Category: Marketing (page 107 of 191)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Meet Dr. Glenn, CEO of a radically different venture-capital-funded real estate start-up. He’s charming, witty, self-deprecating, baldly transparent about his means, ends and motives. The people who saw him speak at Inman Connect were amazed at how engaging he could be.

Why amazed? Because his reputation has suffered from the verbal savageries of his alter-ego, the coarse and flippant Mr. Kelman, a vulgarian who cannot come within shouting distance of a mainstream media maven without shoving one or more of his plentiful feet into his vast, cavernous mouth.

It was Dr. Glenn who showed up at Guy Kawasaki’s weblog, posting the winning entry, Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup, in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition:

Startups face one primary challenge: To never run out of cash. So when projecting costs, we heeded Guy’s advice that “the three most powerful words you can utter at a board meeting are, ‘We beat projections.’” This convinced us to develop the worst possible financial model that could still be used to raise money.

We’re glad we did. True underachievers, we’ve performed at or just a bit better than this worst-possible plan almost every month, raising revenue projections only when forced to in December 2006. We’ve been able to stick to our plan mostly because absurd assumptions in opposite directions cancelled one another out. As the real estate market tanks, we may not be so lucky in the future.

When first putting together our financial model, we looked online to calibrate spending assumptions. So many people have blown venture capital, we thought, there must be a manual somewhere on how to do it, at what rate, avoiding which follies. We couldn’t find anything. So we took some wild guesses and figured we’d see how they turned out. And now two years later to the day that we built our first model, here are the projections and actual results. Hopefully, you can learn from our experiences.

Say what you want about the cretinous Mr. Kelman — I know I do — this article is a fascinating glimpse into a side of real estate few of us Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Redfin’s financial underbelly, the top-bazillion-bloggers and leftovers from last week’s ActiveRain thunderstorm. These are just some of the topics addressed in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

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“Kris Berg — Soledad Mountain “They made such a beautiful home.”“,
“Dan Green — Jobs Report Measuring The Statistical Insignificance Of The Monthly Jobs Report (October 2007 Edition)“,
“Jim Watkins — Lenders When Lenders Mess Up, Everyone Suffers!“,
“Dan Melson — Foreclosure Scam The \”We’ll Keep You In Your Property\” Scam“,
“Jay Thompson — WordPress 2.3 Upgrading to WordPress 2.3“,
“Jonathn Dalton — Weblog Comments Why Do We Allow Comments?“,
“Sandy Kaduce — Redfin Financials Dr. Kelman–Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Redfin“,
“Michael Seguin — Central v. Distributed Central vs Distributed – a familiar cycle“,
“Kevin Boer — Redfin Financials How Come Redfin’s P&L Looks Distinctly Unlike That Of A Traditional Real Estate Brokerage? Because Redfin Is Actually A Brokerage, Not A Landlord!“,
“Brian Boero — Online Marketing Online real estate marketing made simple“,
“Alex Mather — NAR REALTOR This, REALTOR That, An Open Letter to the NAR“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — FHA Reform FHA: A Siren Who Just Might Break Your Heart“,
“Michale Wurzer — Phoenix MLS Big News“,
“Glenn Kelman — Redfin Financials Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup“,
“Lani Anlgin — Aaron Anglin “Thank You” is not enough“,
“Kris Berg — The Inman 25 The Honor is All Mine!“,
“Greg Perry — Buyer Turnoffs The TOP 10 Most Offensive Buyer Turn-Offs“,
“Greg Tracey — Real Estate Market Things I Like About the Current Market“,
“Kris Berg — Birthday Brass in Pocket”
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by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m sitting on a long list of over 60 nominations, so there probably won’t be a detailing of the long list this week, at least not this morning. But there’s still time to make the short list: Deadline is today at 12 Noon PDT/MST. If you know of something worthy of recognition, your own work or someone else’s, nominate it now while you’re thinking about it.

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