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Daniel Cotlar learned early on that he enjoyed the creative, risky, high-energy startup world, and after learning much over his years working at them, now invests and mentors startups. He is passionate about helping others and learning from them. In this episode, he discusses his steps to a successful startup business and mentoring relationships, and some of the stumbling blocks he’s found along the way.
Episode Highlights:
- Daniel Cotlar learned early in his life that he preferred working in smaller, more risk-taking, creative environments. This ultimately led him to work with Jay Steinfeld at Blinds.com. Jay has been a pivotal influence and mentor for Daniel and taught him about his core values, structure, and more. Daniel believes a mentor must want what’s best for their mentee. There should be some flexible structure, and they should focus more on asking questions than simply dumping solutions.
- Through his work as an investor and board member, Daniel does a lot of mentoring these days. He believes it’s essential for new businesses to just go for it: get the product out of the idea stage and into the customer’s hands as quickly as possible, with as little cost as possible. Then you can observe, learn, and improve. It is also imperative for a new business to have product-market fit. If you can prove this, you will find investors.
- The experience of attending a yeshiva, a traditional Jewish college, and learning to study the Talmud taught Daniel how to distill complicated logic, find patterns, debate, and reason. These elements have served him very well over his marketing career.
- Daniel believes Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a valuable statistic, but it's true power lies not in itself as a solitary number. Instead, it lies in finding trends and differentiating between customer sets, campaigns, and time periods. For new businesses, you will have to start with a gap-filled estimate. But over time, you will fill those gaps and refine that number. Remember, though, that achieving and expanding CLV will get more difficult over the life of a company.
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