Metrics

My approach on public market investing

Mike Kwatinetz Metrics, Predictions, Stocks, Technology, Valuation ,

I have always taken a research driven, multi-pronged approach to identifying attractive publicly traded equity investments, and after reflecting on this approach with a new fund that I am starting, I figured that it would make for an interesting blog post to share this with a broader audience. The companies that I have covered through previous blog posts have been identified through this process. As you likely know if you made some investments based off of my suggestions in the past, they have performed very well!

My Screening Process

I begin with a screening process as follows:

  1. Discover trends that are disruptive to entrenched market participants, expected to continue for over five years, and relate to very large markets
  2. Identify companies that are strong beneficiaries of these trends; and
  3. Evaluate these companies’ competitive advantages that stem from one or more of:
    • superior technology often protected by patents,
    • strong emerging brand,
    • network effect of having built a massive connected audience,
    • high quality leadership,
    • products that are very difficult to replicate, and/or
    • advantageous business model

Companies are identified that pass the above screening. Then I apply a filter to reduce these matches to ones that also are already generating or have an ability to generate strong profits. I believe that the most important metric to evaluate companies that have yet to develop mature business models is contribution margin, i.e.: gross margin minus customer acquisition cost. We have covered contribution margin in past blog posts. Check our post in January 2020 which contains our discussion of sophisticated valuation methodology for more background on how I see this as a key metric for evaluating business models.

Companies passing the above screen are rare and, thus, are both difficult and time-consuming to identify. Each company selected from those that passed the screening will also need to have well above average revenue growth for their respective stages.

My experience indicates that great returns will be realized over a long period of time from companies that have the key attributes described above and, therefore, I expect, generally, to hold the core of each of my positions for an average period of five years or more. This doesn’t mean never selling any shares, but rather holding the majority of shares for that period. I augment my equity investments in portfolio companies by writing both call and put options or other derivatives (we covered an example of this recently with Zoom in my 2020 predictions). Doing this hedges risk of short-term market fluctuation and generates income from option premiums going to zero over the life of the option. Given my concentration on relatively few securities of high growth companies, it is expected that volatility in my portfolio could often exceed that of the overall market. Therefore, I believe it’s important to avoid margin borrowing as this would increase risk and volatility beyond what I think is an acceptable level.

Applying the Strategy to Investing

The first step in my strategy is to identify longer term trends that are disruptive to entrenched leaders of large markets. I believe the following qualify:

  1. Growth of eCommerce: Online purchasing will gain share for another 10 years or more
  2. Shift of services from physical, in-person to virtual: This reduces cost and adds convenience and should persist for many years
  3. Use of video conferencing in place of older audio conferencing: Will continue to further penetrate businesses and also emerge as a “must have” for individual households
  4. Online advertising: It will continue to gain share from other forms as it allows for more precise measurement of effectiveness and promotes immediate ability to purchase
  5. Shift from old generation autos to eco-friendlier (i.e. electric) with software capabilities tightly integrated: It is in its early stages and will gain increasing traction for several decades to come
  6. The entire online security industry will not only grow at an accelerated pace but also face an upheaval as more modern technology will be used to detect increased attacks from those deploying viruses, spam, intrusions and identity theft
  7. Web Services will continue to experience double digit growth: Since its directly tied to Internet traffic driven by increased eCommerce, escalation of video, social and virtual services

Several companies that I have selected (and outlined in the past) benefit from more than one of the 7 identified trends and all are one of the dominant players in their particular arena. It should be noted that the arena may be more specific than the trend.

For example, Online advertising has distinct leaders in overall social (Facebook), search advertising (Google), Visual advertising (Pinterest), eCommerce ads (Amazon) and programmatic (The Trade Desk). So, while these 5 companies compete for advertising budget, they each are the dominant brands in their sub-sector with massive networks of users that are difficult to replicate.

Picking the winners

In the first section of this blog, I highlighted six different types of competitive advantages I look for. The companies that I have recently invested in have three or more of these advantages, and on average qualifies for roughly 4.5. On the leadership side not only do all have very strong leadership but virtually all are led by their founder who is an early innovator in their sector.

One other major consideration recently has been the impact of the pandemic. There are three companies that I have previously covered in the blog that I feel benefit strongly: Amazon, DocuSign, and Zoom. Both Peloton and Shopify would be major additional beneficiaries. When the pandemic ends there is widespread views on how such companies will be impacted. On the one hand, many analysts believe some or all of these will experience a reduction in revenue against strong comps. Others, including myself, think that behavior has changed, so while massive growth experienced during the pandemic won’t be replicated, most, if not all of them will continue to grow at a more “normal” rate. The four advertising companies I mentioned previously: Facebook, Google, Pinterest and The Trade Desk have all been impacted by the loss of advertising from major business segments like travel, live events (and associated ticket sellers) and brick and mortar retail. Since Amazon advertising revenue is limited to online sellers it is not affected by loss of ads from these sectors. My expectation is that when the Shelter-in-Place requirements are substantially eased, all four of these companies will experience a jump in advertising revenue. As we reach April of 2021 this jump will be compared to depressed comps and all four should experience above normal growth.

Of companies that are in my 2020 stock pics, surprisingly, Tesla has appreciated well over 600% despite its revenue being lower than pre-pandemic expectations. I believe this is mostly because of the certain shift taking place towards software enabled electronic cars but the stock has also been helped by inclusion in the S&P index. The other company negatively impacted by the pandemic is Stitch Fix. On the one hand, it has undoubtedly gained share as it offers a modern online method of shopping to its very large base of customers, but it is also obvious that people are just not buying that many items of clothes during the pandemic. I expected Stitch Fix to be a substantial beneficiary when Shelter-in-Place is eased, but the market is already anticipating this as we’ve seen it’s begin year value of $25.66, which fell dramatically earlier in the pandemic, rebound nicely to a price of $69 in December 2020…a 170% appreciation year-to-date.

I have also been examining several companies that had recently IPO’d as younger public companies tend to have higher growth rates which in turn creates greater potential future appreciation. So, I considered the various companies that had come public in 2019 to see which ones met my screens. Investing in Lyft and Uber, post IPO, had little interest for me. On the positive side, Lyft revenue growth was 95% in Q1, 2019, but it had a negative contribution margin in 2018 and Q1 2019. Uber’s growth was a much lower 20% in Q1, but it appeared to have slightly better contribution margin than Lyft, possibly even as high as 5%. I expected Uber and Lyft to improve their contribution margin, but it is difficult to see either of them delivering a reasonable level of profitability in the near term as scaling revenue does not help profitability until contribution margin improves. So, I passed on both which proved the right decision as Lyft is still well below the first day’s closing price of $78.29 post-IPO. Uber is now up 27% vs its first day closing price (roughly the same as the S&P index) as food delivery has proven a great business for them during the pandemic. The first of the 2019 IPO class that I bought was Zoom Video, which had a contribution margin of roughly 25% coupled with over 100% revenue growth. It also seemed on the verge of moving to profitability. Four others piqued my interest: Pinterest, Peloton, Slack and CrowdStrike. All of these were growing revenue at a 40% or higher rate, had solid business models and met my other criteria. I’ll discuss these in more detail in my following posts but, on average, they are up well over 300% this year …stay tuned for my 2021 predictions!

The Impact of Gen Z on Marketing

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Economics, Marketing, Metrics , , , , , , ,

Azure Marketing Day

Each year, Azure hosts a marketing day for CMOs and CEOs of its consumer-facing portfolio companies. This year, on February 27th, we had sessions on the following topics:

  • Refreshing Your Brand as the Business Grows
  • Metrics for Evaluating Successful Marketing
  • Leveraging Comedy to Lower Customer Acquisition Cost
  • Know the Next Generation: An introduction to Gen Z
  • The Benefits and Drawbacks of a Multi-Channel Strategy
  • Influencer Strategies
  • Optimizing Pinterest

I presented the one on Metrics, but the other sessions are conducted by a combination of portfolio executives and outside speakers, each a leading thinker on the topic. Since I invariably learn quite a lot from other speakers, it seems only fair to borrow from their talks for a few blog posts so that I can share these benefits.

Much of this post will be based on concepts that I found especially enlightening from the session by Chris Bruzzo, the current CMO of Electronic Arts, on knowing Generation Z. I won’t cite each place I am using something from Chris versus my own thoughts; but you can assume much of the content emanates from Chris. Since Chris is one of the most creative thinkers in marketing, I’m hoping this will make me look good!

Marketers have Defined Generational Characteristics

Marketers often use personas to help understand what they need to do to address different types of customers. A persona may be:

  • A married woman 35 years old with a job and 2 children aged 6 and 9;
  • A 16-year-old male who is a sophomore in high school;
  • A non-working woman aged 50

A great deal of research has been done on the characteristics of particular “personas” to better enable a company to create and market products that meet their needs. One categorization of people is by age, with 5 different generations being profiled. The youngest group to emerge as important is Gen Z, roughly defined as those born between 1995 and 2012. Currently the U.S. population over 12 years old is distributed as follows:

What this means is that Gen Z has become a significant portion of the population to consider when creating and marketing products. With that in mind, let’s compare several characteristics of the youngest three of these groups.

Source: EA Research

Gen Z is the first generation that are digital natives. They are profiled as having cautious optimism, wanting to be connected, seeking community and wanting to create and control things. Earlier generations, including Millennials, watched TV an increasing number of hours, often multi-tasking while they did. Gen Z has replaced much of TV watching with device “screen time”, including visiting YouTube (72% of Gen Z visit it daily). When asked “What device would you pick if you could have only one?”, GenZers chose the TV less than 5% of the time. Prior generations respond well to email marketing while Gen Z needs to be reached through social media. Gen Z has little tolerance for barriers of entry for reaching a site and will just move on (I feel the same way and think many members of other generations do as well).  So, when targeting new customers (especially Gen Z) remove barriers to entry like requiring registration before a user becomes a customer. It is important to demonstrate value to them first.

Gen Z grew up in an era where the Internet was part of life and smart phones were viewed as essential… rather than a luxury. On average they spend 40% of their free time on screens. What is even more eye opening is that 91% go to bed with their devices. Advertisers have responded to these trends by gradually shifting more of their spend online. This has been difficult for newspapers and magazines for quite a while, but now it is also having a major impact on flattening out the use of TV as an advertising medium.

There are several implications from the numbers shown in the above chart. First, it is very clear to see that newspapers and magazines as we know them are not viable. This has led to iconic players like the New York Times and Fortune monetizing their brands through conferences, trips, wine clubs, and more. Lesser known brands have simply disappeared. In 2018, TV revenue continued to grow slightly despite losing share as the smaller share was of a larger pie. But in 2019, TV advertising dollars declined, and the decline is forecast to continue going forward. Several factors can be attributed to this but certainly one is that brands targeting Gen Z are aware that TV is not their medium of choice. One unintended consequence of major brands shifting spend to the Internet is that because they are less price sensitive to cost than eCommerce companies, this has led to higher pricing by Facebook and Google.

Personalization is Becoming “Table Stakes” and Offering Co-Creation is a Major Plus

Consumers, in general, and especially Gen Z, are demanding that brands do more to personalize products to their needs and interests. In fact, Gen Z even wants to participate in product creation. One example involves Azure portfolio company Le Tote. The company, much like Stitch Fix, uses algorithms to personalize the clothing it sends based on specifics about each customer. When the company added the ability for consumers to personalize their box (from the already personalized box suggested by the algorithm) there was a sizeable spike in satisfaction…despite the fact that the items the consumer substituted led to a decline in how well the clothes fit! This example shows that using customer data to select new items is only a first step in personalization. Letting the customer have more of a say (be a co-creator) is even more important. 

Conclusions

  1. Startups need to diversify their marketing spend away from Facebook and Google as the ROI on these channels has contracted. At the Azure marketing day, we highlighted testing whether Pinterest, influencers, brick and mortar distribution and/or comedy might be sources that drive a higher ROI.
  2. If Gen Zers are being targeted, YouTube, Snap, Instagram, and Twitch are likely better places to market
  3. When targeting new customers (especially Gen Z) remove barriers to entry like requiring registration before a user becomes a customer. It is important to demonstrate value to them first.
  4. Build great apps for iPhones and Android phones but what is becoming most important is making sure that smart phones work well on your site without requiring an app, as most Gen Zers will use their phones for access. When they do, the mobile web version needs to be strong so that they don’t need to download your app before discovering the value you offer.
  5. Involve customers as much as possible in the design/selection/creation of your products as this extends personalization to “co-creation” and will increase satisfaction.

Soundbytes

  • Readers are aware that I invest in growth stocks (some of which I suggest to you) to achieve superior performance. What you may not be aware of is that over the past 25 years my strategy for investing has been to put the majority of capital in A or better rated municipal bonds (Munis) to generate income in a relatively safe way (and I believe everyone should diversify how they apportion capital). I use a complex strategy to generate superior returns and in the past 25 years I have earned, on average, between 4% and 5% tax free annually.  But in the current environment new investments in Munis will have much lower yields so I have started to look at “safe” alternatives to generate income. This type of investment is for income generation and involves a different category of stocks than the growth stocks I target for high returns through stock appreciation.
  • Given the recent downturn in the stock market I did my first “bond alternative” investment earlier this week. My goal is to generate income of over 5% on an after-tax basis in stocks that are “safe” investments from the point of view of continuing to deliver dividends at or above current levels.
  • My first set of transactions was in Bristol Myers Squibb:
    • I bought the stock at $56.48 where the dividend is 3.2% per year
    • I sold Jan 21 calls at a strike price of 60 and received $4.95
    • If the stock is not called my cash yield, including $1.80 in dividends, would be $6.75 over less than one year which would equal 12% before taxes
    • I also sold Jan 21 puts at a strike price of $55 and received $6.46. If the stock is not put to me and is not called that would increase my one-year yield to over 23% of the $56.48 stock price and I would repeat the sale of calls and puts next year. Since my net cost was $43.27 the percentage yield would be over 30% of my cash outlay.
    • If the stock was called my net gain would equal the profit on the stock, the dividends for one year plus the premiums on the options and would exceed 30%
    • If the stock went below $55 and was put to me at that price I would be ok with that as the new shares would have a net cost of just over $49 with a dividend yield of close to 4.0% (assuming the company follows past practice of raising dividends each year) and I could sell new puts at a lower strike price.  
  • The second stock I invested in for income is AT&T.
    • I bought the stock at $34.60 where the dividend is 6.0% per year
    • I sold Jan 21 calls at a strike price of $37 and received $2.05 per share
    • If the stock is not called my year 1 cash yield would be $4.13 per share over less than a year or about 12% before taxes
    • I also sold Jan 21 puts with a strike of $32 and received $3.30 per share. If the stock is not put to me and is not called, that would increase my one-year yield to over 20% of the stock price and over 25% of the net cash outlay
    • If the stock was called, I would only have 3 quarters of dividends, but the gain would be over 30% of my net original cash outlay
    • If the stock was put to me my cost of the new shares, after subtracting the put premium would be $28.70 and the dividend alone would provide a 7.2% pre-tax yield and I could sell new puts at a lower price.
  • We shall see how this works out but unless they cut the dividends, I won’t worry if the stock is lower a year from now as that would only increase my yield on new stock purchased due to the puts. The chance of either company cutting dividends seems quite low which is why I view this as a “safe” alternative to generate income as I won’t sell either stock unless they are called at the higher strike price.
  • I also began reserving capital starting about a month ago as I expected the virus to impact the market. These purchases used about 10% of what I had put aside. I put another 15% to work on Friday, March 13 as the market had fallen further and valuations have become quite attractive – remember the secret is to “buy low, sell high”. When the market is low its always scary or it wouldn’t be low! I do confess that I didn’t sell much when it was high as I tend to be a long-term holder of stocks I view as game changers…so I missed the opportunity to sell high and then repurchase low.

Discussion of Sophisticated Valuation Methodology

Mike Kwatinetz Metrics, Valuation

In the long run, companies should be valued based on future earnings flows. Since this is often nearly impossible to calculate, proxies are often used instead. I find it difficult to competently determine what proxies should be used for cyclical companies, so will ignore them as they are not in my universe in venture or public investing. The focus of this post will be on exploring valuation for high-growth companies.

Companies that are already at or near their long-term model for profitability are often valued based on a multiple of earnings. If they are still in their high growth phase, they are likely to have increasing earnings over time and should therefore command a higher multiple than those that are growing slowly or not at all. Much analysis has been done to compare various such entities based on how their multiple of earnings varies depending on their level of growth. There will be a strong correlation between their multiple of earnings and level of growth, but other factors such as the “dependability of growth and earnings” can lead to wide variations in valuations.  For example, a company that has a SaaS business model with greater than 100% revenue retention would usually be viewed as one where growth is “safer” … thus commanding a higher multiple than those with different models.

What about companies that are not near their long-term profit model?   

Many of the companies that have recently gone public are a long way from reaching their long-term business model, and so other methods of valuing them must be used. Often, Investment Bankers suggest a multiple of revenue as one method. By considering how “comparable” companies trade based on revenue and growth a suggested valuation can be derived:

Table 1 Valuation of Comparable Companies

Table 1 shows a sample of what an investment banker might use as one method of determining potential valuation. However, there are many weaknesses to this approach. The biggest of which is: “what makes a company a comparable?” Usually companies selected are in the same sector. But, within a sector, business models can vary widely. For example, a sector like eCommerce has companies that:

  1. Sell physical goods which are not their own brands
  2. Sell physical goods that are their own brands
  3. Are a marketplace in which sellers list their goods and the company facilitates sales, collects the money and pays the seller (e.g., eBay).  Such a company’s revenue is not the sales of the goods but instead the marketplace commission.
  4. Sell virtual goods that are their own

There can be wide variation in gross margin among the four categories, but in general, gross margins are higher as we go from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. In fact, companies in category 1 often have gross margins in the 20% to 40% range, those in category 2 in the 40% to 70% range, those in category 3 in the 70% to 90% range and those in category 4 in the 85% to 95% range. What this means is that all other things being equal the potential earnings at scale for these will depend more on its business model than on the sector.  

To test our theory of whether using a multiple of Gross Margin was a better measure of value than a multiple of revenue, we plotted the relationship between growth and valuation using each of these methods.  It turns out there is a correlation between valuation as a multiple of revenue based on revenue growth regardless of industry. We found the correlation coefficient for it to be 0.36, an indication of a moderate relationship. This was still far better than the correlation between slow growth and high growth plays that just happen to be in the same industry. So, I believe (based on evidence) that growth is a better indicator of multiple than industry sector.

