Hitenism

JANUARY 6, 2017

At that point in 2009, I was also responsible for marketing. We launched it in 2009 with a pretty good idea, a strong product, and a vague plan for growth. Twitter didn’t begin to hyperlink the hashtags in search results until mid 2009. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. Kind of bland, right?

Startup 182

Startup Marketing Engagement Content Marketing 182

Tom Tunguz

MAY 13, 2015

Additionally, Ariba spent relatively modest fraction of their revenue on engineering efforts. Ariba attained profitability in 2009 for the first time. Similar to net income, Ariba sustained cash flow breakeven for the first time in 2009, but flirted with the mark since about 2004.

Outsourced Development 113

Outsourced Development Software Review Technical Review compliance 113

SaaStr

JANUARY 21, 2022

Grammarly was founded in 2009 and is a successful consumer product revolving around a virtual writing assistant that individuals and students use to write better content in their professional, educational, and personal lives. Overview: Grammarly’s Enterprise Evolution.

Scale 246

Scale SMB Enterprise Sales Hiring 246

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 2, 2015

LTV/CAC is a powerful diagnostic tool for the performance of almost every team within the company: product, engineering, sales and marketing. Gross margin, which is an important factor in LTV, reflects the engineering architecture and the hosting costs required to support customers. But there’s much more to it.

Startup 113

Startup SaaS Churn Engineering 113

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 12, 2014

In 2009 and 2010, the company recognized more revenue from services than subscription. The sum total of all this investment in engineering and professional services enabled by big contracts and venture capital is immense revenue growth, more than tripling revenues in just two years, in addition to more than $150M in deferred revenue.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks Deferred Revenue Venture Capital Outsourced Development 113

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 5, 2015

Numbering more than 400 people, Optimizely has built an amazing business since 2009, serving thousands of customers. Before Optimizely, Pete was a product manager at Google building Google App Engine which grew to support 150,000 developers. Before App Engine, Pete worked in the AdSense team and managed the OKR process at Google.

CTO 100

CTO SaaS Engineering Education 100

Neil Patel

JUNE 7, 2021

While many online tools promise functionality to allow users to see data in a whole new way, search engine Wolfram Alpha actually delivers. Through a combination of AI, algorithms, and an extensive knowledge base, this unique engine can provide marketers with valuable data points, as well as answers to complex computational queries.

Market Research 129

Market Research AI Search Marketing Advertising 129

SaaStock

MARCH 1, 2019

DST Global is a global investor in growth internet businesses, founded in 2009 by Yuri Milner. Founded: 2009. It focuses its venture capital investments in IT, internet, new media, biopharma, new energy, and chemical engineering businesses, among others. Size of fund: $1.7B. Stage: Late Stage. Founded: 1999.

SaaS Payments 190

SaaS Payments Venture Capital Payment Services Telecommunications 190

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 8, 2015

The business was founded in 2004, but hit its stride 2009 and went public in 2012. Impressively, the company is investing more and more into engineering - exceeding 20% of revenues last year - likely developing broader feature set to enable additional up and cross sells. ServiceNow has recorded a better than 1.0 at $93M in revenue.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks Metrics SaaS Investment 113

Tom Tunguz

MAY 1, 2014

Earlier this week, I wrote about the increase in cash compensation and decline in equity grants to VPs of Engineering and Product in startups. The graphs are broken out by last Series of investment (A, B, C and D) and show the equity compensation trends of CEOs, VP of Engineering and VP of Product.

Trends 100

Trends Fractional VPE Startup Part-Time VPE 100

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

“I was working for Salesforce in 2009 when I decided to start Okta, an identity management company that connects people with any application on any device. So, how do you choose amongst the stable of unicorns? Well, we did the heavy lifting and highlighted a few here for you… Todd McKinnon, Okta Co-Founder and CEO.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Identity management Cloud Innovation 125

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 9, 2015

It follows a beautiful geometric curve characteristic of Flywheel business models, where an efficient customer acquisition engine keeps building momentum and growing revenues exceptionally. Atlassian surpassed the $50M revenue mark seven years after founding, in 2009, similar to Hubspot, DemandWare, NewRelic and other great companies.

