May, 2017

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The Unbundling of Excel

Tom Tunguz

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.

Scale 186
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The growing dissonance between two business models (SaaS and VC)

The Angel VC

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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Selling Sales Enablement as a Service

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

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.

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When Marketing Automation Doesn’t Work

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

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.

Marketing 100
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An Omnichannel Payment Solution––Without the Complexity

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.

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6 Mistakes that will kill your B2B SaaS Startup

Pierre Lechelle

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.

B2B 76

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Hiring for Bookings Capacity in Sales

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Revisiting Point Nine’s tech stack. Plus: 7 little hacks that help me keep (some of my) sanity

The Angel VC

[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.

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Building a Growth Team from Zero to Fifty

Brian Balfour

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.

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Permission is for suckers: Why I made this intern a co-founder of my company

CloseSaaS

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.

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How Clinic Sense Reduced Churn and Unlocked More Revenue

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.

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Maybe you shouldn’t have a Growth Team – Interview with Pedro Magriço from Typeform

Pierre Lechelle

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.

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Mastering Business Development

Hacking Revenue

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.

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Bias Against Creativity

Tom Tunguz

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.

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When Business Models Collide: HomeAdvisor and Angie’s List

Software Platform Consulting

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.

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Usage-Based Monetization Musts: A Roadmap for Sustainable Revenue Growth

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

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How to Position Your SaaS Business For a Platform Sell

Entrepreneur - SaaS

It's not about selling feeds and speeds, but selling value to enterprises.

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How to keep misalignment from killing your startup

CloseSaaS

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.

Startup 52
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Scaling Recommendation Engine: 15,000 to 130M Users in 24 Months

ReSci

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.

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IDG Contributor Network: Postcards from the network edge

Network World

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.

Cloud 40
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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

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?

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The Price Anchoring Effect of Distribution Platforms

Tom Tunguz

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.

Pricing 110
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5 Things You Should Know Before Building Integrations

Saasler

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.

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As Software Platforms Grow, So Do the Oligopolies

Software Platform Consulting

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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Why creativity kills sales scalability (and how to fix it)

CloseSaaS

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.

Sales 52
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Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, and Terrence Sheflin

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

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The Smart Marketer: When to Use Multi-Armed Bandit A/B Testing

ReSci

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.

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IDG Contributor Network: Postcards from the network edge

Network World

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.

Cloud 40
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The "Hiring The Buyer's Role to Sell" Fallacy

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Ethics in Machine Learning - An Opportunity for Startups to Lead

Tom Tunguz

We’ve entered an era when computers can understand speech, computers can synthesize speech, computers can develop music, author encryption algorithms, create novel art, respond to customer support questions, and even generate new summaries and reports from data. Increasingly, humans will struggle to distinguish between computer-generated and human generated.

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Launching LLM-Based Products: From Concept to Cash in 90 Days

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

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Startup Best Practices 26 - Choosing Your Startup's Competitive Strategy

Tom Tunguz

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.

Startup 100
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Data Middleware - The SaaS Ecosystem's Response to Fragmentation

Tom Tunguz

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.

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The Challenges of Raising Your Series B

Tom Tunguz

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.

Churn 100