In that same post we plotted the relationship between revenue growth and valuation as a multiple of gross margin dollars (GMD). For the remainder of this post I’ll use multiple to mean the multiple of GMD. Since it seemed obvious that GM% is a better indicator of future earnings than revenue, I wasn’t surprised that the correlation coefficient was a much higher 0.62, an indication of a much stronger relationship. While other factors like dependability of revenue, market size, perceived competitive advantage and more will affect the multiple, I decided that this method of assessing valuation was strong enough that I use the resulting least square regression formula as a way of getting a starting approximation for the value of a company that has yet to reach “business model maturity”.

Why Contribution Margin is a better indicator than Gross Margin of future earnings.

The reason the correlation coefficient between GMD multiples and revenue growth is 0.62 rather than a number much closer to 1.0 is that a number of other factors play a role in determining future earnings. For me, the most important one is Contribution Margin, which considers the marketing/sales cost spent each month to help drive revenue (think of it as GMD minus marketing/sales cost). Contribution Margin indicates how quickly the benefits of scaling the business will enable reaching mature earnings. When I look at a company that has low contribution margins it is difficult to see how it can generate substantial profits unless it can improve gross margin and/or reduce marketing spend as a percentage of sales. That is why the bull story on Spotify is that it will get the music labels to substantially reduce their royalty level (from close to 80%), or for Uber is that it will go to self-driving vehicles or why Blue Apron keeps reducing its marketing spend in an effort to increase contribution margin. The argument then becomes a speculation on why the multiple should be of a “theoretically” higher amount.  I would like to plot revenue growth versus the multiple of Contribution Margin to obtain a new least square formula, which I am confident would have a higher correlation coefficient.  Unfortunately, many companies do not readily identify variable marketing/sales cost so instead I analyze where it is likely to be, and factor that into how I view valuation.

Other Factors to Consider for Understanding a Company’s Valuation

  1. Recurring revenue models should have a higher multiple: Business to Business SaaS (Software as a Service) companies usually trade at higher multiples than those with other models that are growing at the same rate. The reason is simple: their customers are likely to stay on their platforms for a decade or more and often increase what they spend over time. This creates a situation where a portion of revenue growth can be sustained even before adding the marketing spend to acquire future customers which in turn should lead to higher Contribution Margins.
  2. Companies that are in markets that are likely to grow at a high rate for 5 years or more should have higher multiples: If the market a company plays in is growing quickly there is more opportunity to sustain high growth levels for a longer time, leading to a likelihood of greater future earnings.
  3. Companies with substantial competitive advantage should have higher multiples: Any company that has a product that it is difficult to replicate can elevate its margins and earnings for a long period of time. One of the best examples of this is pharmaceutical companies, where their drug patents last for 20 years. Even after the patent expires the original holder will continue to sell the drug at a much higher price than its generic alternatives and still maintain strong market share.
  4. Companies that are farther away from generating actual earnings should trade at lower multiples than those that are close or already generating some earnings: The reason for this is obvious to me but it is often not the case … especially for newly minted IPOs. I believe there is considerable risk that such companies will take many years to reach profitability (if they do at all) and that when they do it will only be a modest portion of revenue. I started this post by saying that eventually valuations should reflect the present value of future earnings flows. The longer it takes to get to mature earnings, the lower its present value (see table 2). If tangible earnings started 7 years out (vs immediately) the discounted value of the flow would be reduced by more than half – reflecting that the valuation of the company should be half that of a company with a similar earnings flow that started immediately.

Table 2: Present value of future dollars using a 12% discount rate

How I bet on my Valuation Methodology.

Consider the three recommendations in my last post that have had their IPO between November of 2017 and mid-2019: DocuSign, Stitch fix and Zoom. They all are profitable already. Two are B to B SaaS companies with greater than 100% revenue retention (that means that the cohort of customers they had a year ago, including those that churned, are spending more today than when they started). The third has existing customers increasing their year over spend as well. They are all growing at a strong pace.

SoundBytes

  • While I did not include it in my recommended stocks for 2020, I recently purchased shares in Pinterest (at $19.50 per share), one of the three 2019 Unicorn IPOs (of the nine I highlighted in my last post) that was already profitable. Based on my valuation methods it is at a reasonable valuation, grew 47% year over year in its last reported quarter, and appears well positioned to grow at a high level for many years. What I find surprising is the comparison to the valuation of Snap. Snap is growing at roughly the same pace (50% in the last reported quarter), had an adjusted EBITDA loss of nearly 10% in Q3 and yet was trading at nearly double the multiple of GMD. 
  • I can’t help mentioning that we predicted that Tesla was likely to have a great Q4 in our post in November, based on the long wait time for my getting a model 3 I had ordered, coupled with manufacturing cranking out more expensive model S and X versions for most of the quarter, and that the Chinese factory was starting to produce cars. At the time the stock was $333 per share. Now, after it has risen over 200 points a number of analysts are saying the same thing.

2020 Top Ten Predictions

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Economics, Golden State Warriors, Marketing, Metrics, NBA, Predictions, Startups, Stocks, Technology, Unicorns , , , , , , , ,

I wanted to start this post by repeating something I discussed in my top ten lists in 2017 and 2018 which I learned while at Sanford Bernstein in my Wall Street days: “Owning companies that have strong competitive advantages and a great business model in a potentially mega-sized market can create the largest performance gains over time (assuming one is correct).” It does make my stock predictions somewhat boring (as they were on Wall Street where my top picks, Dell and Microsoft each appreciated over 100X over the ten years I was recommending them).

Let’s do a little simple math. Suppose one can generate an IRR of 26% per year (my target is to be over 25%) over a long period of time.  The wonder of compounding is that at 26% per year your assets will double every 3 years. In 6 years, this would mean 4X your original investment dollars and in 12 years the result would be 16X. For comparison purposes, at 5% per year your assets would only be 1.8X in 12 years and at 10% IRR 3.1X.  While 25%+ IRR represents very high performance, I have been fortunate enough to consistently exceed it (but always am worried that it can’t keep up)! For my recommendations of the past 6 years, the IRR is 34.8% and since this exceeds 26%, the 6-year performance  is roughly 6X rather than 4X.

What is the trick to achieving 25% plus IRR? Here are a few of my basic rules:

  1. Start with companies growing revenue 20% or more, where those closer to 20% also have opportunity to expand income faster than revenue
  2. Make sure the market they are attacking is large enough to support continued high growth for at least 5 years forward
  3. Stay away from companies that don’t have profitability in sight as companies eventually should trade at a multiple of earnings.
  4. Only choose companies with competitive advantages in their space
  5. Re-evaluate your choices periodically but don’t be consumed by short term movement

As I go through each of my 6 stock picks I have also considered where the stock currently trades relative to its growth and other performance metrics. With that in mind, as is my tendency (and was stated in my last post), I am continuing to recommend Tesla, Facebook, Amazon, Stitch Fix and DocuSign. I am adding Zoom Video Communications (ZM) to the list. For Zoom and Amazon I will recommend a more complex transaction to achieve my target return.

2020 Stock Recommendations:

1. Tesla stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $418/share)

Tesla is likely to continue to be a volatile stock, but it has so many positives in front of it that I believe it wise to continue to own it. The upward trend in units and revenue should be strong in 2020 because:

  • The model 3 continues to be one of the most attractive cars on the market. Electric Car Reviews has come out with a report stating that Model 3 cost of ownership not only blows away the Audi AS but is also lower than a Toyota Camry! The analysis is that the 5-year cost of ownership of the Tesla is $0.46 per mile while the Audi AS comes in 70% higher at $0.80 per mile. While Audi being more expensive is no surprise, what is shocking is how much more expensive it is. The report also determined that Toyota Camry has a higher cost as well ($0.49/mile)! Given the fact that the Tesla is a luxury vehicle and the Camry is far from that, why would anyone with this knowledge decide to buy a low-end car like a Camry over a Model 3 when the Camry costs more to own?  What gets the Tesla to a lower cost than the Camry is much lower fuel cost, virtually no maintenance cost and high resale value. While the Camry purchase price is lower, these factors more than make up for the initial price difference
  • China, the largest market for electronic vehicles, is about to take off in sales. With the new production facility in China going live, Tesla will be able to significantly increase production in 2020 and will benefit from the car no longer being subject to import duties in China.  
  • European demand for Teslas is increasing dramatically. With its Chinese plant going live, Tesla will be able to partly meet European demand which could be as high as the U.S. in the future. The company is building another factory in Europe in anticipation. The earliest indicator of just how much market share Tesla can reach has occurred in Norway where electric cars receive numerous incentives. Tesla is now the best selling car in that country and demand for electric cars there now exceeds gas driven vehicles.

While 2020 is shaping up as a stairstep uptick in sales for Tesla given increased capacity and demand, various factors augur continued growth well beyond 2020. For example, Tesla is only partway towards having a full lineup of vehicles. In the future it will add:

  • Pickup trucks – where pre-orders and recent surveys indicate it will acquire 10-20% of that market
  • A lower priced SUV – at Model 3 type pricing this will be attacking a much larger market than the Model X
  • A sports car – early specifications indicate that it could rival Ferrari in performance but at pricing more like a Porsche
  • A refreshed version of the Model S
  • A semi – where the lower cost of fuel and maintenance could mean strong market share.

2. Facebook stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $205/share)

Facebook, like Tesla, continues to have a great deal of controversy surrounding it and therefore may sometimes have price drops that its financial metrics do not warrant. This was the case in 2018 when the stock dropped 28% in value during that year. While 2019 partly recovered from what I believe was an excessive reaction, it’s important to note that the 2019 year-end price of $205/share was only 16% higher than at the end of 2017 while trailing revenue will have grown by about 75% in the 2-year period. The EPS run rate should be up in a similar way after a few quarters of lower earnings in early 2019. My point is that the stock remains at a low price given its metrics. I expect Q4 to be quite strong and believe 2020 will continue to show solid growth.

The Facebook platform is still increasing the number of active users, albeit by only about 5%-6%. Additionally, Facebook continues to increase inventory utilization and pricing. In fact, given what I anticipate will be added advertising spend due to the heated elections for president, senate seats, governorships etc., Facebook advertising inventory usage and rates could increase faster (see prediction 7 on election spending).  

Facebook should also benefit by an acceleration of commerce and increased monetization of advertising on Instagram. Facebook started monetizing that platform in 2017 and Instagram revenue has been growing exponentially and is likely to close out 2019 at well over $10 billion. A wild card for growth is potential monetization of WhatsApp. That platform now has over 1.5 billion active users with over 300 million active every day. It appears close to beginning monetization.

The factors discussed could enable Facebook to continue to grow revenue at 20% – 30% annually for another 3-5 years making it a sound longer term investment.

3. DocuSign stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $74/share)

DocuSign is the runaway leader in e-signatures facilitating multiple parties signing documents in a secure, reliable way for board resolutions, mortgages, investment documents, etc. Being the early leader creates a network effect, as hundreds of millions of people are in the DocuSign e-signature database. The company has worked hard to expand its scope of usage for both enterprise and smaller companies by adding software for full life-cycle management of agreements. This includes the process of generating, redlining, and negotiating agreements in a multi-user environment, all under secure conditions. On the small business side, the DocuSign product is called DocuSign Negotiate and is integrated with Salesforce.

The company is a SaaS company with a stable revenue base of over 560,000 customers at the end of October, up well over 20% from a year earlier. Its strategy is one of land and expand with revenue from existing customers increasing each year leading to a roughly 40% year over year revenue increase in the most recent quarter (fiscal Q3). SaaS products account for over 95% of revenue with professional services providing the rest. As a SaaS company, gross margins are high at 79% (on a non-GAAP basis).

The company has now reached positive earnings on a non-GAAP basis of $0.11/share versus $0.00 a year ago. I use non-GAAP as GAAP financials distort actual results by creating extra cost on the P&L if the company’s stock appreciates. These costs are theoretic rather than real.

My only concern with this recommendation is that the stock has had a 72% runup in 2019 but given its growth, move to positive earnings and the fact that SaaS companies trade at higher multiples of revenue than others I still believe it can outperform this year.

4. Stitch Fix Stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $25.66/share)

Stitch Fix offers customers, who are primarily women, the ability to shop from home by sending them a box with several items selected based on sophisticated analysis of her profile and prior purchases. The customer pays a $20 “styling fee” for the box which can be applied towards purchasing anything in the box. The company is the strong leader in the space with revenue approaching a $2 billion run rate. Unlike many of the recent IPO companies, it has shown an ability to balance growth and earnings. The stock had a strong 2019 ending the year at $25.66 per share up 51% over the 2018 closing price. Despite this, our valuation methodology continues to show it to be substantially under valued and it remains one of my picks for 2020. The likely cause of what I believe is a low valuation is a fear of Amazon making it difficult for Stitch Fix to succeed. As the company gets larger this fear should recede helping the multiple to expand.  

Stitch Fix continues to add higher-end brands and to increase its reach into men, plus sizes and kids. Its algorithms to personalize each box of clothes it ships keeps improving. Therefore, the company can spend less on acquiring new customers as it has increased its ability to get existing customers to spend more and come back more often. Stitch Fix can continue to grow its revenue from women in the U.S. with expansion opportunities in international markets over time. I believe the company can continue to grow by roughly 20% or more in 2020 and beyond.

Stitch Fix revenue growth (of over 21% in the latest reported quarter) comes from a combination of increasing the number of active clients by 17% to 3.4 million, coupled with driving higher revenue per active client. The company accomplished this while generating profits on a non-GAAP basis.

5. Amazon stock strategy will outpace the market (it closed last year at $1848/share).

Amazon shares increased by 23% last year while revenue in Q3 was up 24% year over year. This meant the stock performance mirrored revenue growth. Growth in the core commerce business has slowed but Amazon’s cloud and echo/Alexa businesses are strong enough to help the company maintain roughly 20% growth in 2020. The company continues to invest heavily in R&D with a push to create automated retail stores one of its latest initiatives. If that proves successful, Amazon can greatly expand its physical presence and potentially increase growth through the rollout of numerous brick and mortar locations. But at its current size, it will be difficult for the company to maintain over 20% revenue growth for many years (excluding acquisitions) so I am suggesting a more complex investment in this stock:

  1. Buy X shares of the stock (or keep the ones you have)
  2. Sell Amazon puts for the same number of shares with the puts expiring on January 15, 2021 and having a strike price of $1750. The most recent sale of these puts was for over $126
  3. So, net out of pocket cost would be reduced to $1722
  4. A 20% increase in the stock price (roughly Amazon’s growth rate) would mean 29% growth in value since the puts would expire worthless
  5. If the stock declined 226 points the option sale would be a break-even. Any decline beyond that and you would lose additional dollars.
  6. If the options still have a premium on December 31, I will measure their value on January 15, 2021 for the purposes of performance.

6. I’m adding Zoom Video Communications to the list but with an even more complex investment strategy (the stock is currently at $72.20)

I discussed Zoom Video Communications (ZM) in my post on June 24, 2019. In that post I described the reasons I liked Zoom for the long term:

  1. Revenue retention of a cohort was about 140%
  2. It acquires customers very efficiently with a payback period of 7 months as the host of a Zoom call invites various people to participate in the call and those who are not already Zoom users can be readily targeted by the company at little cost
  3. Gross Margins are over 80% and could increase
  4. The product has been rated best in class numerous times
  5. Its compression technology (the key ingredient in making video high quality) appears to have a multi-year lead over the competition
  6. Adding to those reasons it’s important to note that ZM is improving earnings and was slightly profitable in its most recent reported quarter

The fly in the ointment was that my valuation technology showed that it was overvalued. However, I came up with a way of “future pricing” the stock. Since I expected revenue to grow by about 150% over the next 7 quarters (at the time it was growing over 100% year over year) “future pricing” would make it an attractive stock. This was possible due to the extremely high premiums for options in the stock. So far that call is working out. Despite the company growing revenue in the 3 quarters subsequent to my post by over 57%, my concern about valuation has proven correct and the stock has declined from $76.92 to $72.20. If I closed out the position today by selling the stock and buying back the options (see Table 1) my return for less than 7.5 months would be a 42% profit. This has occurred despite the stock declining slightly due to shrinkage in the premiums.

Table 1: Previous Zoom trade and proposed trade

I typically prefer using longer term options for doing this type of trade as revenue growth of this magnitude should eventually cause the stock to rise, plus the premiums on options that are further out are much higher, reducing the risk profile, but I will construct this trade so that the options expire on January 15, 2021 to be able to evaluate it in one year. In measuring my performance we’ll use the closing stock price on the option expiration date, January 15, 2021 since premiums in options persist until their expiration date so the extra 2 weeks leads to better optimization of the trade.

So, here is the proposed trade (see table 1):

  1. Buy X shares of the stock at $72.20 (today’s price)
  2. Sell Calls for X shares expiring January 15, 2021 at a strike of $80/share for $11.50 (same as last price it traded)
  3. Sell puts for X shares expiring January 15, 2021 with strike of $65/share for $10.00 (same as last price it traded)

I expect revenue growth of 60% or more 4 quarters out. I also expect the stock to rise some portion of that, as it is now closer to its value than when I did the earlier transaction on May 31, 2019. Check my prior post for further analysis on Zoom, but here are 3 cases that matter at December 31, 2020:

  • Stock closes over $80/share (up 11% or more) at end of the year: the profit would be 58% of the net cost of the transaction
    • This would happen because the stock would be called, and you would get $80/share
    • The put would expire worthless
    • Since you paid a net cost of $50.70, net profit would be $29.30
  • Stock closes flat at $72.20:  your profit would be $21.50 (42%)
    • The put and the call would each expire worthless, so you would earn the original premiums you received when you sold them
    • The stock would be worth the same as what you paid
  • Stock closes at $57.85 on December 31: you would be at break even. If it closed lower, then losses would accumulate twice as quickly:
    • The put holder would require you to buy the stock at the put exercise price of $65, $7.15 more than it would be worth
    • The call would expire worthless
    • The original stock would have declined from $72.20 to $57.85, a loss of $14.35
    • The loss on the stock and put together would equal $21.50, the original premiums you received for those options

Outside of my stock picks, I always like to make a few non-stock predictions for the year ahead.