Benchmarks 124

Benchmarks Metrics Venture Capital SaaS 124

Neil Patel

NOVEMBER 26, 2020

The best engineers create luxury cars. That’s a five-fold increase from 2009. We wrote a comprehensive piece of content about finding the perfect engagement ring that helped traffic from search engines to grow from 20% of all traffic to 30% of all traffic in the first six months of our partnership. Ditto for timepieces.

Strategy 145

Strategy Marketing Social Media Underperforming Technical Team 145

Neil Patel

APRIL 23, 2021

They are very powerful because, unlike social network content, they are prominent in search engine results. The search engine game is too important to be ignored, and it is the first step in restoring your image. In 2009, Domino’s Pizza employees who posted disgusting videos of themselves playing with food were fired and arrested.

Management 145

Management Social Media Sales Hiring Branding 145

Neil Patel

OCTOBER 6, 2020

It was amended in 2009 to expand the definition of disabilities and specify which businesses must adhere to ADA requirements. You want your website to be search engine optimized because it helps drive traffic. The more accurate and descriptive your alt text is, the better it will work for screen readers and search engines.

compliance 145

compliance Software Review Technical Review Transportation 145

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Intent to purchase is the engine of the consumer web. In 2009, Pinterest and Houzz started providing tools for users to collect, organize, present and share things. Creating and capturing intent motivates almost every dollar invested into ecommerce and advertising. These breadcrumbs are most useful when fresh but become stale quickly.

Scale 100

Scale Advertising Business Model Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2014

We will explore revenue growth, average revenue per customer, sales efficiency, payback periods, net income, gross margin and engineering spending. in 2009 revenue to 2013 revenue of $71M - an 88% CAGR. In these plots, I’ve used HubSpot’s colors as a consistent legend.

Benchmarks 113

Benchmarks SMB Metrics SaaS 113

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 20, 2014

The number of Series As has grown by 31% annually for the past 5 years, reaching more than 831 Series As in 2013, up from 284 in 2009. Now, more than ever, founders ought to reverse engineer their startup’s Series B pitch to maximize their chances of success. This trend hasn’t abated.

Startup 100

Startup Acquisition Engineering Trends 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 11, 2014

A few years later, customer success has become equal in importance to sales and marketing and engineering and product within SaaS companies. The steady increasing drumbeat of the Customer Success mantra is reflected in Google search traffic, whose volumes have tripled since 2009. So, why now?

Customer Success 100

Customer Success SaaS Payments Payment Services Development Team Review 100

FastSpring

NOVEMBER 12, 2018

Cisco Systems estimated that IoT was “born” between 2008 and 2009, but it’s just in the last couple years we’ve seen an explosion of IoT solutions for both commercial and domestic use. The Internet of Things is a network of interconnected physical devices that collect and share data with each other.

VP of Engineering 97

VP of Engineering Innovation Technology Software 97

OpenView Labs

JULY 21, 2021

Or maybe that’s just my software engineer’s bias. The idea that the latest is also correct holds in technical genres like software engineering, artificial intelligence, and the likes. Behind The Cloud by Marc Benioff (Published 2009). Many lists focus on recently or about-to-be published books.

Business 101

Business Artificial Intelligence Blockchain Software Engineering 101

Neil Patel

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

I am ready to make this bet because I know that Neil Patel Digital is the world’s best choice when it comes to Search Engine Optimization combined with Conversion Rate Optimization. Founded in 2009, they’ve been constantly expanding their team and services. Sometimes CRO just isn’t enough. Their minimum projects start from $10,000.

Sales Hiring 144

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Social Media Underperforming Technical Team 144

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Your core models for sales, for marketing spend, for hiring and engineering and product. Anyhow, so then he went and he was a romantic and he did a search company, great engineer, hard problem, search. We have a 60% chance that we can do it. More likely than not, but barely. That’s how you build your core model.

Outsourcing Services 243

Outsourcing Services Banking CTO Hire New CTO 243

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 14, 2015

Xero Income Statement 2007 2008 2009 2010 211 2012 2013 2014. Xero didn’t break out its engineering spending in its financials until 2013. Growth 109% 265% 206% 123% 107% 88%. Gross Profit -0.8 -2.0 Winning one accountant generates more than 13 end customers, and generates substantial leverage in the sales model.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Metrics SMB Outsourced Development 100

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 22, 2018

Another learning was that we almost tried to over-engineer the solution to how we acquired supply. I initially reported into our head of marketing, but I made sure through the interview process that the head of engineering and the head of product were bought into the concept. We create this robust web crawler. But people adopted it.

