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[Update 12/20/2013: I have extended the dashboard to include multiple pricing tiers and annual subscription plans. Check it out here.] [Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out! ] Over the last few years I've helped quite a lot of SaaS startups to create or fine-tune their KPI dashboards.
What is SaaS? We seem to need to ask this question every couple of years, because the answer is a bit of a moving target. It was simple enough when SaaS was merely software applications pushed through a Web browser, but now we have to contend with the cloud, mobile and even social. Recently, Scott Maxwell of OpenView partners sparked an interesting debate on the topic on LinkedIn that got me pondering it again.
Every SaaS business must decide how to charge for the service. Pricing plans are some of the most difficult decisions to make. Equally important to the price is determining the point at which the customer pays - the conversion point. There are four different models that I’ve experienced: up front payment, freemium, limited free trials, money back guarantee.
A company I'll call "NotAGreatIdea.com" is spying on me. They know I've wandered onto their website and watched a video demo of their product. I didn't provide my name or email address. But somehow they think they have permission to contact harass me. Perhaps "harass" isn't exactly the right word to describe the email that arrived a few minutes after my visit to their site.
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
Inspired by Paul Graham’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” post of a few years ago I’d like to start a series of posts about ideas that I find exciting and that we at Point Nine would be very interested in investing in. Here's the first one. Electronic signing I’m a huge, huge fan of electronic signing. Whenever I have to sign a document and I’m getting a “Please eSign.” email I rejoice because it saves me the hassle of printing, completing, signing, scanning and emailing the signature pages (d
Inspired by Paul Graham’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” post of a few years ago I’d like to start a series of posts about ideas that I find exciting and that we at Point Nine would be very interested in investing in. Here's the first one. Electronic signing I’m a huge, huge fan of electronic signing. Whenever I have to sign a document and I’m getting a “Please eSign.” email I rejoice because it saves me the hassle of printing, completing, signing, scanning and emailing the signature pages (d
Sitting on a bench overlooking the South Beach marina, I asked an entrepreneur how he had been since he founded his company. He replied with a conundrum: Looking back I can’t believe it’s only been a year but if I think about every day, it’s taken forever. That’s a really succinct way of communicating how it feels to grind. Cementing each brick, each hire, each line of code, each product feature seems like just an incremental step, just another day.
Following my post about electronic signing I'd like to describe another area that we'd like to invest in. It's not a specific idea this time, rather a category of startups that we're very interested in: Industry-specific SaaS solutions I talked about the topic before when I wrote about "The land of a thousand niches" and touched on it in my "1st DO for SaaS startups".
Below is my general outline for a typical diligence process. First meeting. When I’m meeting a startup for the first time, my goal is to understand as much about the business and team as I can. Founders/Team: How do the founders know each other? How do they interact with each other? Are they passionate? How qualified are they? What would it be like to work with them?
To answer that question, you have to look for examples of the best storytellers. The best storytellers are the television studios. They divide the day into different segments to reach different audiences. Morning: news. Midday: soap operas. Evening: Nightly news segues into primetime sitcom. Late night: news segues into comedy. An entrepreneur told me a few weeks ago, when we where talking about how to build a blog audience and I had asked him how he thought about content strategy.
Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting
Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical
There are three types of vision that a successful startup needs: product vision, business vision and team vision. Product vision is the dream. It’s how your company changes the world. It’s the problem that you’re solving and the solution to that problem. Product visions don’t end on launch day. They extend for years through the company’s growth. A product vision isn’t a certain feature or even a completed product.
In his Stanford GSB lectures, Peter Thiel spoke about secrets. But he defined secrets for startups in a different way than one might expect. A secret is not an unknown. Rather, it’s something just not widely believed to be achievable or feasible. In other words, it’s an insight, a thesis that isn’t widely held. Exploiting that secret should be the aim of every entrepreneur.
When the core teams of a startup work in harmony, they create tremendous leverage for a business. I saw this last week with one startup I work with, Axial , a New York based company enabling private companies to access debt, equity capital and strategic acquirers. First, the marketing team created a powerful blog post and infographic, just top-notch content marketing.
There’s something beautiful about handwriting that we’ve never been able to capture on the Web. Handwriting has style, a uniqueness to each writer and also an ability to capture the evolution of thought with crossed out words, carats and interjected clauses and margins full of edits. The image above is my favorite from Emily Temple’s curation effort of a series of famous authors' manuscripts on a Tumblog.