7. The major election year will cause a substantial increase in advertising dollars spent

According to Advertising Analytics political spending has grown an average of 27% per year since 2012. Both the rise of Super PACs and the launch of online donation tools such as ActBlue have substantially contributed to this growth. While much of the spend is targeted at TV, online platforms have seen an increasing share of the dollars, especially Facebook and Google. The spend is primarily in even years, as those are the ones with senate, house and gubernatorial races (except for minor exceptions). Of course, every 4th year this is boosted by the added spend from presidential candidates. The Wall Street Journal projects the 2020 amount will be about $9.9 billion…up nearly 60% from the 2016 election year. It should be noted that the forecast was prior to Bloomberg entering the race and if he remains a viable candidate an additional $2 billion or more could be added to this total.

The portion targeted at the digital world is projected to be about $2.8 billion or about 2.2% of total digital ad spending. Much of these dollars will likely go to Facebook and Google. This spend has a dual impact: first it adds to the revenue of each platform in a direct way, but secondly it can also cause the cost of advertising on those platforms to rise for others as well.

8. Automation of Retail will continue to gain momentum

This will happen in multiple ways, including:

  1. More Brick & Mortar locations will offer some or all the SKUs in the store for online purchase through Kiosks (assisted by clerks/sales personnel). By doing this, merchants will be able to offer a larger variety of items, styles, sizes and colors than can be carried in any one outlet. In addition, the consolidation of inventory achieved in this manner will add efficiency to the business model. In the case of clothing, such stores will carry samples of items so the customer can try them on, partly to optimize fit but also to determine whether he or she likes the way it looks and feels on them. If one observes the massive use of Kiosks at airports it becomes obvious that they reduce the number of employees needed and can speed up checking in. One conclusion is this will be the wave of the future for multiple consumer-based industries.
  2. Many more locations will begin incorporating technology to eliminate the number of employees needed in their stores. Amazon will likely be a leader in this, but others will also provide ways to reduce the cost of ordering, picking goods, checking out and receiving information while at the store.

9. The Warriors will come back strong in the 2020/21 season

Let me begin by saying that this prediction is not being made because I have been so humbled by my miss in the July post where I predicted that the Warriors could edge into the 2020 playoffs and then contend for a title if Klay returned in late February/early March. Rather, it is based on analysis of their opportunity for next season and also an attempt to add a little fun to my Top Ten List!  The benefit of this season:

  • Klay and Curry are getting substantial time off after 5 seasons of heavy stress. They should be refreshed at the start of next season
  • Russell, assuming he doesn’t keep missing games with injuries, is learning the Warriors style of play
  • Because of the injuries to Klay, Curry, Looney, and to a lesser extent Green and Russell, several of the younger members of the team are getting experience at a much more rapid rate than would normally be possible and the Warriors are able to have more time to evaluate them as potential long-term assets
  • If the Warriors continue to lose at their current rate, they will be able to get a high draft choice for the first time since 2012 when they drafted Harrison Barnes with the 7th pick. Since then their highest pick has been between the 28th and 30th player chosen (30 is the lowest pick in the first round)
  • The Warriors will have more cap space available to sign a quality veteran
  • Andre Iguodala might re-sign with the team, and while this is not necessary for my prediction it would be great for him and for the team
  • The veterans should be hungry again after several years of almost being bored during the regular season

I am assuming the Warriors will be relatively healthy next season for this to occur.

10. At least one of the major Unicorns will be acquired by a larger player

In 2019, there was a change to the investing environment where most companies that did not show a hint of potential profitability had difficulty maintaining their market price. This was particularly true of highly touted Unicorns, which mostly struggled to increase their share price dramatically from the price each closed on the day of their IPO. Table 2 shows the 9 Unicorns whose IPOs we highlighted in our last post. Other than Beyond Meat, Zoom and Pinterest, they all appear some distance from turning a proforma profit. Five of the other six are below their price on the first day’s close. A 6th, Peloton, is slightly above the IPO price (and further above the first days close). Beyond Meat grew revenue 250% in its latest quarter and moved to profitability as well. Its stock jumped on the first day and is even higher today.  While Pinterest is showing an ability to be profitable it is still between the price of the IPO and its close on the first day of trading.  Zoom, which is one of our recommended buys, was profitable (on a Non-GAAP basis) and grew revenue 85% in its most recent quarter. A 10th player, WeWork, had such substantial losses that it was unable to have a successful IPO.

Table 2: Recent Unicorn IPOs Stock Price & Profitability Comparisons

Something that each of these companies have in common is that they are all growing revenue at 30% or more, are attacking large markets, and are either in the leadership position in that market or are one of two in such a position. Because of this I believe one or more of these (and comparable Unicorns) could be an interesting acquisition for a much larger company who is willing to help make them profitable. For such an acquirer their growth and leadership position could be quite attractive.

Calculating and Acting on the Right KPIs is Critical for Success

Mike Kwatinetz KPI, Marketing, Metrics , ,

Advanced metrics for Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Lifetime Value (LTV)

What is the purpose of CAC, LTV and Payback Period?

Often entrepreneurs we meet have a list of their KPI’s, but as we dig deeper, it becomes clear that they don’t fully comprehend the purpose of the KPI or why we think that they are so critical in helping us understand the health of a business. I’m a believer in thoroughly understanding the economics of your business, and the metrics around Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Revenue (LTR), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and Payback Period are important metrics to work on improving. In this post we use the word customer to mean a ‘buyer’, someone who actually orders product and will use customer and buyer interchangeably.

  • LTR (Customer Lifetime Revenue) is the total revenue from a customer over their estimated lifetime (we prefer using 5 years as representing lifetime)
  • MCA (Marketing Spend for Customer Acquisition) is the marketing cost directed towards new customer acquisition
  • CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) captures the cost of acquiring a new buyer
  • LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) is the estimated lifetime profits on new customers once they have been acquired
  • Net LTV is the estimated lifetime profits on a new customer taking acquisition cost into account or: LTV – CAC
  • Payback Period is the time for a new customer to generate profits that equals his or her CAC

When LTV is compared to CAC a measure of the future health of the business can be seen. Most VCs will be loath to invest in any company where the ratio of LTV/CAC is less than 3X and enthusiastic when it exceeds 5X. I also favor companies with a short payback period especially if the recovery is from the first transaction as this means almost no cash is consumed when acquiring a customer.

I have previously written about Contribution Margin (gross margin less marketing and sales spend) being one of the most important metrics for companies as it tells me how scaling revenue will help cover G&A and R&D costs. Once Contribution Margin exceeds these costs there is operating profit. A company with low Contribution Margin needs much greater scale to be able to reach profitability than one with high Contribution Margin. Both the LTV/CAC ratio and Payback Period are important predictors of future Contribution Margin levels. Table 1 shows two companies with the same revenue, R&D and G&A cost. Assuming R&D and G&A are fixed for both, at 5% Contribution Margin Company A would need to reach $50 million in revenue to break-even while Company B would be at break-even at under $4 million in revenue given its 65% Contribution Margin.

Break Even Revenue = (R&D + G&A)/ (Contribution Margin %)

For Company A = $2,500,000/ (5%) = $50,000,000

For Company B = $2,500,000/ (65%) = $3,846,154

The problem for Company A stems from the fact that for every $40 spent in acquiring a customer the total LTV (or subsequent profits on the customer) is only $76 making Net LTV $36. With such a low ratio of LTV/CAC, Contribution Margin is also quite low. I’ve chosen two extremes in gross margin to better illustrate the impact of gross margin on Contribution Margin. 

Table 1: Illustrative Example on the Importance of Contribution Margin

In a second example, Table 2, we show the impact of much more efficient marketing and remarketing on a company’s results. We assume gross margin, R&D and G&A are the same for Company C and Company D, but that Company D is much more efficient at acquiring and retaining customers, resulting in a lower CAC and a higher LTR and LTV for Company D. This could be due to higher spending on branding and remarketing, but also because they are very focused on the metrics that help them optimize acquisition and LTR. The result is considerably higher LTV/CAC and significantly higher Contribution Margin. 

Table 2: Impact of Efficient Marketing & Remarketing on a Company’s Results

A few rules regarding Contribution Margin

  1. Higher Gross Margin means greater opportunity for high Contribution Margin – for example, Company A at 20% Gross Margin is severely limited in reaching a reasonable Contribution Margin while Company B at 80% Gross Margin has an opportunity for high Contribution Margin and can reach profitability at lower revenue levels
  2. Companies with many new customers acquired through “free” methods like SEO, viral marketing, etc. have higher Contribution Margins than similar companies with a low proportion of free acquisitions.  Notice Company D can spend less on marketing than Company C because it acquires half of its customers from free sources whereas Company C has none from free sources.
  3. Returning buyers contribute heavily to Contribution Margin since they require little if any marketing cost. A high LTV/CAC ratio usually means customers return more often, which in turn should increase future Contribution Margin. Company D with its very high LTV/CAC likely has much lower churn than Company C and therefore most of its marketing spend is for adding incremental customers rather than just replacing those that churn. If a company simply stopped spending on marketing, its revenue would be from existing customers and new customers acquired from free methods making Contribution Margin roughly equal to Gross Margin. Of course, lack of marketing could have a major impact on future growth
  4. All other things being equal, companies with short Payback Periods tend to have higher Contribution Margin than those with longer Payback Periods

Marketing Spend on Branding versus Customer Acquisition

Branding is the communication of characteristics, values and attributes of an organization and its products. What is the purpose of spending on branding?  To create a strong image of the company and its products so that existing customers want to stay and spending on customer acquisition will be more efficient. Great brands should have a lower CAC and higher LTV than weak brands.

Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign worked well in establishing a brand message that resonated. Their more recent campaign centered around Colin Kaepernick was riskier as it had pictures of the quarterback and the slogan: “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything”. While Kaepernick is controversial, he appeals to a large part of the Nike existing and potential buying audience. The campaign helped lift sales by 27% in the first 4 days following the ad launch. Karen McFarlane, founder Kaye Media Partners summed up Nike’s strategy: “Nike’s mission is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. Colin Kaepernick, through his advocacy, conviction, and talent on and off the field, exemplifies those values in the strongest of terms. Couple that with Nike’s commitment to diversity and community, particularly against the backdrop of today’s America where politics have amplified cultural divisions, Nike took the opportunity to lean into their mission and values.”

Marketing campaigns that are for direct customer acquisition differ from branding campaigns as their goal is to directly acquire customers. It is not always clear whether marketing dollars should be classified as acquisition or branding. The key point is that branding is building for the future, whereas acquisition campaigns are measured by how efficiently they deliver current customers. This brings us back to measuring CAC, as the question becomes whether branding campaigns are part of the calculation of CAC. I believe they are not, as CAC should represent the direct cost of acquiring a customer so that increasing that spend will allow us to estimate how many more customers will result. So, I conclude that marketing for branding should be excluded from the calculation of CAC but can be an important strategy to improve efficiency in acquiring customers and maximizing their value. It should be part of the Contribution Margin calculation.

Paid CAC vs Blended CAC

If CAC represents what it costs to acquire a customer, what about those customers that are acquired through SEO, viral marketing, or some other free method? If one simply divides the spend on Marketing for Customer Acquisition (or MCA) by the total number of new customers, the result will be deceptive if it is used to estimate how many more customers will be acquired if MCA spend is increased. Instead companies should calculate CAC in two ways:

Blended CAC = MCA/ (total number of new customers)

Acquisition CAC = MCA/ (number of new customers generated from acquisition marketing only)

Attribution Models and how they help understand CAC by Channel

CAC helps predict the impact of different levels of spending on marketing. Companies also need to know where spending has the best impact, and therefore need to calculate a CAC (and LTV) for each channel of marketing. If a company uses multiple channels like Facebook, Google, and Snap they need to assign credit to each channel for the customers generated from that channel as compared to the spend for that channel to determine the channel CAC. The most simplistic way of doing this is to say, for example, that Google advertising gets credit for the customer if the purchase by the customer occurs after clicking to the site from Google. But what if a consumer sees a Facebook ad, goes to the site to look at products, then a week later comes back to the site from a Snap ad, and then visits the site again because the company sent them an email that they click on, and finally buys something after clicking on a Google ad?  Should Google get the entire credit for the customer?

Attribution models from companies like Amplitude and Hive attempt to appropriately credit each channel touchpoint for the role it played in acquiring a customer. For example, a company might assign 50% of the credit to the last touchpoint and divide the other 50% equally among prior touchpoints or use some other formula that is believed to capture how each channel participated in driving that consumer towards a purchase. Attribution models attempt to help companies understand how scaling spend in each channel will impact customer acquisition. For example:

Google CAC = (Google marketing spend)/ (number of customers attributed to Google ads)

One question that arises when using attribution models to credit each channel is whether “free” areas should share the credit when both paid and free touchpoints occur before converting a consumer into a buyer. The issue is whether the free touchpoints would have occurred had the company not spent on paid marketing. In my prior example the customer would never have received an email from the company had they not first seen the Facebook and Snap ads so eliminating these ads would also eliminate the email which in turn probably means they never would have become a customer. In a similar way, someone who clicked on a Google ad but did not buy, might later do a search for the product, and go to the site from SEO and then buy. So, one method of assigning attribution would be to divide the entire attribution among paid channels if a consumer touched both paid and free ones before becoming a customer. If the consumer only went to free channels, then they would count in blended CAC but not as a customer in calculating paid CAC or CAC by paid channel.

Where does Marketing to an existing customer fit in?

CAC is meant to measure new customer acquisition. So, marketing to an existing customer to get them to buy more should not be part of CAC but rather should be subtracted from MCA. I view it as a cost that reduces Lifetime Value (LTV). Many startups ignore the possibility of “reactivating” churned customers through marketing spend. Several Azure portfolio companies have seen success in deploying a reactivation strategy. I consider this spend as marketing to an existing customer and resulting profits an increase in LTV. Revising the definition of LTV (see Table 1):

LTV = LTR – COGS – Marketing Costs to existing customers

MCA (Marketing Cost for Customer Acquisition) = Marketing Costs – branding costs – marketing to existing customers

In Table 1, remarketing expense is 1% of Lifetime revenue for both Company A and Company B or:

Company A LTV = (GM% – remarketing%) X LTR = (20% – 1%) X $400 = $76

Company B LTV = (80%– 1%) X $400 = $316

What about new customers that return the product?

This is a thorny issue. If a consumer buys their first product from a company and then returns it, is she a customer? I think it would not be wrong with interpreting this either way. But I prefer considering her a customer as she was a buyer, and while the return zeros out the revenue from that purchase, she did become a customer. There is ample opportunity for marketing to her again. Considering her a customer lowers CAC as there are more customers for the spend, but it also lowers LTV for the same reason. So, if the interpretation is applied consistently over both CAC and LTV, I believe it would be correct.

More mature companies should apply the methods shown here to better understand their business

By better understanding acquisition CAC and LTV of each channel of customer acquisition a company can direct more spending to the most efficient ones (those with the highest LTV/CAC). By experimenting with “reactivation” spending a company can determine if this improves LTV/CAC. Companies that improve LTV/CAC will likely generate higher Contribution Margin. Those that increase the proportion of customers acquired for “free” can also improve Contribution Margin. Improving CAC and LTV can be accomplished in several ways as described in prior posts:

Optimizing the cost of customer acquisition modeling metrics to drive startup success (March 2014)

How to improve Contribution Margin (Nov 2018)

Without proper metrics a company is essentially flying blind and will be far less likely to succeed. This post provides a blueprint towards a more sophisticated approach to understanding any business.

Comparing Recent IPO Companies – Should Performance Drive Valuation?

Mike Kwatinetz Metrics, Predictions, Stocks, Technology, Valuation

In a past life, while on Wall Street, one of my favorite calls was: “Buy Dell Short Kellogg”. My reasoning behind the call was that while Dell’s revenue and earnings growth was more than 10X that of Kellogg, somehow Kellogg had a much higher PE than Dell. Portfolio managers gave me various reasons they claimed were logical to explain the un-logical situation like: “Kellogg is more reliable at meeting earnings expectations” …. when in truth they had missed estimates 20 straight quarters. What I later came to believe was that the explanation was their overall comfort level with Kellogg because they understood cereal better than they understood a direct marketing PC hardware company at the time. My call worked out well as Dell not only had a revenue CAGR of nearly 50% from January 1995 (FY 95) through January of 2000 (and a 69% EPS CAGR) but also experienced significant multiple expansion while Kellogg revenue grew at just over 1% annually during the ensuing period and its earnings shrunk (as spend was against missed revenue expectations). The success of Dell was a major reason I was subsequently selected as the number one stock picker across Wall Street analysts for 2 years in a row.

I bring up history because history repeats. One of the reasons for my success in investing is that I look at metrics as a basis of long-term valuation. This means ignoring story lines of why the future is much brighter for those with weak metrics or rationales of why disaster will befall a company that has strong results. Of course, I also consider the strength of management, competitive advantages and market size. But one key thesis that comes after studying hundreds of “growth” companies over time is that momentum tends to persist, and strong business models will show solid contribution margin as an indicator of future profitability.

Given this preamble I’ll be comparing two companies that have recently IPO’d. Much like those that supported Kellogg, the supporters of the one with the weaker metrics will have many reasons why it trades at a much higher multiple (of revenue and gross margin dollars) than the one with stronger metrics.  

Based on financial theory, companies should be valued based on future cash flows. When a company is at a relatively mature stage, earnings and earnings growth will tend to be the proxy used and a company with higher growth usually trades at a higher multiple of earnings.   Since many companies that IPO have little or no earnings, many investors use a multiple of revenue to value them but I prefer to use gross margin or contribution margin (where marketing cost is broken out clearly) as a proxy for potential earnings as they are much better indicators of what portion of revenue can potentially translate to future earnings (see our previous post for valuation methodology).

I would like to hold off on naming the companies so readers can look at the metrics with an unbiased view (which is what I try to do). So, let’s refer to them as Company A and Company B. Table 1 shows their recent metrics.

