怎样赚钱？（Startup Playbook from Sam Altman IV.6）

（创业由四个部分组成，理念、团队、产品、执行力。Startup Playbook 是YC掌门人Sam Altman对这四个方面的完整阐述，这是执行力当中关于赚钱的部分）

Oh yes, making money. You need to figure out how to do that.

The short version of this is that you have to get people to pay you more money than it costs you to deliver your good/service. For some reason, people always forget to take into account the part about how much it costs to deliver it.

啊，对，赚钱。你必须想个办法赚到钱。

简而言之，就是要让人们愿意为你的产品或者服务付出超过成本的钱。不知为啥人们总是忘记去考虑成本的事情。

If you have a free product, don’t plan to grow by buying users. That’s really hard for ad-supported businesses. You need to make something people share with their friends.

如果你弄了个免费的产品，那先别想着去烧钱买用户。对要靠广告实现收入的免费产品而言这太不划算了。你需要想办法做出用户会主动分享的东西。

If you have a paid product with less than a $1,000 customer lifetime value (LTV), you generally cannot afford sales. Experiment with different user acquisition methods like SEO/SEM, ads, mailings, etc., but try to repay your customer acquisition cost (CAC) in 3 months.

如果你有个非免费的产品，而它的“顾客终生价值”（每位购买者在未来可能为企业带来的收益总和）小于1000美金的话，你基本上是请不起销售队伍的。把各种获取用户的方法都试过来吧——搜索引擎优化、搜索引擎营销、打广告、发邮件等等，尽力把获取用户的开销在三个月内赚回来。

If you have a paid product with more than a $1,000 LTV (net to you) you maybe can afford direct sales if your product is easy to sell. But unless your LTV is more like $5,000 or higher, it may not work. Try selling the product yourself first to learn what works. Hacking Sales is a useful book to read.

如果你产品的顾客终生价值超过1000美金，那你说不定可以雇一批人帮你做销售（如果你的产品容易卖的话）。但除非顾客终生价值超过5000美金，不然你还是很有可能会入不敷出。你最好先自己做几次销售体验一下。《Hacking Sales》这本书很值得一读。

In any case, try to get to “ramen profitability”—i.e., make enough money so that the founders can live on ramen—as quickly as you can. When you get here, you control your own destiny and are no longer at the whims of investors and financial markets.

无论如何，尝试一下尽快达到“拉面盈利”，就是说赚到足够让创始人能每天吃着拉面活下去的钱。等你达到这一步，那你至少能掌握自己的命运，而不再需要受投资人和金融市场波动的摆布了。

Watch your cash flow obsessively. Although it sounds unbelievable, we’ve seen founders run out of money without being aware it was happening a number of times.

你需要仔细留意你的现金流。尽管听起来像是天方夜谭，但我们曾多次看到创业者把钱花光了自己都还不知道。

【注：这部分很短，但是真的极其有用，融资是企业发展的助推器，但是企业必须有足以让自己生存下来的收入，再做发展。星空琴行的创业者们真该好好看看这个系列的文章。】