Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 25, 2013

This is as true for their books business as their infrastructure business, AWS. Over sushi, a friend explained to me that this strategy might also extend to the way the company views acquisitions. Bezos has explicitly stated this strategy and it’s the one that has led to Amazon’s massive success in many different lines of business.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Pricing AWS Startup 100

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

Pothole #5 – Prioritizing Revenue Acquisition Ahead of Customer Value Creation. It can be tough to know the answer to that question, but the indicators should be focused more on the retention side over the acquisition side. . Pothole #4 – Promoting Your Best Salesperson to Manager. When should you scale?

Sales Hiring 253

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 253

SaaStr

MAY 15, 2024

Acquisition costs are dramatically lower for consumer and word-of-mouth distribution can go viral. In B2B, you also have fixed costs, but you can diversify monetization based on tokens or seats, or in the case of AWS, however you like. Because of that, you see a 5x increase in conversion from trial to paid on the app store.

Subscription 294

Subscription Payment Features B2B Mobile 294

SaaStr

MARCH 24, 2019

Alibaba is their AWS (or becoming it): The Cloud is better. Billion Acquisition. Goodness : We forget about the OS in the Cloud, but we all need to still deal with things like Windows 7 IRL: One perspective on the Top 25 VCs in SaaS now: Pretty Funny. Clippy was AI before AI: China is a whole different world for SaaS.

Cloud 146

Cloud AWS AI Acquisition 146

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2019

And Salesforce doesn’t seem to screw up its bigger acquisitions. That’s not Twilio growth, but it’s awfully strong. And it means, if you take that growth rate and roll things forward a few years, Salesforce is buying a will-grow-into $3b-$6b business analytics business, that is already the #1 largest player in its segment.

AWS 136

AWS Acquisition Cloud Subscription 136

SaaStr

MAY 14, 2019

Mikkel : Well again, the public cloud, AWS, was the dominant leader. We are seeing platform shifts from how they traditionally run their infrastructure and services and business to seeing them run that stuff on AWS. The acquisition of Base and now the launch of your new CRM platform, Sunshine. Mikkel : Sunshine.

Cloud 238

Cloud Sales Recruiting Scale AWS 238

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 11, 2024

It looks at the YoY dollar change in quarterly revenue from the hyperscalers (just looking at Azure / AWS because the data goes back further) going back a few years. If we break this down and look at Azure and AWS independently (graphs below), you’ll see how the AWS “swings” were a lot more volatile.

Cloud 184

Cloud Software Azure AWS 184

SaaStr

MARCH 17, 2023

Utilize the benefits of flexibility to increase acquisition, build trust with customers, and ultimately convert them to longer-term contracts. We’re seeing a growing trend of buyers making SaaS purchases through global marketplaces such as the AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace.

Marketplace as a Service 246

Marketplace as a Service Software Review Technical Review Azure 246

The Angel VC

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

At that point it becomes a lot harder because the next set of customer acquisition channels will likely be much more expensive. Ten years ago, there was nobody who SaaS founders could ask in order to learn how to do, for example, inbound marketing, low-touch sales or customer success.

Scale 192

Scale Scaling SaaS AWS 192

SaaStr

APRIL 30, 2022

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). & Customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is basically how much do you spend in terms of sales people, sales team, and in terms of marketing to acquire a new customer. But also generally pretty high CAC, customer acquisition costs. Or maybe ARR, depending on your model. Transcript.

SaaS Payments 246

SaaS Payments Metrics Payment Methods Scale 246

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

What’s evolved over the years and is driven by hyper-scalers like Google Azure, AWS, Twilio, and Stripe is the consumption-based model. Driving Market Acquisition When designing a compensation plan, you have to decide what behaviors you want to drive. The first might be market acquisition. This is MongoDB’s approach.

Compensation 169

Compensation Sales Azure AWS 169

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

Very healthy new business (new customer) acquisition. Coming out of earning season I’m slightly more optimistic about a back half acceleration (August or later) than I was coming in. The Good Mongo: Very Positive - Is The Bottom Behind Them? They guided to 26-27% growth in Azure in Q2 (with 1% coming from AI).