Notes:

  • Growth for Company B included an extra week in the quarter. I estimate growth would have been about 27% year/year without the extra week
  • Disclosures on marketing seem inexact so these are estimates I believe to be materially correct
  • Pre-tax income for Company A is from prior quarter as the June quarter had considerable one-time expenses that would make it appear much worse

Company B is:

  1. Growing 2 -2 ½ times faster
  2. Has over 3X the gross margin percentage
  3. Over 28% contribution margin whereas Company A contribution margin is roughly at 0
  4. Company B is bordering on profitability already whereas Company A appears years away

Yet, Company A is trading at roughly 3.5X the multiple of revenue and almost 11X the multiple of gross margin dollars (I could not use multiple of contribution margin as Company A was too close to zero). In fairness to Company A, its gross margin was much higher in the prior quarter (at 27%). But even giving it the benefit of this higher number, Company B gross margins were still about 65% higher than Company A.

The apparent illogic in this comparison is much like what we saw when comparing Kellogg to Dell many years ago. The reasons for it are similar: investors, in general, feel more comfortable with Company A than they do with Company B. Additionally, Company A has a “story” on why things will change radically in the future. You may have guessed already that Company A is Uber. Company B is Stitchfix, and despite its moving to an industry leading position for buying clothing at home (using data science to customize each offering) there continues to be fear that Amazon will overwhelm it sometime in the future. While Uber stock has declined about 35% since it peaked in late June it still appears out of sync compared to Stitchfix.

I am a believer that, in general, performance should drive valuation, and have profited greatly by investing in companies that are growing at a healthy rate, appear to have a likelihood of continuing to do so in the near future and have metrics that indicate they are undervalued.

Soundbytes

  • It appears that many others are now beginning to focus more closely on gross margins which we have been doing for years. I would encourage a shift to contribution margin, where possible, as this considers the variable cost needed to acquire customers.
  • A few notes about Tesla following our 2019 predictions: My household is about to become a two Tesla family. My wife has owned her second Tesla, a Model S, for over 4 years and I just placed an order to buy a Model 3 as a replacement for my Mercedes 550S. Besides the obvious benefits to the environment, I’m also tired of having to go to gas stations every week. The Model 3 can go 310 miles on a charge, is extremely fast, has a great user interface and has autopilot. I looked at several other cars but found it hard to justify paying twice as much (or more) for a car with less pickup, inferior electronics, etc.
  • If you were wondering why Tesla stock has gone on a run it is because the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has added Tesla to its list of approved auto manufacturers (the news of the possibility broke over a week ago). It appears likely that Tesla will begin producing Model 3s out of the new Giga Factory in China some time in Q4. This not only adds capacity for Tesla to increase its unit sales substantially in 2020 but also will save the Company considerable money as it won’t need to ship cars from its US factory. Remember Tesla also is planning on a Giga Factory in Europe to service strong demand there. The company has said that it will choose the location by the end of 2019. Given the intense competition to be the selected location, it is likely that the site chosen will involve substantial incentives to Tesla. While I would not want to predict when it will be in production, Elon Musk expects the date to be sometime in 2021. Various announcements along the way could be positive for Tesla stock.

How to Improve Contribution Margin

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Golden State Warriors, KPI, Marketing, Metrics, NBA, Technology

This post is the third in my series on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), with a heavy emphasis on contribution margin (CM). Previously, I analyzed why CM is such a strong predictor of success. Given that, companies should consistently look at ways of improving it while still maintaining sufficient growth in their business.

In Azure’s recent full day marketing seminar for our consumer (B2C) focused companies, my session highlighted 6 methods of improving CM:

  1. Increase follow-on sales from existing customers
  2. Raise the average invoice value of the initial and subsequent sales to a customer
  3. Increase GM (Gross Margin) through price increases
  4. Increase GM by reducing cost of goods sold (COGs)
  5. Reduce Blended CAC (cost of customer acquisition) by increasing free or very low cost traffic
  6. Decrease marketing spend as a % of revenue

Before drilling down on each of these I want to define several key terms that will be used throughout the discussion:

  • Contribution Margin = GM – Marketing/Sales Costs – other cost that vary with sales
  • Paid CAC = Market Spend/New Customers acquired through this spend
  • Blended CAC = Market Spend/All new customers
  • CAC Recovery Time (CAC RT) = the number of months until variable profit on a customer equals CAC
  • LTV/CAC = Life Time Value (LTV) of a customer/CAC

I will now review each of these strategies and provide some thoughts on how to activate these in consumer-facing businesses:

1. Increase Follow-On sales from existing customers 

Since existing customers have little or no cost associated with getting them to buy, this will decrease blended CAC, increasing CM.

  • Increasing customer retention through improvements in customer care, more interesting and more targeted emails to a customer, or launching a subscription of one kind or another can all help.

On the first point here is an email I received shortly after subscribing to Harry’s, that I thought did an excellent job at engaging me with their customer support, increasing my likelihood to keep my subscription active:

Hi there,
My name is Katie, and I’m a member of the Harry’s team. I wanted to reach out and say thanks for supporting Harry’s.
You are important to us, and I am here to personally help you however I can to make your Harry’s experience as smooth as possible – both literally and figuratively. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any thoughts or questions about your Harry’s products or Shave Plan, or just life in general. (And just a reminder that your next box is scheduled to ship on October 27th.) Thanks again for your support, and I hope to speak soon!
All the best,
Katie

On the subscription concept, think about Amazon Prime. How many of you buy more frequently from Amazon because of being a prime member?

  • Add to product portfolio. By giving your customers more options of what to buy (all within the concept of your brand) customers are given the opportunity to spend more often.
  • Make sure your emails are interesting. This will increase the open rate and drive more follow on sales. If all your emails are about discounting your product, then customers will have less interest in opening them and your brand will be devalued. I’ve received emails from numerous sites that say an X% discount is available until a certain date, and then when that date passes, I receive a new offer that is the same or sometimes better.  The most frequently opened emails have headers and content that creates interest beyond whatever products you sell. A/B test different headers and different content. It doesn’t matter how small or large you are or how many emails you send, it always pays to try different variations to increase open rates and conversion. Experiment with different messaging to different customer segments like those who purchased recently, those who “liked” an item, those that have never purchased, etc.
  • Build a Community of your customers. The more you can get customers engaged with you and with each other, the more committed to you they become and the longer they are retained. Think through how you can build an active community among your users through shared photos, videos, chatting, podcasts or events. Most of this should not involve trying to push new purchases but engaging your community to interact with you and each other.

2. Raise the average invoice value of the initial and subsequent sales to a customer

Since shipping costs will not increase proportionately, this will raise GM dollars and therefore CM.

  • Increase pricing. Most startups underprice their product thinking that will increase market adoption. Even some of the largest companies in the world have found there was ample room to increase prices. Thinking differently, Apple upped prices to over $1,000 for an iPhone. And then increased it again to $1,349 for the top of the line product. Five years ago, how many of you thought people would pay over $1,000 for a cell phone? This shows that unless you A/B test different price points you have no idea whether a price increase is the right strategy.
  • Upsell logical add-on products. While trying to get a customer to add to their shopping cart may seem obvious, many companies do not do this on a consistent basis. Some examples of ones that have: a flower company added vases to the offer, a mattress company added pillows and sheets; a subscription razor company added shaving gel; a cell phone company added a case. All of these led to reasonable attach rates of the add-on product and higher average invoice value. Testing what you could add to generate upsell should be a constant process.
  • “Selling” value added services is another form of upsell. This could include things like concierge customer service, service contacts, premier membership with benefits like: invites to special events, early access to new products, reduced shipping cost, preferred discounts on products, etc. If you get your customers to engage in one or more services, you will significantly increase their connection to your product and likely increase retention.

3. Increase Gross Margin through price Increases

Surprisingly, sometimes higher prices position a product as premium (having more value) and generate increased unit sales. Often higher prices generate more revenue even when fewer unit sales result. What may be counter intuitive is that GM$ can increase even if revenue declines. For example, suppose a company has COGs of $50 for a product and is currently pricing it at $100. If a price increase of 20% causes 20% lower unit sales, revenue would decline by 4% while GM$ would increase 12%. Higher gross margin dollars provide more ability to spend on marketing.

 

4. Improving GM by reducing COGs

  • Better Pricing: When your volume increases, ask for better pricing from suppliers. Just as its important to price test regularly, its also important to talk to multiple potential suppliers of your parts/product. An existing supplier may not be eager to voluntarily offer a price discount that goes with increased volume but is more likely to do so if it knows you are checking with others.
  • Changing Packaging: Packaging should be re-examined regularly as improvements may help customer retention. But it also may be possible to lower the cost of the packaging or to change it in a way that lowers shipping costs since that may be based on the size of the box rather than weight.
  • Shipping Costs: Lower shipping cost per $ of revenue (increasing GM and CM) by generating larger orders. In addition to upsell, this can be done by offering better discounts if the order size is larger. One site I have purchased from offers 10% discount if your net spend (after discount) is over $100, 15% if over $150 and 20% if over $200. Getting to the highest discount lowers the price of the product by enough to motivate buyers (including me) to try to buy over $200 in merchandise. The extra revenue creates incremental product margin dollars and decreases shipping cost as a percentage of revenue. This in turn increases GM$.

For a subscription company this can be done by scheduling less frequent (larger) deliveries. The shipping cost of the larger order will be a much smaller percent of revenue, raising GM.

  • Opening a Second distribution center to reduce shipping cost. Orders shipped from a west coast distribution center to an east coast customer will have 5 zone pricing. By having a second distribution center in a place like Columbus, Ohio (a frequently used location) those same orders will usually be 1 zone, sometimes 2 zone pricing, resulting in substantial savings per order. The caveat here is that a company needs enough volume for the total savings on orders to exceed the fixed cost of a second distribution center.

5. Improving CM by driving “free” or “nearly free” traffic

The higher the proportion of free or inexpensive traffic to total traffic, the lower the blended CAC.

  • Improving SEO (search engine optimization). I’ve learned from SEO experts that optimizing SEO is not free, but rather very low cost compared to paid traffic. Our previous post walks through some of the science involved in making improvements. I would suggest using an SEO consultant as it is likely to lead to far better results.
  • Convert a visitor not ready to buy to an email recipient. If you do that than you will have subsequent opportunities to market to her or him. A slightly costlier version of this is to use remarketing to woo visitors who came to your site but didn’t buy. While using remarketing (advertising) has a cost, it is usually much lower CAC than other methods.
  • Produce emails that get forwarded and go viral. Such emails need to motivate recipients to forward them due to being very funny, of human interest, etc. While there is typically a product offering embedded in them, the header emphasizes the reason to read it. One Azure portfolio company, Shinesty, recently had an email that was opened by about 7X the number of people it was initially sent to.  That generated a lot of potential customers without spending extra marketing dollars. Engaging emails has enabled Shinesty to maintain high CM and high growth.
  • Use social networking to generate incremental customers. Having the right posts on a social network like Instagram can lead to new potential customers finding out about you and lead to additional sales.
  • Optimize Customer Retention. Or as my good friend Chris Bruzzo (CMO of EA) spoke about at the Azure Marketing conference: “Love the ones you’re with.” Existing customers are usually the largest source of “free” buyers in a period. The longer you retain a customer, the more repeat buyers you have, increasing contribution margin. So, it’s imperative to take great care of your existing customers.
  • Drive PR. Like SEO, there is some cost involved in this but if you are judicious in any agency spend and thoughtful in creating news worthy press releases this can be a great source of traffic at a modest cost. However, I recommend you try to understand what you are getting from PR because I have seen situations where the spend did not produce meaningful results.

6. Decrease Marketing Spend as a % of Revenue.

The CAC Recovery Time plays a major role in how to manage your market spend to balance growth and burn. For example, if CAC Recovery Time is one month, spending more will not drive up burn appreciably. If it takes more than a year to recover your CAC, moderating market spend is critical to achieving a reasonable CM. If you recoup CAC faster, you can invest more quickly in the next round of customers. In the consumer space, I won’t invest in a company that has a long (a year or more) CAC Recovery Time as customers are likely to churn in an average of 2-3 years, making it difficult to achieve a reasonable business model. For B2B company’s customer longevity tends to be much longer, and the LTV/CAC can be 5X or more even if CAC Recovery Time is a year.

When a company decreases its market spend as a % of revenue it may experience lower growth but better CM. However, many companies have waste in their marketing spend so it’s important to measure the efficacy of each area of spend separately and to eliminate programs with a low return. This will allow you to reduce the spend with minimal impact on growth rates. There is a balance needed to try to optimize the relationship between CM and revenue growth as higher burn requires raising money more frequently and can put your company at risk. On the other hand, a company generating $1M in revenue needs to be growing at 100% or more to warrant most VCs to consider investing. Since CM should improve with scale, spending more on marketing may be a viable strategy for early stage companies. Once a company reaches $10M in revenue, annual growth of 50% will get it to $76M in revenue in 5 years so such a company should consider better CM rather than driving much higher growth rates and continuing to burn excessive cash.

In summary, Contribution Margin is the lifeblood of a company. If it is weak, the company is likely to fail over time. If it is strong and revenue growth is high, success seems likely. Improving CM is an ongoing process. I realize many of you probably feel much of what I’ve said is obvious, but my question is:“How many of these suggestions are you already doing on a regular basis?”

While you may be using several of the suggestions in this post, I encourage you to try more and to also double down where you can on the ones you already are trying. The results will make your company more valuable!

 

SoundBytes

  • I just want to remind readers that my collaborator on my blog posts, Andrea Drager, doesn’t typically take a bow for her significant contributions. Also, in this post, Chris Bruzzo added several improvements that have been incorporated. So many thanks to Andrea and Chris.
  • Can’t help but comment on the start to the NBA season. Not surprisingly, the Warriors are off to a great start with Curry and Durant leading the way. Greene and Thompson now have moved close to their usual contribution so I’m hopeful that the team can keep up its current pace.
  • What surprised me early on was the lack of recognition that both Toronto and San Antonio would be greatly improved. Remember, while San Antonio lost Kawhi, he only played a few games last year so with the addition of DeRozan should improve and once again reach the playoffs. For Toronto the change to Kawhi is a marked improvement placing them very competitive with the Celtics for eastern leadership.
  • I also feel it necessary to comment on the “Las Vegas” Raiders. I call them that already as they have shown zero regard for Oakland fans. While commentators have criticized their trading of all-star level players for draft choices, this is precisely on-strategy. When they get to Vegas they want a brand-new set of rising stars that the new fan base can identify with (using the numerous first round draft choices they traded for), and they don’t mind having the worst record in the league while still in Oakland. I believe Oakland fans should stop attending games as a response. I also think the NFL continues to shoot itself in the foot, allowing one of the most loyal and visible fan bases in the league to once again be abandoned

Why Contribution Margin is a Strong Predictor of Success for Companies

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, KPI, Marketing, Metrics, Technology , , , , , , , , , ,

In the last post I concluded with a brief discussion of Contribution Margin as a key KPI. Recall:

Contribution Margin = Variable Profits – Sales and Marketing Cost

The higher the contribution margin, the more dollars available towards covering G&A. Once contribution margin exceeds G&A, a company reaches operating profits. For simplicity in this post, I’ll use gross margin (GM) as the definition of variable profits even though there may be other costs that vary directly with revenue.

The Drivers of Contribution Margin (CM)

There is an absolute correlation between GM percent and CM. Very high gross margin companies will, in general, get to strong contribution margins and low gross margin companies will struggle to get there. But the sales and marketing needed to drive growth is just as important. There are several underlying factors in how much needs to be spent on sales and marketing to drive growth:

  1. The profits on a new customer relative to the cost of acquiring her (or him). That is, the CAC (customer acquisition cost) for customers derived from paid advertising compared to the profits on those customers’ first purchase
  2. The portion of new traffic that is “free” from SEO (search engine optimization), PR, existing customers recommending your products, etc.
  3. The portion of revenue that comes from repeat customers

The Relationship Between CAC and First Purchase Profits Has a Dramatic Impact on CM

Suppose Company A spends $60 to acquire a customer and has GM of $90 on the initial purchase by that customer. The contribution margin will already be positive $30 without accounting for customers that are organic or those that are repeat customers; in other words, this tends to be extremely positive! Of course, the startups I see in eCommerce are rarely in this situation but those that are can get to profitability fairly quickly if this relationship holds as they scale.

It would be more typical for companies to find that the initial purchase GM only covers a portion of CAC but that subsequent purchases lead to a positive relationship between the LTV (life time value) of the customer and CAC. If I assume the spend to acquire a customer is $60 and the GM is $30 then the CM on the first purchase would be negative (-$30), and it would take a second purchase with the same GM dollars to cover that initial cost. Most startups require several purchases before recovering CAC which in turn means requiring investment dollars to cover the outlay.

Free Traffic and Contribution Margin

If a company can generate a high proportion of free/organic traffic, there is a benefit to contribution margin. CAC is defined as the marketing spend divided by the number of new customers derived from this spend. Blended CAC is defined as the marketing spend divided by all customers who purchased in the period. The more organically generated and return customers, the lower the “blended CAC”. Using the above example, suppose 50% of the new customers for Company A come from organic (free) traffic. Then the “blended CAC“ would be 50% of the paid CAC. In the above example that would be $30 instead of $60 and if the GM was only $30 the initial purchase would cover blended CAC.

Of course, in addition to obtaining customers for free from organic traffic, companies, as they build their customer base, have an increasing opportunity to obtain free traffic by getting existing customers to buy again. So, a company should never forget that maintaining a persistent relationship with customers leads to improved Contribution Margin.

Spending to Drive Higher Growth Can Mean Lower Contribution Margin

Unless the GM on the first purchase a new customer makes exceeds their CAC, there is an inverse relationship between expanding growth and achieving high contribution margin. Think of it this way: suppose that going into a month the likely organic traffic and repeat buyers are somewhat set. Boosting that month’s growth means increasing the number of new paid customers, which in turn makes paid customers a higher proportion of blended CAC and therefore increases CAC. For an example consider the following assumptions for Company B:

  • The GM is $60 on an average order of $100
  • Paid CAC is $150
  • The company will have 1,000 new customers through organic means and 2,000 repeat buyers or $300,000 in revenue with 60% GM ($180,000) from these customers before spending on paid customers
  • G&A besides marketing for the month will be $150,000
  • Last year Company B had $400,000 in revenue in the same month
  • The company is considering the ramifications of targeting 25%, 50% or 100% year-over-year growth

Table 1: The Relationship Between Contribution Margin & Growth

Since the paid CAC is $150 while Gross Margin is only $60 per new customer, each acquired customer generates negative $90 in contribution margin in the period. As can be seen in Table 1, the company would shrink 25% if there is no acquisition spend but would have $180,000 in contribution margin and positive operating profit. On the other end of the spectrum, driving 100% growth requires spending $750,000 to acquire 5,000 new customers and results in a negative $270,000 in contribution margin and an Operating Loss of $420,000 in the period. Of course, if new customers are expected to make multiple future purchases than the number of repeat customers would rise in future periods.

