Tom Tunguz
MAY 23, 2017
In January 2010, Andrew Parker wrote a post called the Spawn of Craigslist. Andrew identified companies that had built businesses by unbundling Craigslist. The vacation rentals link gave rise to AirBnB and HomeAway. Etsy dominated the arts and crafts for sale. This same unbundling is occurring to Excel. Microsoft Office has more than 1 billion users globally.
The Angel VC
MAY 17, 2017
In our weekly investment team call earlier this week we decided to pass on two early-stage SaaS startups that were both on track to grow from zero to $100k in MRR in their first 12 months of going live. Both companies clearly had impressive traction, but in both cases we weren’t convinced of the market size and the opportunity to build a large, sustainable company.
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Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
MAY 22, 2017
I lead sales enablement for HubSpot out of Dublin, Ireland and my role encompasses sales content, sales training, deal support and sales productivity. While my attention is laser focussed on helping our sales organisation hit quota, lately I’ve been thinking about how HubSpot’s partner marketing and sales agencies, of which there are more than 3,400 can sell sales enablement as a monthly recurring service.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MAY 13, 2017
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of marketing automation. I can’t imagine handling my email newsletter, my website, or my blog without automation. Managing subscribes & unsubscribes, tracking opens & clicks, and scheduling posts manually… that would bury me. And for companies that send out emails and track responses from thousands of prospective customers, solutions that automate those and other marketing functions are indispensable.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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Pierre Lechelle
MAY 15, 2017
When I was 16 years old, I was daydreaming about an automated business. I imagined money flowing into my account while I was asleep. I was so amazed by stories of companies like Salesforce, Buffer, or SendGrid and how they could create value and earn money with online software. I started programming when I was […]. Cet article 6 Mistakes that will kill your B2B SaaS Startup est apparu en premier sur Pierre Lechelle.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 15, 2017
How much revenue do you want to book for your SaaS startup next quarter? And in 12 months? It is one thing to put a number down on the financial plan. It’s another thing altogether to have the sales team staffed to close that amount of business. The bookings capacity of the business is the amount of business a sales team should book in a certain period.
The Angel VC
MAY 5, 2017
[This post first appeared on Point Nine Land, our Medium channel.] A few years ago I wrote about some of the tools that we’re using to run a VC fund in the Cloud. Nicolas later followed up with more details about our tech stack. Today I’d like to provide a quick update on how our SaaS stack has evolved, as well as share a couple of little tools and hacks that help me (sort of) keep (a little bit of) my sanity.
The SaaS Garage
MAY 10, 2017
I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical when the founder of that company mentioned to me that he is about to sign an overdraft (debt capital) contract with a bank, only a few weeks after he had initiated the dialog. And indeed, a few days later the agreement was signed and the company received a 6-digit Euro overdraft from Deutsche Handelsbank. That caught my attention and I thought I should learn more about the preconditions for early stage SaaS companies to receive such an overdraft within
Brian Balfour
MAY 24, 2017
Growth is still an emerging discipline, and not everyone has a structured growth team within their org. But, let’s say you get to start from scratch and build the ideal growth team. What people and roles would you start with? Andrew Chen and I recently sat down to look at a few configurations to consider as you're scaling up a team around growth. We've broken up the conversation into three videos, with notes below each video.
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.
Pierre Lechelle
MAY 29, 2017
Couple months ago, I was going away to Barcelona for the weekend. I decided to go out there early to get some work done and meet with interesting folks. I emailed a couple people and surprisingly Pedro Magriço answered. I was doing research on Growth at the time and especially about Growth Teams. Pedro brought me […]. Cet article Maybe you shouldn’t have a Growth Team – Interview with Pedro Magriço from Typeform est apparu en premier sur Pierre Lechelle.
CloseSaaS
MAY 30, 2017
Several years ago, I sold everything I owned and bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley. I planned to build what I thought would be my legacy—a billion-dollar business that would change the world.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 21, 2017
In Bias Against Creativity , a team of researchers at Cornell discuss the bias against creativity they revealed in their study. Originally published in 2010, the article resurfaced yesterday on Hacker News. It raises the question of how to evaluate creative ideas and how to engender internal incentives to support creativity. From the Cornell paper: People often reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as a desired goal.
Hacking Revenue
MAY 14, 2017
Business Development means different things to different people in different industries. Even though the title itself is used in almost every industry – more than 3.5 Million people listed in Linkedin alone(!) – the job description, goals and responsibilities of a Business Development person are dramatically different from company to company.