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

JUNE 3, 2017

When they talk about their websites, I find that marketing people fall into two groups: One group thinks their website is awful. But it’s really just one part of a comprehensive customer acquisition strategy. Don’t blame the website To fix a broken customer acquisition process usually means more than just fixing the website.

AWS 100

AWS Social Media Acquisition Subscription 100

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

And if you think about AWS, if you think about the rise of cloud data warehousing, that is a big technology change and a big game changer for a lot of companies. . “And so the reason that companies are shifting to the new stack is that CRMs weren’t designed to handle all the click data that’s coming at them.

Scale 181

Scale Marketing AWS Machine Learning 181

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2015

I’m curious how much user acquisition occurs on mobile. But if SaaS usage trends follow consumer usage - which for some ecommerce and messaging products top 70%+ mobile usage - then mobile will undoubtedly become a critical user engagement and acquisition platform. More than 20% of end users log in mobile; 2.5%

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting Data SaaS AWS 100

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 9, 2013

For example Belkin’s wifi-enabled plugtop “actually makes your house worse” Even the software of the market leader, Apple, is be terrible: “iTunes should die” , “iOS6 Maps is Awful” and as Bijan wrote, every one of the core iOS apps has been replaced with third party software.

Startup 100

Startup Outsourced Development AWS Marketing 100

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2020

There’s customer acquisition, and then, there’s your existing customers. We can save companies $100,000 on their AWS bill. Everybody wants to save $100,000 on their AWS bill right now. In Brex, the AWS credits and it’s getting additional rebate by moving your card spends over. Jason Lemkin: Got it.

Merchant Services 253

Merchant Services Scale Sales Recruiting Sales 253

SaaStr

JULY 20, 2021

It’s a brutal, awful slog in the start. I would say, it’s always good to call out just how awful it is to be a founder, to be an entrepreneur, because that is a unique perspective that you bring to the board room that no one else shares. That sounds like an awful idea,” and then you have to work for it.

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring AWS Business Model 246

User Pilot

APRIL 2, 2025

For instance, marketing focuses on user acquisition, whereas product looks at feature adoption. Userpilots data is fully encrypted and stored with SOC-compliant vendors like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud. Userpilots real-time analytics let you track behavior, feature usage, and engagement trends across web and mobile in one place.

Mobile 66

Mobile Underperforming Technical Team Onboarding AWS 66

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 28, 2021

If you’ve seen our recent articles on AWS migration, the updated stripe integration and the acquisition of Flightpath Finance, it will come as no surprise to you that our team is getting pretty busy! You may have noticed some exciting things happening here at Baremetrics. Product Team Our product team has expanded by a factor of 3!

AWS 94

AWS Forecasting Onboarding Finance 94

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. You can also find your second act inorganically via acquisition as Twilio did with SendGrid. This one is niche, but it’s interesting, not doing mergers and acquisitions sooner. You changed the name to ZoomInfo after that acquisition.

Sales Hiring 229

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 229

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 22, 2024

And once a customer has paid back the initial acquisitions costs to acquire it, all future streams of revenue can loosely be described as a cash flow annuity. This is why the consumption players (Snowflake, Mongo, Confluent, Azure, AWS, etc) so more variability in the macro slowdown.

AI 190

AI Cloud Revenue Technical Advisors 190

Sales Hacker

JUNE 1, 2020

This is part of a phenomenon called Product Led Growth (PLG) , an end-user growth model that relies on the product itself to be the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. Sounds an awful lot like Sales. No hassle and no credit card required. That includes nearly 20 publicly traded companies. doesn’t it?

Sales Hiring 97

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 97

User Pilot

SEPTEMBER 1, 2024

Pros of usage-based pricing model Lower barrier to entry : Lower upfront costs can attract new customers who might be hesitant to commit to a higher, fixed subscription fee, resulting in higher acquisition rates than in other pricing models. Amazon AWS is one of the best SaaS pricing examples with this model. Amazon pricing example.

Pricing 104

Pricing Strategy SaaS Scale 104

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

AWS, Twilio, Heroku, etc. Just a quick reminder: Payback Period = Cost of Customer Acquisition/Gross Margin. So does Expensify, which decreases the time to file expenses. With cost-based pricing, startups mark up the product they sell by some margin. Many infrastructure as a service companies do this.