Subscription Models Create More Consistency but are not a Panacea

When a company’s customers are monthly subscribers, each month starts with the prior month’s base less churn. To put it another way, if churn from the prior month is modest (for example 5%) then that month already has 95% of the prior months revenue from repeat customers. Additionally, if the company increases the average invoice value from these customers, it might even have a starting point where return customers account for as much revenue as the prior month. For B-to-B companies, high revenue retention is the norm, where an average customer will pay them for 10 years or more.

Consumer ecommerce subscriptions typically have much more substantial churn, with an average life of two years being closer to the norm. Additionally, the highest level of churn (which can be as much as 30% or more) occurs in the second month, and the next highest, the third month before tapering off. What this means is that companies trying to drive high sequential growth will have a higher % churn rate than those that target more modest growth. Part of a company’s acquisition spend is needed just to stay even. For example, if we assume all new customers come from paid acquisition, the CAC is $200, and that 15% of 10,000 customers churn then the first $300,000 in marketing spend would just serve to replace the churned customers and additional spend would be needed to drive sequential growth.

Investing in Companies with High Contribution Margin

As a VC, I tend to appreciate strong business models and like to invest after some baseline proof points are in place.  In my last post I outlined a number of metrics that were important ways to track a company’s health with the ratio of LTV (life time value) to CAC being one of the most important. When a company has a high contribution margin they have the time to build that ratio by adding more products or establishing subscriptions without burning through a lot of capital. Further, companies that have a high LTV/CAC ratio should have a high contribution margin as they mature since this usually means customers buy many times – leading to an expansion in repeat business as part of each month’s total revenue.

This thought process also applies to public companies. One of the most extreme is Facebook, which I’ve owned and recommended for five years. Even after the recent pullback its stock price is about 7x what it was five years ago (or has appreciated at a compound rate of nearly 50% per year since I’ve been recommending it). Not a surprise as Facebook’s contribution margin runs over 70% and revenue was up year/year 42% in Q2. These are extraordinary numbers for a company its size.

To give the reader some idea of how this method can be used as one screen for public companies, Table 2 shows gross margin, contribution margin, revenue growth and this year’s stock market performance for seven public companies.

Table 2: Public Company Contribution Margin Analysis

Two of the seven companies shown stand out as having both high Contribution Margin and strong revenue growth: Etsy and Stitch Fix. Each had year/year revenue growth of around 30% in Q2 coupled with 44% and 29% contribution margins, respectively. This likely has been a factor in Stitch Fix stock appreciating 53% and Etsy 135% since the beginning of the year.

Three of the seven have weak models and are struggling to balance revenue growth and contribution margin: Blue Apron, Overstock, and Groupon. Both Blue Apron and Groupon have been attempting to reduce their losses by dropping their marketing spend. While this increased their CM by 10% and 20% respectively, it also meant that they both have negative growth while still losing money. The losses for Blue Apron were over 16% of revenue. This coupled with shrinking revenue feels like a lethal combination. Blue Apron stock is only down a marginal amount year-to-date but is 59% lower than one year ago. Groupon, because of much higher gross margins than Blue Apron (52% vs 35%), still seems to have a chance to turn things around, but does have a lot of work to do. Overstock went in the other direction, increasing marketing spend to drive modest revenue growth of 12%. But this led to a negative CM and substantially increased losses. That strategy did not seem to benefit shareholders as the stock has declined 53% since the beginning of the year.

eBay is a healthy company from a contribution margin point of view but has sub 10% revenue growth. I can’t tell if increasing their market spend by a substantial amount (at the cost of lower CM) would be a better balance for them.

For me, Spotify is the one anomaly in the table as its stock has appreciated 46% since the IPO despite weak contribution margins which was one reason for my negative view expressed in a prior post. I think that is driven by three reasons: its product is an iconic brand; there is not a lot of float in the stock creating some scarcity; and contribution margin has been improving giving bulls on the stock a belief that it can get to profitability eventually. I say it is an anomaly, as comparing it to Facebook, it is hard to justify the relative valuations. Facebook grew 42% in Q2, Spotify 26%; Facebook is trading at a P/E of 24 whereas even if we assume Spotify can eventually get to generating 6% net profit (it currently is at a 7% loss before finance charges and 31% loss after finance charges, so this feels optimistic) Spotify would be trading at 112 times this theoretic future earnings.

 

SoundBytes

I found the recent controversy over Elon Musk’s sharing his thoughts on taking Tesla private interesting. On the one hand, people want transparency from companies and Elon certainly provides that! On the other hand, it clearly impacted the stock price for a few days and the SEC abhors anything that can be construed as stock manipulation. Of course, Elon may not have been as careful as he should have been when he sent out his tweet regarding whether financing was lined up…but like most entrepreneurs he was optimistic.

Company Valuations Implied by my Valuations Bible: Are Snap, Netflix, Square and Twitter Grossly Overvalued?

Mike Kwatinetz Metrics, Predictions, Stocks, Valuation , , , ,

Applying the Gross Margin Multiple Method to Public Company Valuation

In my last two posts I’ve laid out a method to value companies not yet at their mature business models. The method provides a way to value unprofitable growth companies and those that are profitable but not yet at what could be their mature business model. This often occurs when a company is heavily investing in growth at the expense of near-term profits. In the last post, I showed how I would estimate what I believed the long-term model would be for Tesla, calling the result “Potential Earnings” or “PE”. Since this method requires multiple assumptions, some of which might not find agreement among investors, I provided a second, simplified method that only involved gross margin and revenue growth.

The first step was taking about 20 public companies and calculating how they were valued as a multiple of gross margin (GM) dollars. The second step was to determine a “least square line” and formula based on revenue growth and the gross margin multiple for these companies. The coefficient of 0.62 shows that there is a good correlation between Gross Margin and Revenue Growth, and one significantly better than the one between Revenue Growth and a company’s Revenue Multiple (that had a coefficient of 0.36 which is considered very modest).

Where’s the Beef?

The least square formula derived in my post for relating revenue growth to an implied multiple of Gross Margin dollars is:

GM Multiple = (24.773 x Revenue growth percent) + 4.1083

Implied Company Market Value = GM Multiple x GM Dollars

Now comes the controversial part. I am going to apply this formula to 10 companies using their data (with small adjustments) and compare the Implied Market Value (Implied MKT Cap) to their existing market Cap as of several days ago. I’ll than calculate the Implied Over (under) Valuation based on the comparison. If the two values are within 20% I view it as normal statistical variation.

Table 1: Valuation Analysis of 10 Tech Companies

  • * Includes net cash included in expected market cap
  • ** Uses adjusted GM%
  • *** Uses 1/31/18 year end
  • **** Growth rate used in the model is q4 2017 vs q4 2016.  See text

This method suggests that 5 companies are over-valued by 100% or more and a fifth, Workday, by 25%. Since Workday is close to a normal variation, I won’t discuss it further. I have added net cash for Facebook, Snap, Workday and Twitter to the implied market cap as it was material in each case but did not do so for the six others as the impact was not as material.

I decided to include the four companies I recommended, in this year’s top ten list, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla and Stitchfix, in the analysis. To my relief, they all show as under-valued with Stitchfix, (the only one below the Jan 2 price) having an implied valuation more than 100% above where it currently trades. The other three are up year to date, and while trading below what is suggested by this method, are within a normal range. For additional discussion of these four see our 2018 top Ten List.

 

Digging into the “Overvalued” Five

Why is there such a large discrepancy between actual market cap and that implied by this method for 5 companies? There are three possibilities:

  1. The method is inaccurate
  2. The method is a valid screen but I’m missing some adjustment for these companies
  3. The companies are over-valued and at some point, will adjust, making them risky investments

While the method is a good screen on valuation, it can be off for any given company for three reasons:  the revenue growth rate I’m using will radically change; a particular company has an ability to dramatically increase gross margins, and/or a particular company can generate much higher profit margins than their gross margin suggests. Each of these may be reflected in the company’s actual valuation but isn’t captured by this method.

To help understand what might make the stock attractive to an advocate, I’ll go into a lot of detail in analyzing Snap. Since similar arguments apply to the other 4, I’ll go into less detail for each but still point out what is implicit in their valuations.

Snap

Snap’s gross margin (GM) is well below its peers and hurts its potential profitability and implied valuation. Last year, GM was about 15%, excluding depreciation and amortization, but it was much higher in the seasonally strong Q4. It’s most direct competitor, Facebook, has a gross margin of 87%.  The difference is that Facebook monetizes its users at a much higher level and has invested billions of dollars and executed quite well in creating its own low-cost infrastructure, while Snap has outsourced its backend to cloud providers Google and Amazon. Snap has recently signed 5-year contracts with each of them to extend the relationships. Committing to lengthy contracts will likely lower the cost of goods sold.  Additionally, increasing revenue per user should also improve GM.  But, continuing to outsource puts a cap on how high margins can reach. Using our model, Snap would need 79% gross margin to justify its current valuation. If I assume that scale and the longer-term contracts will enable Snap to double its gross margins to 30%, the model still shows it as being over-valued by 128% (as opposed to the 276% shown in our table). The other reason bulls on Snap may justify its high valuation is that they expect it to continue to grow revenue at 100% or more in 2018 and beyond. What is built into most forecasts is an assumed decline in revenue growth rates over time… as that is what typically occurs. The model shows that growing revenue 100% a year for two more years without burning cash would leave it only 32% over-valued in 2 years. But as a company scales, keeping revenue growth at that high a level is a daunting task. In fact, Snap already saw revenue growth decline to 75% in Q4 of 2017.

Twitter

Twitter is not profitable.  Revenue declined in 2017 after growing a modest 15% in 2016, and yet it trades at a valuation that implies that it is a growth company of about 50%. While it has achieved such levels in the past, it may be difficult to even get back to 15% growth in the future given increased competition for advertising.

Netflix

I recommended Netflix in January 2015 as one of my stock picks for the year, and it proved a strong recommendation as the stock went up about 140% that year. However, between January 2015 and January 2018, the stock was up over 550% while trailing revenue only increased 112%.  I continue to like the fundamentals of Netflix, but my GM model indicates that the stock may have gotten ahead of itself by a fair amount, and it is unlikely to dramatically increase revenue growth rates from last year’s 32%.

Square

Square has followed what I believe to be the average pattern of revenue growth rate decline as it went from 49% growth in 2015, down to 35% growth in 2016, to under 30% growth in 2017. There is no reason to think this will radically change, but the stock is trading as if its revenue is expected to grow at a nearly 90% rate. On the GM side, Square has been improving GM each year and advocates will point out that it could go higher than the 38% it was in 2017. But, even if I use 45% for GM, assuming it can reach that, the model still implies it is 90% over-valued.

Blue Apron

I don’t want to beat up on a struggling Blue Apron and thought it might have reached its nadir, but the model still implies it is considerably over-valued. One problem that the company is facing is that investors are negative when a company has slow growth and keeps losing money. Such companies find it difficult to raise additional capital. So, before running out of cash, Blue Apron began cutting expenses to try to reach profitability. Unfortunately, given their customer churn, cutting marketing spend resulted in shrinking revenue in each sequential quarter of 2017. In Q4 the burn was down to $30 million but the company was now at a 13% decline in revenue versus Q4 of 2016 (which is what we used in our model). I assume the solution probably needs to be a sale of the company. There could be buyers who would like to acquire the customer base, supplier relationships and Blue Apron’s understanding of process. But given that it has very thin technology, considerable churn and strong competition, I’m not sure if a buyer would be willing to pay a substantial premium to its market cap.

 

An Alternative Theory on the Over Valued Five

I have to emphasize that I am no longer a Wall Street analyst and don’t have detailed knowledge of the companies discussed in this post, so I easily could be missing some important factors that drive their valuation.  However, if the GM multiple model is an accurate way of determining valuation, then why are they trading at such lofty premiums to implied value? One very noticeable common characteristic of all 5 companies in question is that they are well known brands used by millions (or even tens of millions) of people. Years ago, one of the most successful fund managers ever wrote a book where he told readers to rely on their judgement of what products they thought were great in deciding what stocks to own. I believe there is some large subset of personal and professional investors who do exactly that. So, the stories go:

  • “The younger generation is using Snap instead of Facebook and my son or daughter loves it”
  • “I use Twitter every day and really depend on it”
  • “Netflix is my go-to provider for video content and I’m even thinking of getting rid of my cable subscription”

Once investors substitute such inclinations for hard analysis, valuations can vary widely from those suggested by analytics. I’m not saying that such thoughts can’t prove correct, but I believe that investors need to be very wary of relying on such intuition in the face of evidence that contradicts it.

The Valuation Bible – Part 2: Applying the Rules to Tesla and Creating an Adjusted Valuation Method for Startups

Mike Kwatinetz Economics, Metrics, Startups, Stocks, Valuation ,

This post is part 2 of our valuation discussion (see this post for part 1).  As I write this post Tesla’s market cap is about $56 billion. I thought it would be interesting to show how the rules discussed in the first post apply to Tesla, and then to take it a step further for startups.

Revenue and Revenue Growth

Revenue for Tesla in 2017 was $11.8 billion, about 68% higher than 2016, and it is likely to grow faster this year given the over $20 billion in pre-orders (and growing) for the model 3 coupled with continued strong demand for the model S and model X. Since it is unclear when the new sports car or truck will ship, I assume no revenue in those categories. As long as Tesla can increase production at the pace they expect, I estimate 2018 revenue will be up 80% – 120% over 2017, with Q4 year over year growth at or above 120%.

If I’m correct on Tesla revenue growth, its 2018 revenue will exceed $20 billion. So, Rule Number 1 from the prior post indicates that Tesla’s high growth rates should merit a higher “theoretical PE” than the S&P (by at least 4X if one believes that growth will continue at elevated rates).

Calculating TPE

Tesla gross margins have varied a bit while ramping production for each new model, but in the 16 quarters from Q1, 2014 to Q4, 2017 gross margin averaged 23% and was above 25%, 6 of the 16 quarters. Given that Tesla is still a relatively young company it appears likely margins will increase with scale, leading me to believe that long term gross margins are very likely to be above 25%. While it will dip during the early production ramp of the model 3, 25% seems like the lowest percent to use for long term modeling and I expect it to rise to between 27% and 30% with higher production volumes and newer factory technology.

Tesla recognizes substantial cost based on stock-based compensation (which partly occurs due to the steep rise in the stock). Most professional investors ignore artificial expenses like stock-based compensation, as I will for modeling purposes, and refer to the actual cost as net SG&A and net R&D. Given that Tesla does not pay commissions and has increased its sales footprint substantially in advance of the roll-out of the model 3, I believe Net SG&A and Net R&D will each increase at a much slower pace than revenue. If they each rise 20% by Q4 of this year and revenue is at or exceeds $20 billion, this would put their total at below 20% of revenue by Q4. Since they should decline further as a percent of revenue as the company matures, I am assuming 27% gross margin and 18% operating cost as the base case for long term operating profit. While this gross margin level is well above traditional auto manufacturers, it seems in line as Tesla does not have independent dealerships (who buy vehicles at a discount) and does not discount its cars at the end of each model year.

Estimated TPE

Table 1 provides the above as the base case for long term operating profit. To provide perspective on the Tesla opportunity, Table 1 also shows a low-end case (25% GM and 20% operating cost) and a high-end profit case (30% GM and 16% operating cost).  Recall, theoretic earnings are derived from applying the mature operating profit level to trailing and to forward revenue. For calculating theoretic earnings, I will ignore interest payments and net tax loss carry forwards as they appear to be a wash over the next 5 years. Finally, to derive the Theoretic Net Earnings Percent a potential mature tax rate needs to be applied. I am using 20% for each model case which gives little credit for tax optimization techniques that could be deployed. That would make theoretic earnings for 2017 and 2018 $0.85 billion and $1.51 billion, respectively and leads to:

  • 2017 TPE=$ 56.1 billion/$0.85 = 66.0
  • 2018 TPE= $ 56.1 billion/1.51 = 37.1

The S&P trailing P/E is 25.5 and forward P/E is about 19X. Based on our analysis of the correlation between growth and P/E provided in the prior post, Tesla should be trading at a minimum of 4X the trailing S&P ratio (or 102 TP/E) and at least 3.5X S&P forward P/E (or 66.5 TP/E). To me that shows that the current valuation of Tesla does not appear out of market.  If the market stays at current P/E levels and Tesla reaches $21B in revenue in 2018 this indicates that there is strong upside for the stock.

Table 1: Tesla TPE 2017 & 2018

The question is whether Tesla can continue to grow revenue at high rates for several years. Currently Tesla has about 2.4% share of the luxury car market giving it ample room to grow that share. At the same time, it is entering the much larger medium-priced market with the launch of the Model 3 and expects to produce vehicles in other categories over the next few years. Worldwide sales of new cars for the auto market is about 90 million in 2017 and growing about 5% a year. Tesla is the leader in several forward trends: electric vehicles, automated vehicles and technology within a car. Plus, it has a superior business model as well. If it reaches $21 billion in revenue in 2018, its share of the worldwide market would be about 0.3%. It appears poised to continue to gain share over the next 3-5 years, especially as it fills out its line of product.  Given that it has achieved a 2.4% share of the market it currently plays in, one could speculate that it could get to a similar share in other categories. Even achieving a 1% share of the worldwide market in 5 years would mean about 40% compound growth between 2018 and 2022 and imply a 75X-90X TP/E at the end of this year.

