Top Insights

"Every 8 to 10 years there's a new dating app that kind of enters into the space and Tinder's now nine years old. So it is the right time for that next dating app to come in and usurp them. And I fundamentally believe that's what Snack is doing with a video-first approach." - Kimberly Kaplan

• Snack was created to optimize a single dating platform for Gen Z

  • What was the problem?
    • Users, especially Gen Z, would match on Bumble or Tinder and immediately move the conversation & interaction to other apps like Snap & Instagram
    • On those platforms, users would reply to each others’ stories and casually flirt, rather than carrying on in a more high-pressure DM conversation on the dating apps

• Learning different lessons from different Match.com properties:

  • Tinder: design-driven
  • Match: marketing-driven
  • Plenty of Fish: data-driven

  "Match has done a phenomenal job at working with different companies and acquiring different companies." - Kimberly Kaplan

• It has been significantly easier to raise capital for Snack post-Bumble's IPO.

  • A sector can become stale to investors, especially after being burned repeatedly.
  • Proof of a publicly traded challenger company makes picturing startups' success easier.

Ask Jason

From TWiST Slack member Alan from (msb.ai):

Aside from a PR news wire or DIY PR methods, how else can a company with over $1M in revenue let people in VC know about us?

Jason's Answer:

• Celebrate your wins, write a short blog post when you hit milestones (300-500 words).
• Content Marketing on Twitter, LinkedIn (social media), start following VCs and engage with them. Host conversations where you can share your expertise.
• Run targeted promotions of your best blog posts to VCs and like-minded individuals.
• Send monthly updates to non-investors.

From Jacob:

As a new investor - what key metric would you look for in these 3 different types of startups: consumer subscriptions, marketplaces, b2b saas?

• Consumer Subscriptions (Calm, Netflix, Spotify)
  • What is the user profile of your top users, and what is the retention and churn like for those top-tier users?
  • Customer acquisition cost
• Marketplaces (UberEats, Doordash, Zillow)
  • Frequency of use (transactions per customer)
• Bottom-up Enterprise SaaS
  • Land-and-expand, or net dollar retention (NDR)
  • NDR measures impact on revenue generation from existing customers
  • If your net dollar retention is over 100%...
    • It means your startup will grow revenue only from its existing customer base, without needing to acquire any new customers
    • It also means you have achieved net negative churn:
      • which is when revenue gained from existing accounts exceeds revenue lost from churned accounts - (see David Sacks on churn)
      • an example would be: more existing Slack customers expand from free to paid accounts then churn or downgrade from paid to free
      • According to David Sacks, the master of bottom-up SaaS, this is a great signal for your B2B company