Pricing 117

Pricing Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 117

User Pilot

JANUARY 26, 2024

TL;DR Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy where the product is the main driver of customer acquisition , adoption, and account expansion. Referral schemes are an alternative method for driving customer acquisition. Both free and paid users need on-demand access to support. How do these growth models differ?

SaaS 103

SaaS Acquisition Onboarding Retention 103

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

Acquisition, retention, and monetization potential of your first product is another reason B2B tends to expand earlier. From a customer acquisition perspective, the companies grew in very different ways too. Pinterest significantly evolved how its core product worked, changing both the acquisition and retention loops over time.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

Sales Hacker

MARCH 29, 2021

As a result, more products are being discovered and sold through online marketplaces, like the Salesforce AppExchange and the AWS Marketplace. Partner acquisition. There are three different types of products designed to enhance partner acquisition. There are five different functions that partner tech can help to optimize.

Payments 112

Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions Payment Services 112

SaaStr

JUNE 1, 2021

I would love to say, “Oh, I wrote this software, and I put two servers on AWS, and put a credit card form up, and the money just kept flowing in.” It’s like, “We could work on acquisition costs,” which we did. It reduces the friction, and the acquisition time, and all that stuff.

Part-Time VPE 283

Part-Time VPE Technical Cofounder CTO Hire New CTO 283

User Pilot

AUGUST 22, 2024

As you better understand your customer acquisition costs and ROI, you can then allocate resources to campaigns that deliver the highest ROI. It also logs its data on AWS rather than Salesforce, which means the data will never be added to your Salesforce records. This enables you to measure the impact of sales on your campaigns.

Forecasting 105

Forecasting AWS Revenue Data 105

User Pilot

AUGUST 18, 2024

Marketplaces – Online platforms like AWS Marketplace and Salesforce AppExchange let you list your product and attract new users by giving you access to a wider audience base. Product-led growth – A PLG strategy involves using your product as the primary driver of customer acquisition, activation, and retention.

AI Search 105

AI Search AI Scale Strategy 105

FastSpring

DECEMBER 21, 2020

How was the experience of going through an acquisition fully remote during a pandemic? Going through the acquisition during the pandemic was a challenge because, I guess, for all the obvious reasons. Describe a favorite memory during the acquisition. But I do enjoy running an awful lot. So, everything.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Development Team Review Software Review AWS 78

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Not only do the IT folks get an ear-load of grief from users who complain that "IT is deliberately wasting our time with this awful system," but they also bear the burden of supporting these end-users. I only hear from them when something's broken. This is the worst job in the company."

Sales Recruiting 100

Sales Recruiting AWS Compensation User Experience 100

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 24, 2019

It’s less expensive than it’s ever been in terms of actually getting a product to market, whether it’s leveraging platforms like Salesforce or GCP or AWS or Heroku. Just from a platform perspective, we can look at it: everybody knows from the AWS perspective how inexpensive it is to go to market.

Scale 151

Scale Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Technical Review 151

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

As investors, we keep a close eye on customer acquisition cost (CAC) payback. We use it as an indicator that a company has the right fundamentals in place to effectively ramp up customer acquisition. AWS and other infrastructure providers have been using UBP for nearly a decade. The takeaway.

Headcount 73

Headcount SaaS Compensation Acquisition 73

OpenView Labs

JANUARY 29, 2020

Freemium: It’s About Acquisition, Not Revenue. However, freemium is a really potent acquisition model. There are costs and benefits to the model — is the acquisition cost worthwhile for your company? In their freemium plan, AWS offers a year’s worth of micro instance for free – a time-bound freemium model.

Pricing 82

Pricing Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 82

ChurnZero

MARCH 31, 2022

tech ops, AWS, technical support). Q: For customer acquisition cost, how far back should the numerator and denominator “lag”? Are you facing a project like a merger or acquisition that requires you to work with new investors or existing investors in a new capacity? BUT NO ONE DOES THAT. Looking for more on metrics?

Customer Success 98

Customer Success Metrics Technical Review Scale 98