The Bear Case

I would be remiss if I omitted the risks that those negative on the stock point out. Tesla is a very controversial stock for a variety of reasons:

  1. Gross Margin has been volatile as it adds new production facilities so ‘Bears’ argue that even my 25% low case is optimistic, especially as tax rebate subsidies go away
  2. It has consistently lost money so some say it will never reach the mature case I have outlined
  3. As others produce better electric cars Tesla’s market share of electric vehicles will decline so high revenue growth is not sustainable
  4. Companies like Google have better automated technology that they will license to other manufacturers leading to a leap frog of Tesla

As they say, “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” and I believe my base case is realistic…but not without risk. In response to the bear case that Tesla revenue growth can’t continue, it is important to recognize that Tesla already has the backlog and order momentum to drive very high growth for the next two years. Past that, growing market share over the 4 subsequent years to 1% (a fraction of their current share of the luxury market) would generate compound annual growth of 40% for that 4-year period. In my opinion, the biggest risk is Tesla’s own execution in ramping production. Bears will also argue that Tesla will never reach the operating margins of my base case for a variety of reasons. This is the weakness of the TPE approach: it depends on assumptions that have yet to be proven. I’m comfortable when my assumptions depend on momentum that is already there, gross margin proof points and likelihood that scale will drive operating margin improvements without any radical change to the business model.

Applying the rules to Startups

As a VC I am often in the position of helping advise companies regarding valuation. This occurs when they are negotiating a round of financing or in an M&A situation.  Because the companies are even earlier than Tesla, theoretic earnings are a bit more difficult to establish. Some investors ignore the growth rates of companies and look for comps in the same business. The problem with the comparable approach is that by selecting companies in the same business, the comps are often very slow growth companies that do not merit a high multiple. For example, comparing Tesla to GM or Ford to me seems a bit ludicrous when Tesla’s revenue grew 68% last year and is expected to grow even faster this year while Ford and GM are growing their revenue at rates below 5%. It would be similar if investors compared Apple (in the early days of the iPhone) to Nokia, a company it was obsoleting.

Investors look for proxies to use that best correlate to what future earnings will be and often settle on a multiple of revenue. As Table 2 shows, there is a correlation between valuation as a multiple of revenue and revenue growth regardless of what industry the companies are in. This correlation is closer than one would find by comparing high growth companies to their older industry peers.

Table 2: Multiple of Revenue and Revenue Growth

However, using revenue as the proxy for future earnings suffers from a wide variety of issues. Some companies have 90% or greater gross margins like our portfolio company Education.com, while others have very low gross margins of 10% – 20%, like Spotify. It is very likely that the former will generate much higher earnings as a percent of revenue than the latter. In fact, Education.com is already cash flow positive at a relatively modest revenue level (in the low double-digit millions) while Spotify continues to lose a considerable amount of money at billions of dollars in revenue. Notice, this method also implies that Tesla should be valued about 60% higher than its current market price.

This leads me to believe a better proxy for earnings is gross margin as it is more closely correlated with earnings levels. It also removes the issue of how revenue is recognized and is much easier to analyze than TPE. For example, Uber recognizing gross revenue or net revenue has no impact on gross margin dollars but would radically change its price to revenue. Table 3 uses the same companies as Table 2 but shows their multiple of gross margin dollars relative to revenue growth. Looking at the two graphs, one can see how much more closely this correlates to the valuation of public companies. The correlation coefficient improves from 0.36 for the revenue multiple to 0.62 for the gross margin multiple.

Table 3: Multiple of Gross Margin vs. Revenue Growth

So, when evaluating a round of financing for a pre-profit company the gross margin multiple as it relates to growth should be considered. For example, while there are many other factors to consider, the formula implies that a 40% revenue growth company should have a valuation of about 14X trailing gross margin dollars.  Typically, I would expect that an earlier stage company’s mature gross margin percent would likely increase. But they also should receive some discount from this analysis as its risk profile is higher than the public companies shown here.

Notice that the price to sales graph indicates Tesla should be selling at 60% more than its multiple of 5X revenue. On the other hand, our low-end case for Tesla Gross Margin, 25%, puts Tesla at 20X Gross Margin dollars, just slightly undervalued based on where the least square line in Table 3 indicates it should be valued.

The Valuation Bible

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Economics, Golden State Warriors, Metrics, NBA, Stocks, Technology, Valuation , , , , , , ,

Facebook valuation image

After many years of successfully picking public and private companies to invest in, I thought I’d share some of the core fundamentals I use to think about how a company should be valued. Let me start by saying numerous companies defy the logic that I will lay out in this post, often for good reasons, sometimes for poor ones. However, eventually most companies will likely approach this method, so it should at least be used as a sanity check against valuations.

When a company is young, it may not have any earnings at all, or it may be at an earnings level (relative to revenue) that is expected to rise. In this post, I’ll start by considering more mature companies that are approaching their long-term model for earnings to establish a framework, before addressing how this framework applies to less mature companies. The post will be followed by another one where I apply the rules to Tesla and discuss how it carries over into private companies.

Growth and Earnings are the Starting Points for Valuing Mature Companies

When a company is public, the most frequently cited metric for valuation is its price to earnings ratio (PE). This may be done based on either a trailing 12 months or a forward 12 months. In classic finance theory a company should be valued based on the present value of future cash flows. What this leads to is our first rule:

Rule 1: Higher Growth Rates should result in a higher PE ratio.

When I was on Wall Street, I studied hundreds of growth companies (this analysis does not apply to cyclical companies) over the prior 10-year period and found that there was a very strong correlation between a given year’s revenue growth rate and the next year’s revenue growth rate. While the growth rate usually declined year over year if it was over 10%, on average this decline was less than 20% of the prior year’s growth rate. What this means is that if we took a group of companies with a revenue growth rate of 40% this year, the average organic growth for the group would likely be about 33%-38% the next year. Of course, things like recessions, major new product releases, tax changes, and more could impact this, but over a lengthy period of time this tended to be a good sanity test. As of January 2, 2018, the average S&P company had a PE ratio of 25 on trailing earnings and was growing revenue at 5% per year. Rule 1 implies that companies growing faster should have higher PEs and those growing slower, lower PEs than the average.

Graph 1: Growth Rates vs. Price Earnings Ratios

graph

The graph shows the correlation between growth and PE based on the valuations of 21 public companies. Based on Rule 1, those above the line may be relatively under-priced and those below relatively over-priced. I say ‘may be’ as there are many other factors to consider, and the above is only one of several ways to value companies. Notice that most of the theoretically over-priced companies with growth rates of under 5% are traditional companies that have long histories of success and pay a dividend. What may be the case is that it takes several years for the market to adjust to their changed circumstances or they may be valued based on the return from the dividend. For example, is Coca Cola trading on: past glory, its 3.5% dividend, or is there something about current earnings that is deceptive (revenue growth has been a problem for several years as people switch from soda to healthier drinks)? I am not up to speed enough to know the answer. Those above the line may be buys despite appearing to be highly valued by other measures.

Relatively early in my career (in 1993-1995) I applied this theory to make one of my best calls on Wall Street: “Buy Dell sell Kellogg”. At the time Dell was growing revenue over 50% per year and Kellogg was struggling to grow it over 4% annually (its compounded growth from 1992 to 1995, this was partly based on price increases). Yet Dell’s PE was about half that of Kellogg and well below the S&P average. So, the call, while radical at the time, was an obvious consequence of Rule 1. Fortunately for me, Dell’s stock appreciated over 65X from January 1993 to January 2000 (and well over 100X while I had it as a top pick) while Kellogg, despite large appreciation in the overall stock market, saw its stock decline slightly over the same 7-year period (but holders did receive annual dividends).

Rule 2: Predictability of Revenue and Earnings Growth should drive a higher trailing PE

Investors place a great deal of value on predictability of growth and earnings, which is why companies with subscription/SaaS models tend to get higher multiples than those with regular sales models. It is also why companies with large sales backlogs usually get additional value. In both cases, investors can more readily value the companies on forward earnings since they are more predictable.

Rule 3: Market Opportunity should impact the Valuation of Emerging Leaders

When one considers why high growth rates might persist, the size of the market opportunity should be viewed as a major factor. The trick here is to make sure the market being considered is really the appropriate one for that company. In the early 1990s, Dell had a relatively small share of a rapidly growing PC market. Given its competitive advantages, I expected Dell to gain share in this mushrooming market. At the same time, Kellogg had a stable share of a relatively flat cereal market, hardly a formula for growth. In recent times, I have consistently recommended Facebook in this blog for the very same reasons I had recommended Dell: in 2013, Facebook had a modest share of the online advertising, a market expected to grow rapidly. Given the advantages Facebook had (and they were apparent as I saw every Azure ecommerce portfolio company moving a large portion of marketing spend to Facebook), it was relatively easy for me to realize that Facebook would rapidly gain share. During the time I’ve owned it and recommended it, this has worked out well as the share price is up over 8X.

How the rules can be applied to companies that are pre-profit

As a VC, it is important to evaluate what companies should be valued at well before they are profitable. While this is nearly impossible to do when we first invest (and won’t be covered in this post), it is feasible to get a realistic range when an offer comes in to acquire a portfolio company that has started to mature. Since they are not profitable, how can I apply a PE ratio?

What needs to be done is to try to forecast eventual profitability when the company matures. A first step is to see where current gross margins are and to understand whether they can realistically increase. The word realistic is the key one here. For example, if a young ecommerce company currently has one distribution center on the west coast, like our portfolio company Le Tote, the impact on shipping costs of adding a second eastern distribution center can be modeled based on current customer locations and known shipping rates from each distribution center. Such modeling, in the case of Le Tote, shows that gross margins will increase 5%-7% once the second distribution center is fully functional. On the other hand, a company that builds revenue city by city, like food service providers, may have little opportunity to save on shipping.

  • Calculating variable Profit Margin

Once the forecast range for “mature” gross margin is estimated, the next step is to identify other costs that will increase in some proportion to revenue. For example, if a company is an ecommerce company that acquires most of its new customers through Facebook, Google and other advertising and has high churn, the spend on customer acquisition may continue to increase in direct proportion to revenue. Similarly, if customer service needs to be labor intensive, this can also be a variable cost. So, the next step in the process is to access where one expects the “variable profit margin” to wind up. While I don’t know the company well, this appears to be a significant issue for Blue Apron: marketing and cost of goods add up to about 90% of revenue. I suspect that customer support probably eats up (no pun intended) 5-10% of what is left, putting variable margins very close to zero. If I assume that the company can eventually generate 10% variable profit margin (which is giving it credit for strong execution), it would need to reach about $4 billion in annual revenue to reach break-even if other costs (product, technology and G&A) do not increase. That means increasing revenue nearly 5-fold. At their current YTD growth rate this would take 9 years and explains why the stock has a low valuation.

  • Estimating Long Term Net Margin

Once the variable profit margin is determined, the next step would be to estimate what the long-term ratio of all other operating cost might be as a percent of revenue. Using this estimate I can determine a Theoretic Net Earnings Percent. Applying this percent to current (or next years) revenue yields a Theoretic Earnings and a Theoretic PE (TPE):

TPE= Market Cap/Theoretic Earnings     

To give you a sense of how I successfully use this, review my recap of the Top Ten Predictions from 2017 where I correctly predicted that Spotify would not go public last year despite strong top line growth as it was hard to see how its business model could support more than 2% or so positive operating margin, and that required renegotiating royalty deals with record labels.  Now that Spotify has successfully negotiated a 3% lower royalty rate from several of the labels, it appears that the 16% gross margins in 2016 could rise to 19% or more by the end of 2018. This means that variable margins (after marketing cost) might be 6%. This would narrow its losses, but still means it might be several years before the company achieves the 2% operating margins discussed in that post. As a result, Spotify appears headed for a non-traditional IPO, clearly fearing that portfolio managers would not be likely to value it at its private valuation price since that would lead to a TPE of over 200. Since Spotify is loved by many consumers, individuals might be willing to overpay relative to my valuation analysis.

Our next post will pick up this theme by walking through why this leads me to believe Tesla continues to have upside, and then discussing how entrepreneurs should view exit opportunities.

 

SoundBytes

I’ve often written about effective shooting percentage relative to Stephen Curry, and once again he leads the league among players who average 15 points or more per game. What also accounts for the Warriors success is the effective shooting of Klay Thompson, who is 3rd in the league, and Kevin Durant who is 6th. Not surprisingly, Lebron is also in the top 10 (4th). The table below shows the top ten among players averaging 15 points or more per game.  Of the top ten scorers in the league, 6 are among the top 10 effective shooters with James Harden only slightly behind at 54.8%. The remaining 3 are Cousins (53.0%), Lillard (52.2%), and Westbrook, the only one below the league average of 52.1% at 47.4%.

Table: Top Ten Effective Shooters in the League

table

*Note: Bolded players denote those in the top 10 in Points per Game

Ten Predictions for 2018

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Marketing, Metrics, Predictions, Stocks, Technology , , ,

In my recap of 2017 predictions I pointed out how boring my stock predictions have been with Tesla and Facebook on my list every year since 2013 and Amazon on for two of the past three years. But what I learned on Wall Street is that sticking with companies that have strong competitive advantages in a potentially mega-sized market can create great performance over time (assuming one is correct)! So here we go again, because as stated in my January 5 post, I am again including Tesla, Facebook and Amazon in my Top ten list for 2018. I believe they each continue to offer strong upside, as explained below. I’m also adding a younger company, with a modest market cap, thus more potential upside coupled with more risk. The company is Stitch Fix, an early leader in providing women with the ability to shop for fashion-forward clothes at home. My belief in the four companies is backed up by my having an equity position in each of them.

I’m expecting the four stocks to outperform the market. So, in a steeply declining market, out-performance might occur with the stock itself being down (but less than the market). Having mentioned the possibility of a down market, I’m predicting the market will rise this year. This is a bit scary for me, as predicting the market as a whole is not my specialty.

We’ll start with the stock picks (with January 2 opening prices of stocks shown in parenthesis) and then move on to the remainder of my 10 predictions.

1. Tesla stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market (it opened the year at $312/share).

The good news and bad news on Tesla is the delays in production of the Model 3. The good part is that we can still look forward to massive increases in the number of cars the company sells once Tesla gets production ramping (I estimate the Model 3 backlog is well in excess of 500,000 units going into 2018 and demand appears to be growing). In 2017, Tesla shipped between 80,000 and 100,000 vehicles with revenue up 30% in Q3 without help from the model 3. If the company is successful at ramping capacity (and acquiring needed parts), it expects to reach a production rate of 5,000 cars per week by the end of Q1 and 10,000 by the end of the year. That could mean that the number of units produced in Q4 2018 will be more than four times that sold in Q4 2017 (with revenue about 2.0-2.5x due to the Model 3 being a lower priced car). Additionally, while it is modest compared to revenue from selling autos, the company appears to be the leader in battery production. It recently announced the largest battery deal ever, a $50 million contract (now completed on time) to supply what is essentially a massive backup battery complex for energy to Southern Australia. While this type of project is unlikely to be a major portion of revenue in the near term, it can add to Tesla’s growth rate and profitability.

2. Facebook stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market (it opened the year at $182/share).

The core Facebook user base growth has slowed considerably but Facebook has a product portfolio that includes Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. This gives Facebook multiple opportunities for revenue growth: Improve the revenue per DAU (daily active user) on Facebook itself; increase efforts to monetize Instagram and WhatsApp in more meaningful ways; and build the install base of Oculus. Facebook advertising rates have been increasing steadily as more mainstream companies shift budget from traditional advertising to Facebook, especially in view of declining TV viewership coupled with increased use of DVRs (allowing viewers to skip ads). Higher advertising rates, combined with modest growth in DAUs, should lead to continued strong revenue growth. And while the Oculus product did not get out of the gate as fast as expected, it began picking up steam in Q3 2017 after Facebook reduced prices. At 210,000 units for the quarter it may have contributed up to 5% of Q3 revenue. The wild card here is if a “killer app” (a software application that becomes a must have) launches that is only available on the Oculus, sales of Oculus could jump substantially in a short time.

3. Amazon stock appreciation will outpace the market (it opened the year at $1188/share).

Amazon, remarkably, increased its revenue growth rate in 2017 as compared to 2016. This is unusual for companies of this size. In 2018, we expect online to continue to pick up share in retail and Amazon to gain more share of online. The acquisition of Whole Foods will add approximately $4B per quarter in revenue, boosting year/year revenue growth of Amazon an additional 9%-11% per quarter, if Whole Foods revenue remains flattish. If Amazon achieves organic growth of 25% (in Q3 it was 29% so that would be a drop) in 2018, this would put the 3 quarters starting in Q4 2017 at about 35% growth. While we do expect Amazon to boost Whole Foods revenue, that is not required to reach those levels. In Q4 2018, reported revenue will return to organic growth levels. The Amazon story also features two other important growth drivers. First, I expect the Echo to have another substantial growth year and continue to emerge as a new platform in the home. Additionally, Amazon appears poised to benefit from continued business migration to the cloud coupled with increased market share and higher average revenue per cloud customer. This will be driven by modest price increases and introduction of more services as part of its cloud offering. The success of the Amazon Echo with industry leading voice technology should continue to provide another boost to Amazon’s revenue. Additionally, having a large footprint of physical stores will allow Amazon to increase distribution of many products.

4. Stitch Fix stock appreciation will outpace the market (it opened the year at $25/share and is at the same level as I write this post).

Stitch Fix is my riskiest stock forecast. As a new public company, it has yet to establish a track record of performance that one can depend upon. On the other hand, it’s the early leader in a massive market that will increasingly move online, at-home shopping for fashion forward clothes. The number of people who prefer shopping at home to going to a physical store is on the increase. The type of goods they wish to buy expands every year. Now, clothing is becoming a new category on the rapid rise (it grew from 11% of overall clothing retail sales in 2011 to 19% in 2016). It is important for women buying this way to feel that the provider understands what they want and facilitates making it easy to obtain clothes they prefer. Stitch Fix uses substantial data analysis to personalize each box it sends a customer. The woman can try them on, keep (and pay for) those they like, and return the rest very easily.

