Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 28, 2014
Bill Gurley and Fred Wilson have focused on burn rates as an important topic for startups. The immediate question that follows this commentary is: How much does the typical startup burn throughout its life? And what is a “risky” burn rate for a company? I use a rule of thumb to evaluate the burn rate of a Series A startup. I multiply the number of employees by about $10-12k, depending on the location of the company.
The Angel VC
SEPTEMBER 16, 2014
In a Wall Street Journal interview that was published yesterday, Bill Gurley , General Partner at Benchmark and one of the smartest and most successful VCs of all time, said that the current environment reminds him of the tech bubble of the late 1990s: “Every incremental day that goes past I have this feeling a little bit more. I think that Silicon Valley as a whole or that the venture-capital community or startup community is taking on an excessive amount of risk right now.
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Aaron Beashel
SEPTEMBER 24, 2014
I have to hand it to the guys at Buffer, the recommended content section was a genius play. Not only did they create a feature that has probably tripled product usage, but they created a content distribution channel that they can use to send content on a sharing rampage. I’d heard through a content marketing friend of mine that getting featured in their recommended section drives a ton of social sharing activity, and I was definitely intrigued by the idea.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
SEPTEMBER 2, 2014
Free, free, free. It sure is a powerful word. Which probably explains why “free trial” is used so often by software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketers. Lots of SaaS solutions, whether they’re for business or for personal use, let prospective customers use the solution for free. And then after 15 days, 30 days, maybe 60 days, they ask them to actually pay for it.
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CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 19, 2014
Most people just don't know how to close a deal. And it's typically one of these seven mistakes that prevents them from closing deal. That's why I call them the seven deadly closing sins—because they're killing your sales!
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 14, 2014
This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. In the two most recent analyses, we’ve explored the S-1s of Hubspot and Zendesk, two of the public SaaS companies with the smallest Average Revenue per Customer.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 15, 2014
After reading a few of the S-1 analyses on this blog , an entrepreneur asked me to look into the balance sheets of public SaaS companies. More specifically, how much cash should SaaS hold? How much equity do they raise? And do they employ debt to grow? The chart above shows the median cash on the balance sheet by year of founding for publicly traded SaaS companies.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 23, 2014
I remember many the great TED talks I’ve watched. Sir Ken Robinson’s ,“How Schools Kill Creativity” and the story of a little girl whose genius was unrecognized in school until she was allow do dance, and ultimately became a prima-ballerina, is simply unforgettable. In most of my meetings, I remember Amy Cuddy’s “Body Language” talk for a split-second.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 30, 2014
I met a founder a few days ago who captured the idea of building brand equity really well. He said something along the lines of, “Every time we provide a magical experience to a customer, we invest in our brand equity. Each time we do something that disappoints them or overtly extracts value from our users, we expend brand equity.” This founder prided himself on continuously investing in and increasing his business’s brand equity over long periods of time.
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
SEPTEMBER 16, 2014
Startups are intense experiences. Driven by a burning passion to change some aspect of the world, startup teams push, push, push to grow as fast as possible. Without the right balance, though, teams burn out - a terrible outcome. One of the most important responsibilities of every startup’s management team is to shepherd their teams to maximize their performance and prevent burnout.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 29, 2014
This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Founded in 2007, MobileIron is a leader in the Mobile Device Management sector. MDM provides enterprises software to manage the mobile phones and tablets of their employees.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 25, 2014
The startups that build and retain the best teams develop a huge competitive advantage. It’s no surprise that managers are the most important influencers of team development and retention. The most frequent and consequently most powerful tool for managers to coach, develop and lead their teams are one-on-ones, weekly meetings between a manager and his or her individual reports.
Aaron Beashel
SEPTEMBER 23, 2014
Late last month, I was fortunate to take some time off to head up to Splendour In The Grass in Byron Bay with a few friends. It was quite the event, with 40,000+ people all converging in one bigass field outside of Byron for 3 days of music and drinking. There were probably 100+ bands playing over the 3 days, and we went and saw a good number of them.
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
SEPTEMBER 21, 2014
This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. All of the businesses we’ve looked at in the past have been purely SaaS businesses. Today, we’ll examine Tableau, the market leader for data visualization software.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 18, 2014
Yesterday, SAP announced it would acquire Concur for $8.3B, the single largest SaaS acquisition in history in dollar terms. To put this acquisition in context, I looked at six other public-to-public acquisitions, where one publicly traded company acquired another. Because the acquired target is public, much of their financial information is readily available.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 17, 2014
Jason Fried, co-founder of 37Signals and Basecamp , published a blog post today called Faith in Eventually that captures the emotional tensions of building a product: During the development of most any product, there are always times when things aren’t quite right. Times when you feel like you may be going backwards a bit. Times where it’s almost there, but you can’t yet figure out why it isn’t.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 11, 2014
What will the world look like when cloud compute and storage are free? Cloud computing prices are hurtling to zero. The chart above shows the logarithmic decline of the cost of a transistor cycle by 11 orders of magnitude (11 decimal places) over the past 40 years. AWS has decreased prices for EC2, elastic compute cloud, and S3, simple storage service, 42 times in eight years.
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Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 10, 2014
I wish I had been in Stanford’s CS183 class in 2012, the year Peter Thiel taught it. A student of the class, Blake Masters, copied all the class notes and I read every post, like thousands of other visitors to the site. In a few days, Thiel and Masters will release a book version of these notes called Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 8, 2014
Is there an optimal price for a product to maximize a SaaS startup’s sales efficiency ? As I’ve been analyzing the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies, most recently of HubSpot and Zendesk , I’ve been asking myself that question. Do million-dollar enterprise price points and field sales people create more efficient sales organizations than content-marketing-driven SMB startups?
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 2, 2014
This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. Zendesk is a 700 person company that builds customer support software. Zendesk went public earlier this year. It’s a remarkable business primarily because the founders and the team have built an incredibly efficient customer acquisition funnel.
CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 30, 2014
Many sales reps don't even see their prospect's requests to receive some info materials as an obstacle. Early on in a cold call, a prospect will ask, "Can you send me some more information? I'll review it and get back to you.
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CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 26, 2014
A lot of unsuccessful salespeople share a common trait: they want to be liked. And in the pursuit of likability, they get lost in the "building rapport" stage and never accomplish the things that matter in sales.
CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 25, 2014
What do you do when you're in a sales conversation and the prospect asks for a feature you don't have?
CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 24, 2014
Any salesperson can start a conversation with energy and enthusiasm, but it takes a pro to keep that level of engagement to the end. Most salespeople give up the moment they encounter indifference. They assume if their prospect isn’t immediately engaged, the deal is doomed. Big mistake.
CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 23, 2014
I was a 19 year old high-school dropout, selling financial investments worth tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands Euros. My clients where old enough to be my parents or even grandparents. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs—much more sophisticated, experienced and educated.
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
SEPTEMBER 17, 2014
We share a lot of sales tactics for very specific situations you encounter when you're trying to drum up business on our blog. But I believe that some of the biggest gains you can get are not by learning tactics, but by shifting your mindset.
CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 16, 2014
I recently talked with a guy who's about to launch an incubator in Europe, and he asked me about my experiences at Y Combinator. He wanted to know what makes Y Combinator the arguably most successful incubator there is.
CloseSaaS
SEPTEMBER 15, 2014
Have you received an RFI (Request For Information) from a large organization or government agency? This could turn into a huge deal—but there's a lot of complexity involved. What's the best way to respond to an RFI?
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