if you're the founder, even if you're just one guy and an idea, you need to be able to evaluate your options.
Example, founder says "We launched and got 100K users in the first weekend!" That is fabulous, shows that they have really connected with their target market, but do they know how much money each user has to generate to pay for their expected burn rate? They should. You can say "We're build X for Y, and we're looking to monetize the landing pages with advertising." So what "CPM" do you need? (clicks per thousand) What RPM (revenue per thousand) do you need to make that work? Are there other businesses that have similar CPM/RPM numbers?
We're fortunate that a lot of folks can and do share their numbers with this community. I'm just encouraging founders to keep the whole equation in their thoughts between costs + engagement + revenue so they can think about ways to test against their models.
The three questions every founder has to wonder; Can we build it? Will people use it? Can we convince them to pay enough for it to sustain it?
Example, founder says "We launched and got 100K users in the first weekend!" That is fabulous, shows that they have really connected with their target market, but do they know how much money each user has to generate to pay for their expected burn rate? They should. You can say "We're build X for Y, and we're looking to monetize the landing pages with advertising." So what "CPM" do you need? (clicks per thousand) What RPM (revenue per thousand) do you need to make that work? Are there other businesses that have similar CPM/RPM numbers?
We're fortunate that a lot of folks can and do share their numbers with this community. I'm just encouraging founders to keep the whole equation in their thoughts between costs + engagement + revenue so they can think about ways to test against their models.
The three questions every founder has to wonder; Can we build it? Will people use it? Can we convince them to pay enough for it to sustain it?