5. The stock market will rise in 2018 (the S&P opened the year at 2,696 on January 2).

While I have been accurate on recommending individual stocks over a long period, I rarely believe that I understand what will happen to the overall market. Two prior exceptions were after 9/11 and after the 2008 mortgage crisis generated meltdown. I was correct both times but those seemed like easy calls. So, it is with great trepidation that I’m including this prediction as it is based on logic and I know the market does not always follow logic! To put it simply, the new tax bill is quite favorable to corporations and therefore should boost after-tax earnings. What larger corporations pay is often a blend of taxes on U.S. earnings and those on earnings in various countries outside the U.S. There can be numerous other factors as well. Companies like Microsoft have lower blended tax rates because much of R&D and corporate overhead is in the United States and several of its key products are sold out of a subsidiary in a low tax location, thereby lowering the portion of pre-tax earnings here. This and other factors (like tax benefits in fiscal 2017 from previous phone business losses) led to blended tax rates in fiscal 2015, 2016 and 2017 of 34%, 15% and 8%, respectively. Walmart, on the other hand, generated over 75% of its pre-tax earnings in the United States over the past three fiscal years, so their blended rate was over 30% in each of those years

Table 1: Walmart Blended Tax Rates 2015-2017

The degree to which any specific company’s pre-tax earnings mix changes between the United States and other countries is unpredictable to me, so I’m providing a table showing the impact on after-tax earnings growth for theoretical companies instead. Table 2 shows the impact of lowering the U.S. corporate from 35% to 21% on four example companies. To provide context, I show two companies growing pre-tax earnings by 10% and two companies by 30%. If blended tax rates didn’t change, EPS would grow by the same amount as pre-tax earnings. For Companies 1 and 3, Table 2 shows what the increase in earnings would be if their blended 2017 tax rate was 35% and 2018 shifts to 21%. For companies 2 and 4, Table 2 shows what the increase in earnings would be if the 2017 rate was 30% (Walmart’s blended rate the past three years) and the 2018 blended rate is 20%.

Table 2: Impact on After-Tax Earnings Growth

As you can see, companies that have the majority of 2018 pre-tax earnings subject to the full U.S. tax rate could experience EPS growth 15%-30% above their pre-tax earnings growth. On the other hand, if a company has a minimal amount of earnings in the U.S. (like the 5% of earnings Microsoft had in fiscal 2017), the benefit will be minimal. Whatever benefits do accrue will also boost cash, leading to potential investments that could help future earnings.  If companies that have maximum benefits from this have no decline in their P/E ratio, this would mean a substantial increase in their share price, thus the forecast of an up market. But as I learned on Wall Street, it’s important to sight risk. The biggest risks to this forecast are the expected rise in interest rates this year (which usually is negative for the market) and the fact that the market is already at all-time highs.

6. Battles between the federal government and states will continue over marijuana use but the cannabis industry will emerge as one to invest in.

The battle over legalization of Marijuana reached a turning point in 2017 as polls showed that over 60% of Americans now favor full legalization (as compared to 12% in 1969). Prior to 2000, only three states (California, Oregon and Maine) had made medical cannabis legal. Now 29 states have made it legal for medical use and six have legalized sale for recreational use. Given the swing in voter sentiment (and a need for additional sources of tax revenue), more states are moving towards legalization for recreational and medical purposes. This has put the “legal” marijuana industry on a torrid growth curve. In Colorado, one of the first states to broadly legalize use, revenue is over $1 billion per year and overall 2017 industry revenue is estimated at nearly $8 billion, up 20% year/year. Given expected legalization by more states and the ability to market product openly once it is legal, New Frontier Data predicts that industry revenue will more than triple by 2025. The industry is making a strong case that medical use has compelling results for a wide variety of illnesses and high margin, medical use is forecast to generate over 50% of the 2025 revenue. Given this backdrop, public cannabis companies have had very strong performance. Despite this, in 2016, VCs only invested about $49 million in the sector. We expect that number to escalate dramatically in 2017 through 2019. While public cannabis stocks are trading at nosebleed valuations, they could have continued strong performance as market share consolidates and more states (and Canada) head towards legalization. One caveat to this is that Federal law still makes marijuana use illegal and the Trump administration is adopting a more aggressive policy towards pursuing producers, even in states that have made use legal. The states that have legalized marijuana use are gearing up to battle the federal government.

7. At least one city will announce a new approach to Urban transport

Traffic congestion in cities continues to worsen. Our post on December 14, 2017 discussed a new approach to urban transportation, utilizing small footprint automated cars (one to two passengers, no trunk, no driver) in a dedicated corridor. This appears much more cost effective than a Rapid Bus Transit solution and far more affordable than new subway lines. As discussed in that post, Uber and other ride services increase traffic and don’t appear to be a solution. The thought that automating these vehicles will relieve pressure is overly optimistic. I expect at least one city to commit to testing the method discussed in the December post before the end of this year – it is unlikely to be a U.S. city. The approach outlined in that post is one of several that is likely to be tried over the coming years as new thinking is clearly needed to prevent the traffic congestion that makes cities less livable.

8. Offline retailers will increase the velocity of moving towards omnichannel.

Retailers will adopt more of a multi-pronged approach to increasing their participation in e-commerce. I expect this to include:

  • An increased pace of acquisition of e-commerce companies, technologies and brands with Walmart leading the way. Walmart and others need to participate more heavily in online as their core offline business continues to lose share to online. In 2017, Walmart made several large acquisitions and has emerged as the leader among large retailers in moving online. This, in turn, has helped its stock performance. After a stellar 12 months in which the stock was up over 40%, it finally exceeded its January 2015 high of $89 per share (it reached $101/share as we are finalizing the post). I expect Walmart and others in physical retail to make acquisitions that are meaningful in 2018 so as to speed up the transformation of their businesses to an omnichannel approach.
  • Collaborating to introduce more online/technology into their physical stores (which Amazon is likely to do in Whole Foods stores). This can take the form of screens in the stores to order online (a la William Sonoma), having online purchases shipped to your local store (already done by Nordstrom) and adding substantial ability to use technology to create personalized items right at the store, which would subsequently be produced and shipped by a partner.

9. Social commerce will begin to emerge as a new category.

Many e-commerce sites have added elements of social, and many social sites have begun trying to sell various products. But few of these have a fully integrated social approach to e-commerce. The elements of a social approach to e-commerce include:

  • A feed-based user experience
  • Friends’ actions impact your feed
  • Following trend setters to see what they are buying, wearing, and favoring
  • Notifications based on your likes and tastes
  • One click to buy
  • Following particular stores and/or friends

I expect to see existing e-commerce players adding more elements of social, existing social players improving their approach to commerce and a rising trend of emerging companies focused on fully integrated social commerce.

10. “The Empire Strikes Back”: automobile manufacturers will begin to take steps to reclaim use of its GPS.

It is almost shameful that automobile manufacturers, other than Tesla, have lost substantial usage of their onboard GPS systems as many people use their cell phones or a small device to run Google, Waze (owned by Google) or Garmin instead of the larger screen in their car. In the hundreds of times I’ve taken an Uber or Lyft, I’ve never seen the driver use their car’s system. To modernize their existing systems, manufacturers may need to license software from a third party. Several companies are offering next generation products that claim to replicate the optimization offered by Waze but also add new features that go beyond it like offering to order coffee and other items to enable the driver to stop at a nearby location and have the product prepaid and waiting for them. In addition to adding value to the user, this also leads to a lead-gen revenue opportunity. In 2018, I expect one or more auto manufacturers to commit to including a third-party product in one or more of their models.

Soundbytes

Tesla model 3 sample car generates huge buzz at Stanford Mall in Menlo Park California. This past weekend my wife and I experienced something we had not seen before – a substantial line of people waiting to check out a car, one of the first Model 3 cars seen live. We were walking through the Stanford Mall where Tesla has a “Guide Store” and came upon a line of about 60 people willing to wait a few hours to get to check out one of the two Model 3’s available for perusal in California (the other was in L.A.). An hour later we came back, and the line had grown to 80 people. To be clear, the car was not available for a test drive, only for seeing it, sitting in it, finding out more info, etc. Given the buzz involved, it seems to me that as other locations are given Model 3 cars to look at, the number of people ordering a Model 3 each week might increase faster than Tesla’s capacity to fulfill.

Re-cap of 2017 Top Ten Predictions

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Golden State Warriors, Metrics, Predictions, Stocks, Technology , , , , ,

I started 2017 by saying:

“When I was on Wall Street I became very boring by having the same three strong buy recommendations for many years…  until I downgraded Compaq in 1998 (it was about 30X the original price at that point). The other two, Microsoft and Dell, remained strong recommendations until I left Wall Street in 2000. At the time, they were each well over 100X the price of my original recommendation. I mention this because my favorite stocks for this blog include Facebook and Tesla for the 4th year in a row. They are both over 5X what I paid for them in 2013 ($23 and $45, respectively) and I continue to own both. Will they get to 100X or more? This is not likely, as companies like them have had much higher valuations when going public compared with Microsoft or Dell, but I believe they continue to offer strong upside, as explained below.”

Be advised that my top ten for 2018 will continue to include all three picks from 2017. I’m quite pleased that I continue to be fortunate, as the three were up an average of 53% in 2017. Furthermore, each of my top ten forecasts proved pretty accurate, as well!

I’ve listed in bold the 2017 stock picks and trend forecasts below, and give a personal evaluation of how I fared on each. For context, the S&P was up 19% and the Nasdaq 28% in 2017.

  1. Tesla stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market. Tesla, once again, posted very strong performance.  While the Model 3 experienced considerable delays, backorders for it continued to climb as ratings were very strong. As of mid-August, Tesla was adding a net of 1,800 orders per day and I believe it probably closed the year at over a 500,000-unit backlog. So, while the stock tailed off a bit from its high ($385 in September), it was up 45% from January 3, 2017 to January 2, 2018 and ended the year at 7 times the original price I paid in 2013 when I started recommending it. Its competitors are working hard to catch up, but they are still trailing by quite a bit.
  2. Facebook stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market. Facebook stock appreciated 57% year/year and opened on January 2, 2018 at $182 (nearly 8 times my original price paid in 2013 when I started recommending it). This was on the heels of 47% revenue growth (through 3 quarters) and even higher earnings growth.
  3. Amazon stock appreciation will outpace the market. Amazon stock appreciated 57% in 2017 and opened on January 2, 2018 at $1,188 per share. It had been on my recommended list in 2015 when it appreciated 137%. Taking it off in 2016 was based on Amazon’s stock price getting a bit ahead of itself (and revenue did catch up that year growing 25% while the stock was only up about 12%). In 2017, the company increased its growth rate (even before the acquisition of Whole Foods) and appeared to consolidate its ability to dominate online retail.
  4. Both online and offline retailers will increasingly use an omnichannel approach. Traditional retailers started accelerating the pace at which they attempted to blend online and offline in 2017. Walmart led, finally realizing it had to step up its game to compete with Amazon. While its biggest acquisition was Jet.com for over $3 billion, it also acquired Bonobos, Modcloth.com, Moosejaw, Shoebuy.com and Hayneedle.com, creating a portfolio of online brands that could also be sold offline. Target focused on becoming a leader in one-day delivery by acquiring Shipt and Grand Junction, two leaders in home delivery. While I had not predicted anything as large as a Whole Foods acquisition for Amazon, I did forecast that they would increase their footprint of physical locations (see October 2016 Soundbytes). The strategy for online brands to open “Guide” brick and mortar stores ( e.g. Tesla, Warby Parker, Everlane, etc.) continued at a rapid pace.
  5. A giant piloted robot will be demo’d as the next form of entertainment. As expected, Azure portfolio company, Megabots, delivered on this forecast by staging an international fight with a giant robot from Japan. The fight was not live as the robots are still “temperamental” (meaning they occasionally stop working during combat). However, interest in this new form of entertainment was incredible as the video of the fight garnered over 5 million views (which is in the range of an average prime-time TV show). There is still a large amount of work to be done to convert this to an ongoing form of entertainment, but all the ingredients are there.
  6. Virtual and Augmented reality products will escalate. Sales of VR/AR headsets appear to have well exceeded 10 million units for the year with some market gain for higher-end products. The types of applications have expanded from gaming to room design (and viewing), travel, inventory management, education, healthcare, entertainment and more. While the actual growth in unit sales fell short of what many expected, it still was substantial. With Apple’s acquisition of Vrvana (augmented reality headset maker) it seems clear that Apple plans to launch multiple products in the category over the next 2-3 years, and with Facebook’s launch of ArKIT, it’s social AR development platform, there is clearly a lot of focus and growth ahead.
  7. Magic Leap will disappoint in 2017. Magic Leap, after 5 years of development and $1.5 billion of investment, did not launch a product in 2017. But, in late December they announced that their first product will launch in 2018. Once again, the company has made strong claims for what its product will do, and some have said early adopters (at a very hefty price likely to be in the $1,500 range) are said to be like those who bought the first iPod. So, while it disappointed in 2017, it is difficult to tell whether or not this will eventually be a winning company as it’s hard to separate hype from reality.
  8. Cable companies will see a slide in adoption. According to eMarketer, “cord cutting”, i.e. getting rid of cable, reached record proportions in 2017, well exceeding their prior forecast. Just as worrisome to providers, the average time watching TV dropped as well, implying decreased dependence on traditional consumption. Given the increase now evident in cord cutting, UBS (as I did a year ago) is now forecasting substantial acceleration of the decline in subscribers. While the number of subscribers bounced around a bit between 2011 and 2015, when all was said and done, the aggregate drop in that four-year period was less than 0.02%. UBS now forecasts that between the end of 2016 and the end of 2018 the drop will be 7.3%. The more the industry tries to offset the drop by price increases, the more they will accelerate the pace of cord cutting.
  9. Spotify will either postpone its IPO or have a disappointing one. When we made this forecast, Spotify was expected to go public in Q2 2017. Spotify postponed its IPO into 2018 while working on new contracts with the major music labels to try to improve its business model. It was successful in these negotiations in that the labels all agreed to new terms. Since the terms were not announced, we’ll need to see financials for Q1 2018 to better understand the magnitude of improvement. In the first half of the year, Spotify reported that gross margins improved from 16% to 22%, but this merely cut its loss level rather than move the company to profitability. It has stated that it expects to do a non-traditional IPO (a direct listing without using an investment bank) in the first half of 2018. If the valuation approaches its last private round, I would caution investors to stay away, as that valuation, coupled with 22% gross margins (and over 12% of revenue in sales and marketing cost to acquire customers), implies net margin in the mid-single digits at best (assuming they can reduce R&D and G&A as a percent of revenue). This becomes much more challenging in the face of a $1.6 billion lawsuit filed against it for illegally offering songs without compensating the music publisher. Even if they managed to successfully fight the lawsuit and improve margin, Spotify would be valued at close to 100 times “potential earnings” and these earnings may not even materialize.
  10. Amazon’s Echo will gain considerable traction in 2017. Sales of the Echo exploded in 2017 with Amazon announcing that it “sold 10s of millions of Alexa-enabled devices” exceeding our aggressive forecast of 2-3x the 4.4 million units sold in 2016. The Alexa app was also the top app for both Android and iOS phones. It clearly has carved out a niche as a new major platform.

Stay tuned for my top 10 predictions of 2018!

 

SoundBytes

  • In our December 20, 2017 post, I discussed just how much Steph Curry improves teammate performance and how effective a shooter he is. I also mentioned that Russell Westbrook leading the league in scoring in the prior season might have been detrimental to his team as his shooting percentage falls well below the league average. Now, in his first game returning to the lineup, Curry had an effective shooting percentage that exceeded 100% while scoring 38 points (this means scoring more than 2 points for every shot taken). It would be interesting to know if Curry is the first player ever to score over 35 points with an effective shooting percentage above 100%! Also, as of now, the Warriors are scoring over 15 points more per game this season with Curry in the lineup than they did for the 11 games he was out (which directly ties to the 7.4% improvement in field goal percentage that his teammates achieve when playing with Curry as discussed in the post).

Ending the Year on a High Note…or should I say Basketball Note

Mike Kwatinetz Golden State Warriors, Metrics, NBA, Sports , , ,

Deeper analysis on what constitutes MVP Value

Blog 35 photo

In my blog post dated February 3, 2017, I discussed several statistics that are noteworthy in analyzing how much a basketball player contributes to his team’s success. In it, I compared Stephen Curry and Russell Westbrook using several advanced statistics that are not typically highlighted.

The first statistic: Primary plus Secondary Assists per Minute a player has the ball. Time with the ball equates to assist opportunity, so holding the ball most of the time one’s team is on offense reduces the opportunity for others on the team to have assists. This may lead to fewer assisted baskets for the whole team, but more for the individual player. As of the time of the post, Curry had 1.74 assists (primary plus secondary) per minute he had the ball, while Westbrook only had 1.30 assists per minute. Curry’s efficiency in assists is one of the reasons the Warriors total almost 50% more assists per game than the Thunder, make many more easy baskets, and lead the league in field goal percentage.

The second statistic: Effective Field Goal Percentages (where making a 3-point shot counts the same as making 1 ½ 2-point shots). Again, Curry was vastly superior to Westbrook at 59.1% vs 46.4%. What this means is that Westbrook scores more because he takes many more shots, but these shots are not very efficient for his team, as Westbrook’s shooting percentage continued to be well below the league average of 45.7% (Westbrook’s was 42.5% last season and is 39.6% this season to date).

The third statistic: Plus/Minus.  Plus/Minus reflects the number of points your team outscores opponents while you are on the floor.  Curry led the league in this in 2013, 2014, and 2016 and leads year-to-date this season. In 2015 he finished second by a hair to a teammate. Westbrook has had positive results, but last year averaged 3.2 per 36 minutes vs Curry’s 13.8. One challenge to the impressiveness of this statistic for Curry is whether his leading the league in Plus/Minus is due to the quality of players around him. In refute, it is interesting to note that he led the league in 2013 when Greene was a sub, Durant wasn’t on the team and Thompson was not the player he is today.

The background shown above brings me to today’s post which outlines another way of looking at a player’s value. The measurement I’m advocating is: How much does he help teammates improve? My thesis is that if the key player on a team creates a culture of passing the ball and setting up teammates, everyone benefits. Currently the value of helping teammates is only measured by the number of assists a player records. But, if I’m right, and the volume of assists is the wrong measure of helping teammates excel (as sometimes assists are the result of holding the ball most of the time) then I should be able to verify this through teammate performance. If most players improve their performance by getting easier shots when playing with Westbrook or Curry, then this should translate into a better shooting percentage. That would mean we should be able to see that most teammates who played on another team the year before or the year after would show a distinct improvement in shooting percentage while on his team. This is unlikely to apply across the board as some players get better or worse from year to year, and other players on one’s team also impact this data. That being said, looking at this across players that switch teams is relevant, especially if there is a consistent trend.

