Tom Tunguz
APRIL 21, 2016
Pricing. Is there any word that confers some whisper of dark arts than pricing? Or any question that instills less confidence than, “How did you derive your pricing strategy?” Many times, startups replicate and tune competitors’ pricing strategies. If everyone else prices per seat, then so should we… Is this the right thought process?
The Angel VC
APRIL 6, 2016
About three years ago, we were looking for an Associate to join Point Nine and put up this landing page : We called the position "truffle pig", because just like a truffle pig is digging up the best truffles from the ground, we as an early-stage VC try to find the best startups among a large number of potential investments. I have to give full credit for the truffle pig analogy to Mathias Schilling and Thomas Gieselmann of e.ventures, by the way.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
APRIL 2, 2016
So you’ve just shipped your new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, and for sure you’re eager to tell the world: get out a press announcement, roll-out a search engine marketing campaign, sign-up for industry events, and whatever else you can think of. Here’s some advice: Slow down. As tough as it is to resist the urge to do something , hold off a bit before going full blast with all this marketing activity.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 15, 2016
To many, the archetypal salesperson is a deceptive scoundrel who manipulates people into buying something they don’t need. Think used car salesman meets con artist.
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Sixteen Ventures
APRIL 30, 2016
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SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 28, 2016
In ServiceNow’s Q1 Investor presentation are the first semblances of SaaS metrics in public company reporting. If you sift through the 40+ public SaaS businesses, you won’t find mention of annual recurring revenue, churn, account expansion, or cash collection cycles in most of them - even though these are the the metrics the management teams employ to evaluate and steer their businesses.
The Angel VC
APRIL 11, 2016
For some reason we keep finding great early-stage SaaS startups in France, and it's not because of my command of the French language. In the last few years we've invested in four awesome SaaS companies from France: Algolia , Front , Mention and Critizr. We recently did #5, which hasn't been announced yet, and are in advanced talks with a potential #6.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 10, 2016
There many ways of measuring a SaaS company’s efficiency: magic number, payback period on cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value to cost customer acquisition ratio, quick ratio. These metrics primarily focus on measuring efficiency in customer acquisition. But, a software company’s true efficiency also have to include the cost to service contracts.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 24, 2016
It’s hard to read Boys in the Boat before I sleep. The stories of the 8 rowers awaiting the coxswain’s call at the starting line of a boat race remind me of the races I competed in with so many wonderful friends and oarsmen. Imagining those races - and in particular, placing second at nationals, the adrenaline surges and my heartbeat accelerates, resurfacing all those memories and moments.
Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments
Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 25, 2016
As the overall venture market environment evolves in 2016, so too does the SaaS and Software segment. The number of Series A, B, C, and D investments in software companies stabilized at roughly 170 per quarter from mid-2013 through mid-2015, before falling 17% in Q4 2015 to a two year low. In Q1 2016, SaaS rounds increased a modest 10%. The SaaS fundraising has slowed in parallel to the rest of the market.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 20, 2016
About 15 years since the creation of the first SaaS companies, public SaaS companies account for 14% of total software revenues generated by public companies, a figure growing at about 17% per year. Over the last ten years, the total amount of revenue generated by software companies has tripled from $53B to $169B, meaning SaaS companies are both taking share and growing the market.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 18, 2016
Starting in late 2015 through the first quarter of 2016, founders have shifted their seed fundraising strategies toward a single investor. Seeds led by a single investor have increased by 50% in these trailing six months. How much of this trend is due to greater participation of venture capitalists investing in the seed market? The chart above plots the number of seeds rounds by year.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 17, 2016
Party rounds symbolized the heyday of the startup seed market just a last year. Called parties because of the number of investors who collaboratively financed seed rounds of startups, the lists became almost comically long as seed sizes ballooned and investor syndicates swelled with them. Recently, I have heard from founders that they are less interested in party rounds, but does the data support the case?
Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage
When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 13, 2016
Last week, Facebook launched the messenger chatbot platform, which like Slack, Telegram and others, presents a big market opportunity for startups to innovate. In addition, the companies and products that determine how to most efficiently distribute their product on these new platforms will benefit from user curiosity and less competition, both of which result in lower cost-of-customer acquisition.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 7, 2016
Daniel Kahneman wrote about his experiences with the inside/outside bias. Kahneman, a team of graduate students, and the Dean of the Hebrew University School of Education collaborated on curriculum for judgment and decision-making for high schools. At one point, Kahneman surveyed his team to estimate the amount of time remaining to complete project.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 6, 2016
About one third of US startups that raise a seed round raise a Series A. The larger the seed investment, the greater the odds the company successfully raises the next round. A $500,000 seed round results in a series A 20% of the time, while $1.5M seed increases the chances to 30%, an increase of half. larger seed rounds enable early-stage companies to experiment more, hire more aggressively, recover from mistakes better and attain more of the milestones necessary to raise a series A.
Tom Tunguz
APRIL 4, 2016
The Future of Machine Intelligence is a free collection of 10 interviews machine learning experts filed by David Beyer. The interviews explain exactly where we are with the state-of-the-art, the challenges to advanced machine learning, and some of the applications. In the last interview, Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google, describes sequence-to-sequence machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has been used to create descriptions of images, and could be used to summari
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Tom Tunguz
APRIL 3, 2016
Over the last six years, seed rounds have grown in size by 12% annually. Series As have grown by 14%, series Bs by 9%, series Cs by 14% and series Ds by 11%. In that same timeframe, the median series A and series C has doubled. Median seed rounds have more than tripled in size. This tripling of seed round sizes is a recent phenomenon, taking place in the first quarter of 2016.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 13, 2016
Sales reps from all industries and walks of life often ask me: “How do I become really great at sales?” I believe that sales is simply results-driven communication, so my answer is always: become a better communicator.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 29, 2016
The most common mistake new entrepreneurs make is looking for “right” answers.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 27, 2016
If you are an SDR or AE at a company that uses Close, here’s an earlier post with some tips for you.
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CloseSaaS
APRIL 25, 2016
Ten years ago, I hired a salesperson with incredible drive. He had recently lost everything—his job, his house, all his money. But he was hungry to get back in the game and work his ass off. He was under-qualified, but what he lacked in experience, he made up for in energy.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 20, 2016
On any given day, the sales and product team play by different rules. Little attention is really paid to the separation of the two. It seems only natural. There go the tech people. New features, roadmaps, and so on.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 19, 2016
A couple months ago, you hired an ace sales rep named Mike. When he started out, he was out in the field crushing it every day, making 150–160 cold calls a day, setting up demos, and closing new customers.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 18, 2016
Great news: Your startup landed its tenth customer today. You haven’t seen a cancellation yet, and all your clients are amped whenever you talk to them. You're ecstatic about your startup's traction.
Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O'Neill Stoll
Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng
CloseSaaS
APRIL 11, 2016
I learned public speaking from the worst person ever—my 5th-grade teacher, Mr. Gramarchek. He was the kind of dude who terrorized little kids, and made them cry almost daily. One day in class, our assignment was to memorize a poem and recite it in front of the class. I was terrified—mostly of Mr.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 7, 2016
Ever get the feeling you have no idea what you’re doing? That everyone else has it all figured out? That you are the only person who doesn’t have all the answers? Ever find yourself saying,“If only I was more like them, everything wouldn’t be so hard”? Bull.
CloseSaaS
APRIL 6, 2016
Most startups suck at outbound sales recruiting. They either recruit too early, or too late. Too aggressively, or too passively. They pursue the wrong candidates, or no candidates at all (fyi: good salespeople are not going to come to you).
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