Simplify omnichannel payments with a solution that unifies every channel through your platform. By integrating front-end systems like online, mobile, and in-store payments with robust back-end infrastructure, you can deliver a seamless payments experience without the need for heavy engineering. Omnitoken technology enhances security by tokenizing card transactions for reuse, enabling merchants to drive cross-selling opportunities.
Andrew Dumont wrote about his grueling schedule at a startup and the lessons on “Avoiding Burnout” which spurred a torrent of comments on HackerNews. For me, the most interesting comment is this one by Daniel Ribeiro who quotes Isaac Yonemoto : Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail…You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure… The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure wi
When the neologism was popularized in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, the words Web 2.0 captured a desire for the web to become interactive. It was a description of a movement towards social media and engaging users on the web. But more than an idea, it carried a design aesthetic which focused on the user, user experience and engagement. After all, users wouldn’t participate on a hostile site.
“What’s the difference between a string and a String?” I asked on the first day of my engineering internship at a startup. That comment drew some sighs from the other engineers in the cube. The pit in my stomach confirmed what I already knew - I was out of my depth. I had never programmed in Java before that day. And there I was, a Java engineering intern at this startup.
When I started at Google, I began working in the AdSense Online Sales and Operations team. The demand for AdSense was overwhelming and we received tens of thousands of website applications each day asking to be granted permission to run Google’s ad product on their websites. Sometimes, automated approval systems would reject an application based upon strong spam or fraud signals.
ClinicSense is a SaaS platform that supports over 7,000 massage therapists who use it for appointment management, payments, scheduling, marketing activities and more. Despite having a relatively low payment failure rate, the company discovered that the failures disrupted the customer experience. This often led to churn as customers decided to cancel or abandon their account, preventing ClinicSense from realizing the full lifetime value (LTV) of its users.
Pricing is taxation. A pricing plan taxes some element of a product’s use. For a startup, choosing what to tax and how to tax it can be one of the most perplexing decisions because the tradeoffs between usage and revenue aren’t always clear. Activity based pricing or usage based pricing is one of the more common pricing plans in utility computing and software these days.
Do social networks have a killer distribution or engagement advantage on Android that cannot be replicated on iOS because of Android’s openness? Will we see an Android-first social network of real scale in the near future? I think it’s a real possibility. Open platforms enable faster experimentation and more innovation than closed ones. New engagement models can be created, tested and refined much more easily on Android than iOS and Facebook’s newest mobile product could be that first example, d
Feedback loops are essential components of every person’s role within a startup. The most recent and celebrated feedback loop is the viral coefficient or k-factor which Facebook applications optimize to grow their user bases. The [k-factor]( [link] , a borrowed concept from the study of biological viruses, measures the rate at which an application spreads through the network.
At first glance, SMB SaaS companies, those who sell Software-as-a-Service to small to medium businesses, may seem like any other software company. But they are quite a different breed. Successful SMB SaaS companies have reinvented their businesses eschewing the expensive enterprise sales model in favor of end-user centric marketing, support and product development.
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
We’ve all had a great idea for a product that would solve a pain we feel directly. It used to be impossible to convey that insight to anyone who might be in a position to act upon it. But that’s all changing because of the Internet. Of late, it’s becoming increasingly easier for consumers to share their ideas for great products and bring them to market.
As a founder, you’re always selling. You’re selling yourself, your team, your product, your company. But your pitch is likely missing one of two key components. A pitch needs to accomplish two goals to be effective. Most pitches solve the first, but omit the second. First, the pitch must convince the audience who might be investors, employees, recruits, or customers of some premise.
Reference checks are part and parcel of the VC diligence process and most hiring processes. They are also one of the two most important analyses in hiring, next to the interview. Below, I’ve outlined my standard question set. I’m curious to hear feedback on what other questions or techniques might work. Types of References. I find it’s valuable to speak to references who have worked with the candidate in different roles.
I have been writing for three years now and it’s been a ton of fun. I hope to continue to write for many more. Along the way so far, I’ve learned a few lessons on frequency, content type, idea generation, voice, titles and distribution. Frequency. There are two schools of thought on blogging frequency: high frequency vs high quality. At this point, it’s unclear to me which is better for building an audience because both work.
Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?
For the Close sales software, we’ve built a powerful search engine which lets you find leads based on different criteria. For examples and insight on how our search works from a user’s perspective, check out our previous blog post about lead search.
We’ve partnered with our friends at Zapier [[link] a service that allows you to integrate dozens of platforms together with absolutely zero code. Using Zapier, you can integrate Close with dozens of platforms, including Wufoo [[link] But Wofoo is just one example.
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