Marketplace as a Service 189

Marketplace as a Service Scale Payment Solutions Payment Services 189

FastSpring

JANUARY 21, 2019

In 2009, Alibaba and its founder, Jack Ma, decided to turn the anti-Valentine’s Day into an ecommerce dream. Take advantage of the back to school frenzy but offering discounts and special promotions on items like productivity tools, academic software, ebooks, and more. Singles’ Day (November 11th).

Business 79

Business Scale Mobile Trends 79

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 3, 2018

How did you end up at Mongo back in 2009? Meghan Gill: When I joined MongoDB at the end of 2009, I was the eighth employee. It was all engineers and how I got there is I knew the founder, Elliot. So, tell us about your story a little bit. Where are you from? What’s your background? Un-Marketing to Developers.

Scale 81

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 81

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2020

We were actually built out of a bank called Live Oak Bank and Live Oak Bank was founded in 2009 and they had a need for a completely digital bank. You need X number of engineers and everyone can buy it but what does this all mean? ” Rob Bernshyten: That was a big, big risk to take in 2009 and 2010. But what is this?

Payment Solutions 215

Payment Solutions Pricing Payments Payment Services 215

ProfitWell

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Chargify launched in 2009, and the goal was to help SaaS bill and collect revenue. There is no hesitation when it comes to addressing a problem like a bug in the engineering stack, or refactoring an entire feature. They will help align teams and all the different metrics. Michael Klett.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO CTO 98

Unbounce

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Google Ads amounts to billions of dollars in revenue for the search engine giant, but what about your revenue? Google introduced the first extension—sitelinks—way back in 2009. There’s only so much space on a search results page to go around, after all. Ad Extensions. But why stop there?

Advertising 111

Advertising Systems Review Mobile Banking 111

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 30, 2018

Both are design partners at GV (launched as Google Ventures in 2009 as the venture capital arm of Alphabet, Inc.), Kate: At Facebook, we started this new form of front-end engineering and design called UI engineering. They had to make their own. Two decades later, these two women are blazing trails in design leadership.

Scale 149

Scale Leadership Scaling Venture Capital 149

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2020

And he also has the, I don’t know, benefit or dubious distinction, but lived through this before in 2008 and 2009. Adnan Chaudhry: One of the guiding principles that helped me personally, I was here as Matt mentioned, I was here at Salesforce in 2008, 2009. So a lot of lessons that can be taken from there as well. There we go.

Sales Hiring 210

Sales Hiring Scale SaaS Payments Payment Services 210

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

And then I convinced him to come back in 2009, and the rest is history. But I think brand and marketing are different, where I see a lot of companies raising around and plugging their cap table into the marketing engine. ” I was like, “Well, we have a good engine.” We have an engine.”

Acquisition 160

Acquisition Sales Recruiting Scale Sales Hiring 160

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

By 2009, unemployment for ‘08 graduates was at 9% : The door to the real world had slammed shut just as we were about to walk through it. So wherever you are, re-engineer, reinvent what you do, touch. The job market vanished overnight. All of us asking in dismay, What happened? So don’t wait for it. Get ahead of it.

Sales Hiring 106

Sales Hiring Marketplace as a Service Payment Services Banking 106

Chargify

AUGUST 6, 2019

In 2009, the founders co-wrote a book called “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs ” in which they included snippets of exclusive eBooks and offered the full content for free in exchange for an email address. 2009: 1,150 customers. 2009: 96 employees. 2009: Unknown. 2007: 48 customers.

Subscription 40

Subscription Payment Features Revenue Software Review 40

Baremetrics

AUGUST 20, 2019

Yoast develops popular WordPress plugins to help website owners optimize for search engine traffic. Launched in 2009, the first iteration of the Shopify App Store had less than a dozen apps, many of which ended in “-ify” to match Shopify’s name. Their flagship Yoast SEO plugin reportedly has over 5 million active installations.

Innovation 105

Innovation Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments 105

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

We were profitable by 2009. Can either of you maybe share with us how the team at WebPT turned that internal expertise into a real engine to drive growth for the company? I know for many people in the audience, obviously finding the right investor is critical. Heidi Jannenga: As I mentioned before, we were boot strapped.

Scale 186

Scale SMB VP of Engineering Leadership 186