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
Software Platform Consulting
MAY 9, 2017
Established in 1995, Angie’s List was the pioneer in the home services marketplace. Home Advisor (IAC) announced last week it is acquiring Angie’s List (ANGI) for more than $500 million. (This price represents a 44% premium over Angie’s List’s depleted closing stock price (see below)). I am sad to see Angie’s List go.
Adhere Creative
MAY 15, 2017
L ets be honest, out of other types of B2B businesses to create engaging marketing content for, manufacturing is pretty up there when it comes to difficulty. Content for manufacturing can simply be a little too technical, convoluted, or highly niche. But not anymore.
ReSci
MAY 6, 2017
Delivering users with precise product recommendations (recs) is the creative force that drives Retention Science to continue to iterate, improve and innovate. In this post, our team unveils our iteration from a minimum viable product to a production-ready solution. Here’s the chronology of events: Month. The post Scaling Recommendation Engine: 15,000 to 130M Users in 24 Months appeared first on ReSci.
CloseSaaS
MAY 24, 2017
When your car has an alignment issue, it’s difficult to stay on course. The same is true for your company. If everyone isn’t working toward a common goal—if one tire is tilted even slightly—you might just end up in a ditch.
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Tom Tunguz
MAY 10, 2017
When building a SaaS product for salespeople, a startup’s price will inevitably be compared to Salesforce CRM’s cost of about $150 per seat. How expensive is this new product compared to Salesforce? In diligence calls, I often hear buyers say: one-half of Salesforce’s price seems expensive; one-third might seem more reasonable. This is the price anchoring effect in the real world.
Network World
MAY 25, 2017
I was recently invited to participate on a panel at a major IT conference, where questions from the audience provided an interesting window into the top issues that networking professionals are dealing with as part of their organizations’ digital transformation. Every enterprise, it seems, is planning a cloud strategy. On closer inspection, most are already using the cloud in the form SaaS ERP and CRM applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, etc.
Saasler
MAY 9, 2017
An integration can be explained as a “communication channel” that generally works both ways (input/output) for the exchange of information between two applications. In the case of SaaS applications, which are expected to offer a portfolio of services to their users, the implementation of powerful integrations can greatly increase their added value and product functionality, while helping grow the business.
Software Platform Consulting
MAY 16, 2017
I love the word “oligoply” It’s a fancy word for a market structure in which a few companies have the large majority of market share. The recent news reminds me just how many markets are becoming oligopolistic–especially those dominated by platform software. Before We Get to Software… Warren Buffett recently announced that he was buying airline stocks.
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ReSci
MAY 14, 2017
What if as a marketer you could run 10 A/B tests within a week without lifting a finger instead of the standard monthly testing? You could be getting a significant increase in productivity and performance if you do it right. A/B testing is a standard step. The post The Smart Marketer: When to Use Multi-Armed Bandit A/B Testing appeared first on ReSci.
CloseSaaS
MAY 22, 2017
I’m not gonna lie: I’m a great salesperson. Humbleness aside, I've pretty much always been. But as long as we’re being honest, I’ve got a confession, too: I was a terrible sales manager.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 31, 2017
What could be more natural than a marketer selling a product to other marketers? Or an engineer pushing a new devops tool to other developers? Or a customer success person pitching CS tools? After all, they both speak the same language, come from the same domain, will develop trust quickly. Consequently, they will sell faster and more efficiently. This might seem like a very logical argument for differentiating on sales processes, but it’s a fallacy.
Network World
MAY 25, 2017
I was recently invited to participate on a panel at a major IT conference, where questions from the audience provided an interesting window into the top issues that networking professionals are dealing with as part of their organizations’ digital transformation. Every enterprise, it seems, is planning a cloud strategy. On closer inspection, most are already using the cloud in the form SaaS ERP and CRM applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, etc.
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
Tom Tunguz
MAY 25, 2017
When I was taught Michael Porter’s value chain analysis , I learned to analyze at the industry level. A beer supplier sells to wholesaler sells to distributor sales to retailers sells to customer. But as I went back last night and reread Porter’s Competitive Strategy, I was surprised to learn that Porter’s intended value chain analysis to be used also at the business unit and at the company level.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 18, 2017
As the number of SaaS applications has exploded, the SaaS ecosystem is responding to data fragmentation with middleware. This isn’t the middleware of the early 2000s, which was focused on helping developers build software. This is middleware that is focused on helping end-users unify data from the vast numbers of data repositories now existent.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 13, 2017
In January, I wrote The Hardest Round to Raise which argued Series B rounds would be the most challenging early stage round in 2017. Irrespective of the annual vicissitudes of the fundraising market, Series Bs are always the most challenging rounds to raise because they are in-between rounds. The Series B is the pimpled and gangly adolescent phase of startup evolution.
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