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For a startup CEO that’s hacked through the bushes of idea validation, MVP-building and product-market-fit, one of the next big challenges is naturally how to measure success in customer acquisition. At a first glance, this is pretty straightforward. Count the number of customers or revenue every week, put them in a deck to show your board, crack open a beer and you're done! However, the traction chart doesn’t go upwards to the right on its own.  Therefore, the key to building a reliable customer acquisition machine is understanding all of the steps that come before the deal is closed - from the first time that the customer interacts with you all the way through to the point at which they become a customer -- the journey. This is what allows a growing company to identify where user acquisition bottlenecks exist, refine their go-to-market model, and understand what factors lead to strong performance. At this stage, you should be quite familiar with the concept of a customer acquisit...

As CEO of a fast-growing startup entering into a new market, at some point you will need to reevaluate your go-to-market. In some ways entering a new market is a negotiation. There are terms that the market will set for you, and there are also terms that you should be setting yourself as the CEO.  New markets will demand things from your company that will be unfamiliar. Maybe you need to take payment using local methods or currency. Maybe the local market calls for additional services beyond your current offerings. Or maybe it's simply that you don't speak the local language - entering Vietnam is pretty tough if you don't have Vietnamese-speaking sales, marketing, or customer success muscle. In any market entry, figuring out what new capabilities are required of you by the market is a key factor in your decision-making. At the same time, there are also terms that you should be setting. This article will mostly deal with how you should decide these terms, and what the implic...