To measure this for Russell Westbrook, I’ve chosen 5 of the most prominent players that recently switched teams to or from Oklahoma City: Victor Oladipo, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Paul George and Enes Kantor. Three left Oklahoma City and two went there from another team. For the two that went there, Paul George and Carmelo Anthony, I’ll compare year-to-date this season (playing with Westbrook) vs their shooting percentage last year (without Westbrook). For Kantor and Oladipo, the percentage last year will be titled “with Westbrook” and this year “without Westbrook” and for Durant, the seasons in question are the 2015-16 season (with Westbrook) vs the 2016-17 season (without Westbrook).

Shooting Percentage

Table 0

Given that the league average is to shoot 45.7%, shooting below that can hurt a team, while shooting above that should help. An average team takes 85.4 shots per game, so a 4.0% swing translates to over 8.0 points a game. To put that in perspective, the three teams with the best records this season are the Rockets, Warriors and Celtics and they had first, second and fourth best Plus/Minus for the season at +11.0, +11.0 and +5.9, respectively. The Thunder came in at plus 0.8. If they scored 8 more points a game (without giving up more) their Plus/Minus would have been on a par with the top three teams, and their record likely would be quite a bit better than 12 and 14.

Curry and His Teammates Make Others Better

How does Curry compare? Let’s look at the same statistics for Durant, Andrew Bogut, Harrison Barnes, Zaza Pachulia and Ian Clark (the primary player who left the Warriors). For Barnes, Bogut, Pachulia and Durant I’ll compare the 2015 and 2016 seasons and for Clark I’ll use 2016 vs this season-to-date.

Table 1

So, besides being one of the best shooters to play the game, Curry also has a dramatic impact on the efficiency of other players on his team. Perhaps it’s because opponents need to double team him, which allows other players to be less guarded. Perhaps it’s because he bought into Kerr’s “spread the floor, move the ball philosophy”. Whatever the case, his willingness to give up the ball certainly has an impact. And that impact, plus his own shooting efficiency, clearly leads to the Warriors being an impressive scoring machine. As an aside, recent Warrior additions Casspi and Young are also having the best shooting percentages of their careers.

Westbrook is a Great Player Who Could be Even Better

I want to make it clear that I believe Russell Westbrook is a great player. His speed, agility and general athleticism allow him to do things that few other players can match. He can be extremely effective driving to the basket when it is done under control. But, he is not a great outside shooter and could help his team more by taking fewer outside shots and playing less one/one basketball. Many believed that the addition of George and Anthony would make Oklahoma City a force to be reckoned with, but to date this has not been the case. Despite the theoretic offensive power these three bring to the table, the team is 24th in the league in scoring at 101.8 per game, 15 points per game behind the league leading Warriors. This may change over the course of the season but I believe that each of them playing less one/one basketball would help.

How much do you know about SEO?

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Marketing, Metrics, Startups , , ,

Search Engine Optimization: A step by step process recommended by experts

Azure just completed its annual ecommerce marketing day. It was attended by 15 of our portfolio companies, two high level executives at major corporations, a very strong SEO consultant and the Azure team. The purpose of the day is to help the CMOs in the Azure portfolio gain a broader perspective on hot marketing topics and share ideas and best practices. This year’s agenda included the following sessions:

  1. Working with QVC/HSN
  2. Brand building
  3. Using TV, radio and/or podcasts for marketing
  4. Techniques to improve email marketing
  5. Measuring and improving email marketing effectiveness
  6. Storytelling to build your brand and drive marketing success
  7. Working with celebrities, brands, popular YouTube personalities, etc.
  8. Optimizing SEO
  9. Product Listing Ads (PLAs) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

One pleasant aspect of the day is that it generated quite a few interesting ideas for blog posts! In other words, I learned a lot regarding the topics covered. This post is on an area many of you may believe you know well, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I thought I knew it well too… before being exposed to a superstar consultant, Allison Lantz, who provided a cutting-edge presentation on the topic. With her permission, this post borrows freely from her content. Of course, I’ve added my own ideas in places and may have introduced some errors in thinking, and a short post can only touch on a few areas and is not a substitute for true expertise.

SEO is Not Free if You Want to Optimize

I have sometimes labeled SEO as a free source of visitors to a site, but Allison correctly points out that if you want to focus on Optimization (the O in SEO) with the search engines, then it isn’t free, but rather an ongoing process (and investment) that should be part of company culture. The good news is that SEO likely will generate high quality traffic that lasts for years and leads to a high ROI against the cost of striving to optimize. All content creators should be trained to write in a manner that optimizes generating traffic by using targeted key words in their content and ensuring these words appear in the places that are optimal for search. To be clear, it’s also best if the content is relevant, well written and user-friendly. If you were planning to create the content anyway, then the cost of doing this is relatively minor. However, if the content is incremental to achieve higher SEO rankings, then the cost will be greater. But I’m getting ahead of myself and need to review the step by step process Allison recommends to move towards optimization.

Keyword Research

The first thing to know when developing an SEO Strategy is what you are targeting to optimize. Anyone doing a search enters a word or phrase they are searching for. Each such word or phrase is called a ‘keyword’. If you want to gain more users through SEO, it’s critical to identify thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords that are relevant to your site. For a fashion site, these could be brands, styles, and designers. For an educational site like Education.com (an Azure portfolio company that is quite strong in SEO and ranks on over 600,000 keywords) keywords might be math, english, multiplication, etc. The broader the keywords, the greater the likelihood of higher volume.  But along with that comes more competition for search rankings and a higher cost per keyword. The first step in the process is spending time brainstorming what combinations of words are relevant to your site – in other words if someone searched for that specific combination would your site be very relevant to them? To give you an idea of why the number gets very high, consider again Education.com. Going beyond searching on “math”, one can divide math into arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. Each of these can then be divided further. For example, arithmetic can include multiplication, addition, division, subtraction, exponentiation, fractions and more.  Each of these can be subdivided further with multiplication covering multiplication games, multiplication lesson plans, multiplication worksheets, multiplication quizzes and more.

Ranking Keywords

Once keywords are identified the next step is deciding which ones to focus on. The concept leads to ranking keywords based upon the likely number of clicks to your site that could be generated from each one and the expected value of potential users obtained through these clicks. Doing this requires determining for each keyword:

  • Monthly searches
  • Competition for the keyword
  • Conversion potential
  • Effort (and possible cost) required to achieve a certain ranking

Existing tools report the monthly volume of searches for each keyword (remember to add searches on Bing to those on Google). Estimating the strength of competition requires doing a search using the keyword and learning who the top-ranking sites are currently (given the volume of keywords to analyze, this is very labor intensive). If Amazon is a top site they may be difficult to surpass but if the competition includes relatively minor players, they would be easier to outrank.

The next question to answer for each keyword is: “What is the likelihood of converting someone who is searching on the keyword if they do come to my site”. For example, for Education.com, someone searching on ‘sesame street math games’ might not convert well since they don’t have the license to use Sesame Street characters in their math games. But someone searching on ‘1st grade multiplication worksheets’ would have a high probability of converting since the company is world-class in that area. The other consideration mentioned above is the effort required to achieve a degree of success. If you already have a lot of content relevant to a keyword, then search optimizing that content for the keyword might not be very costly. But, if you currently don’t have any content that is relevant or the keyword is very broad, then a great deal more work might be required.

Example of Keyword Ranking Analysis

Source: Education.com

Comparing Effort Required to Estimated Value of Keywords

Once you have produced the first table, you can make a very educated guess on your possible ranking after about 12 months (the time it may take Google/Bing to recognize your new status for that keyword).

There are known statistics on what the likely click-through rates (share of searches against the keyword) will be if you rank 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Multiplying that by the average search volume for that keyword gives a reasonable estimate of the monthly traffic that this would generate to your site. The next step is to estimate the rate at which you will convert that traffic to members (where they register so you get their email) and/or customers (I’ll assume customers for the rest of this post but the same method would apply to members). Since you already know your existing conversion rate, in general, this could be your estimate. But, if you have been buying clicks on that keyword from Google or Bing, you may already have a better estimate of conversion. Multiplying the number of customers obtained by the LTV (Life Time Value) of a customer yields the $ value generated if the keyword obtains the estimated rank. Subtract from this the current value being obtained from the keyword (based on its current ranking) to see the incremental benefit.

Content Optimization

One important step to improve rankings is to use keywords in titles of articles. While the words to use may seem intuitive, it’s important to test variations to see how each may improve results. Will “free online multiplication games” outperform “free times table games”. The way to test this is by trying each for a different 2-week (or month) time period and see which gives a higher CTR (Click Through Rate). As discussed earlier, it’s also important to optimize the body copy against keywords. Many of our companies create a guide for writing copy that provides rules that result in better CTR.

The Importance of Links

Google views links from other sites to yours as an indication of your level of authority. The more important the site linking to you, the more it impacts Google’s view. Having a larger number of sites linking to you can drive up your Domain Authority (a search engine ranking score) which in turn will benefit rankings across all keywords. However, it’s important to be restrained in acquiring links as those from “Black Hats” (sites Google regards as somewhat bogus) can actually result in getting penalized. While getting another site to link to you will typically require some motivation for them, Allison warns that paying cash for a link is likely to result in obtaining some of them from black hat sites. Instead, motivation can be your featuring an article from the other site, selling goods from a partner, etc.

Other Issues

I won’t review it here but site architecture is also a relevant factor in optimizing SEO benefits. For a product company with tens of thousands of products, it can be extremely important to have the right titles and structure in how you list products. If you have duplicative content on your site, removing it may help your rankings, even if there was a valid reason to have such duplication. Changing the wording of content on a regular basis will help you maintain rankings.

Summary

SEO requires a well-thought-out strategy and consistent, continued execution to produce results. This is not a short-term fix, as an SEO investment will likely only start to show improvements four to six months after implementation with ongoing management. But as many of our portfolio companies can attest, it’s well worth the effort.

 

 

SoundBytes

  • It’s a new basketball season so I can’t resist a few comments. First, as much as I am a fan of the Warriors, it’s pretty foolish to view them as a lock to win as winning is very tenuous. For example, in game 5 of the finals last year, had Durant missed his late game three point shot the Warriors may have been facing the threat of a repeat of the 2016 finals – going back to Cleveland for a potential tying game.
  • Now that Russell Westbrook has two star players to accompany him we can see if I am correct that he is less valuable than Curry, who has repeatedly shown the ability to elevate all teammates. This is why I believe that, despite his two MVPs, Curry is under-rated!
  • With Stitchfix filing for an IPO, we are seeing the first of several next generation fashion companies emerging. In the filing, I noted the emphasis they place on SEO as a key component of their success. I believe new fashion startups will continue to exert pressure on traditional players. One Azure company moving towards scale in this domain is Le Tote – keep an eye on them!

Lessons Learned from Anti-Consumer Practices/Technologies in Tech and eCommerce

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Marketing, Metrics , ,

One example of the anti-consumer practices by airline loyalty programs.

As more and more of our life consists of interacting with technology, it is easier and easier to have our time on an iPhone, computer or game device become all consuming. The good news is that it is so easy for each of us to interact with colleagues, friends and relatives; to shop from anywhere; to access transportation on demand; and to find information on just about anything anytime. The bad news is that anyone can interact with us: marketers can more easily bombard us, scammers can find new and better ways to defraud us, and identity thieves can access our financials and more. When friends email us or post something on Facebook, there is an expectation that we will respond.  This leads to one of the less obvious negatives: marketers and friends may not consider whether what they send is relevant to us and can make us inefficient.

In this post, I want to focus on lessons entrepreneurs can learn from products and technologies that many of us use regularly but that have glaring inefficiencies in their design, or those that employ business practices that are anti-consumer. One of the overriding themes is that companies should try to adjust to each consumer’s preferences rather than force customers to do unwanted things. Some of our examples may sound like minor quibbles but customers have such high expectations that even small offenses can result in lost customers.

Lesson 1: Getting email marketing right

Frequency of email 

The question: “How often should I be emailing existing and prospective customers?” has an easy answer. It is: “As often as they want you to.”  If you email them too frequently the recipients may be turned off. If you send too few, you may be leaving money on the table. Today’s email marketing is still in a rudimentary stage but there are many products that will automatically adjust the frequency of emails based on open rates. Every company should use these. I have several companies that send me too many emails and I have either opted out of receiving them or only open them on rare occasions. In either case the marketer has not optimized their sales opportunity.

Relevance of email

Given the amount of data that companies have on each of us one would think that emails would be highly personalized around a customer’s preferences and product applicability. One thing to realize is that part of product applicability is understanding frequency of purchase of certain products and not sending a marketing email too soon for a product that your customer would be unlikely to be ready to buy. One Azure portfolio company, Filter Easy, offers a service for providing air filters. Filter Easy gives each customer a recommended replacement time from the manufacturer of their air conditioner. They then let the customer decide replacement frequency and the company only attempts to sell units based on this time table. Because of this attention to detail, Filter Easy has one of the lowest customer churn rates of any B to C company. In contrast to this, I receive marketing emails from the company I purchase my running shoes from within a week of buying new ones even though they should know my replacement cycle is about every 6 months unless there is a good sale (where I may buy ahead). I rarely open their emails now, but would open more and be a candidate for other products from them if they sent me fewer emails and thought more about which of their products was most relevant to me given what I buy and my purchase frequency. Even the vaunted Amazon has sent me emails to purchase a new Kindle within a week or so of my buying one, when the replacement cycle of a Kindle is about 3 years.

In an idea world, each customer or potential customer would receive emails uniquely crafted for them. An offer to a customer would be ranked by likely value based on the customer profile and item profile. For example, customers who only buy when items are on sale should be profiled that way and only sent emails when there is a sale. Open Road, another Azure company, has created a daily email of deeply discounted e-books and gets a very high open rate due to the relevance of their emails (but cuts frequency for subscribers whose open rates start declining).

Lesson 2: Learning from Best Practices of Others

I find it surprising when a company launches a new version of a software application without attempting to incorporate best practices of existing products. Remember Lotus 123? They refused to create a Windows version of their spreadsheet for a few years and instead developed one for OS/2 despite seeing Excel’s considerable functionality and ease of use sparking rapid adoption. By the time they created a Windows version, it was too late and they eventually saw their market share erode from a dominant position to a minimal level.  In more modern times, Apple helped Blackberry survive well past it’s expected funeral by failing to incorporate many of Blackberry’s strong email features into the iPhone. Even today, after many updates to mail, Apple still is missing such simple features like being able to hit a “B” to go to the bottom of my email stack on the iPhone. Instead, one needs to scroll down through hundreds of emails to get to the bottom if you want to process older emails first. This wastes lots of time. But Microsoft Outlook in some ways is even worse as it has failed to incorporate lookup technology from Blackberry (and now from Apple) that always allows finding an email address from a person’s name. When one has not received a recent email from a person in your contact list, and the person’s email address is not their name, outlook requires an exact email address. When this happens, I wind up looking it the person’s contact information on my phone!

Best practices extends beyond software products to marketing, packaging, upselling and more. For example, every ecommerce company should study Apple packaging to understand how a best in class branding company packages its products. Companies also have learned that in many cases they need to replicate Amazon by providing free shipping.

Lesson 3: The Customer is Usually Right

Make sure customer loyalty programs are positive for customers but affordable for the company

With few exceptions, companies should adopt a philosophy that is very customer-centric. Failing to do so has negative consequences. For example, the airline industry has moved towards giving customers little consideration and this results in many customers no longer having a preferred airline, instead looking for best price and/or most convenient scheduling. Whereas the mileage programs from airlines were once a very attractive way of retaining customers, the value of miles has eroded to such a degree that travelers have lost much of the benefit. This may have been necessary for the airlines as the liability associated with outstanding points reached billions of dollars. But, in addition, airlines began using points as a profit center by selling miles to credit cards at 1.5 cents per mile. Then, to make this a profitable sale, moved average redemption value to what I estimate to be about 1 cent per point. This leads to a concern of mine for consumers. Airlines are selling points at Kiosks and online for 3 cents per point, in effect charging 3 times their cash redemption value.

The lesson here is that if you decide to initiate a loyalty points program, make sure the benefits to the customer increase retention, driving additional revenue. But also make sure that the cost of the program does not exceed the additional revenue. (This may not have been the case for airlines when their mileage points were worth 3-4 cents per mile).  It is important to recognize the future cost associated with loyalty points at the time they are given out (based on their exchange value) as this lowers the gross margin of the transaction. We know of a company that failed to understand that the value of points awarded for a transaction so severely reduced the associated gross margin that it was nearly impossible for them to be profitable.

Make sure that customer service is very customer centric

During the Thanksgiving weekend I was buying a gift online and found that Best Buy had what I was looking for on sale. I filled out all the information to purchase the item, but when I went to the last step in the process, my order didn’t seem to be confirmed. I repeated the process and again had the same experience. So, I waited a few days to try again, but by then the sale was no longer valid. My assistant engaged in a chat session with their customer service to try to get them to honor the sale price, and this was refused (we think she was dealing with a bot but we’re not positive). After multiple chats, she was told that I could try going to one of their physical stores to see if they had it on sale (extremely unlikely). Instead I went to Amazon and bought a similar product at full price and decided to never buy from Best Buy’s online store again. I know from experience that Amazon would not behave that way and Azure tries to make sure none of our portfolio companies would either. Turning down what would still have been a profitable transaction and in the process losing a customer is not a formula for success! While there may be some lost revenue in satisfying a reasonable customer request the long term consequence of failing to do so usually will far outweigh this cost.

 

Soundbytes

My friend, Adam Lashinsky, from Fortune has just reported that an insurance company is now offering lower rates for drivers of Teslas who deploy Autopilot driver-assistance. Recall that Tesla was one of our stock picks for 2017 and this only reinforces our belief that the stock will continue to outperform.

 

 

Optimizing the Cost of Customer Acquisition: Modeling Metrics to Drive Startup Success

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Metrics, Posts

I admit it, I’m a weird guy. How many others have a PhD in financial modeling combined with an MBA in finance and accounting?  I’ve never put any of this on my business card (not even my CPA) because degrees are not necessarily the indicators of who will succeed in business. After all, the one thing Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Ted Waitt and Larry Ellison have in common, besides 4 of the 5 being billionaires before turning 30, was they never graduated from college. Don’t get me wrong: I’m notadvocating dropping out of school. In fact, in this post, I will leverage my finance and modeling background to discuss further how to better predict the future success of companies. When we evaluate companies, we like to see that:

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