The Angel VC
JANUARY 10, 2017
Today is January 10, 2017. That means that in ten days, this jerk will become the leader of the free world. Ugh. It still feels surreal to me. In less earth shattering news, the fact that it's 2017 also means that my "SaaS Funding in 2016" napkin needs an update. As a reminder, in the original post I tried to give a "back of a napkin" answer to this question: What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016?
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 26, 2017
Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. In 2010, classic SaaS was booming, the benefits of a subscription model were finally becoming clear to the public markets and the mass-market. Since then, many other types of software businesses have been created in new categories like agriculture technology and robotics.
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Hitenism
JANUARY 20, 2017
In online marketing today, you have hundreds of channels to choose from. Within each, there are thousands of tactics that you could use. If you’re like most marketers, you’re trying to tackle a dozen or more of these channels and tactics at any given time. If you try to do too much with your marketing strategy, it quickly becomes difficult to keep the clarity and conviction you need to simplify, focus, and drive key results.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JANUARY 10, 2017
I talk with a lot of new customers about how and why they bought a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Here are the kinds of things I hear: “We didn’t spend a lot of time with the free trial. We just subscribed.” “With such a low monthly cost and no long-term commitment, we figured if we didn’t like the product, we’d just drop it.” “We didn’t spend weeks looking at demos and trials; we just bought it.
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Pierre Lechelle
JANUARY 23, 2017
CEOs moving past Product / Market Fit often have issues to grow. They struggle to find more channels to acquire new leads. When I met Ryan, his problems were radically different… They were growing quickly. His team was doing a fine job. They implemented Growth Processes, but after a few months, they realized that they […]. Cet article Why Companies are Failing to Implement Growth Processes 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.
The Angel VC
JANUARY 15, 2017
We have a tradition here at Point Nine that once a year, we organize a meetup for the founders of our SaaS portfolio companies. The first meetup took place in SF back in 2012 and gave the founders in our (at that time still rather small) portfolio a unique opportunity to learn about what works and what doesn't work in SaaS, compare notes and share war stories.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 28, 2017
How much should a founder raise for their startup? I imagine almost every founder contemplating a fundraising round ponders this question. There are many different paths to developing an answer. The right answer that every startup founder has told me is as much capital as possible at the highest possible price. But what strategies exist to justify increasing the round size and consequently price?
Hitenism
JANUARY 6, 2017
It was 2008, and I was having a classic founder moment. I had no idea what I was doing. But at least I was doing! I was founding a SaaS business, KISSmetrics. Like any startup, we were flailing, failing, and on fire, all at the same time. It was a wild, insane, and ridiculously exhausting experience. I was in charge of product development, operations, finance, funding, and probably 44 other things.
Stack Commerce
JANUARY 26, 2017
It’s a tough job getting marketing efforts rolling, and even tougher trying to scale them. While it’s great to build your brand through snappy messaging and eye-catching creative (and you do NEED those things), it’s not always what grows your revenue and bottom line. At StackCommerce, each new publisher and new brand we work with is a fresh marketing challenge.
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.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 30, 2017
Interviews are like first dates, where the candidate and the interviewer try to pass off the best versions of themselves. Candidates sell you on their immaculate resumes, and some canned responses. You sell them on unlimited coconut water, and a foosball table.
Brian Balfour
JANUARY 12, 2017
Quick note: We recently announced the next Growth Series , an 8-week program for designed for experienced practitioners in growth (past participants came from Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn, Evernote, Airbnb, Soundcloud, Facebook, and many other companies). It's by application only, and if interested, you can learn more here. In the early days of building the growth team at HubSpot, we spent a few months optimizing onboarding in our product and produced some meaningful improvements.
yoursales
JANUARY 9, 2017
SALES STACK 2017: THE TOOLS SALES STACK 2017: THE TOOLS SALES STACK 2017: THE TOOLS. Want the 2019 list instead? Then click here! A s a supplier for outsourced sales for SaaS businesses the sales stack is increasingly important. One of the things expected of us, is that we always have a fairly good idea about which sales tools are available to drive growth for SaaS companies.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 10, 2017
During my first few weeks at Google, I read through the internal resumes of my new colleagues, which detailed their work and promotion paths. Google promoted people quickly. Some college graduates who had distinguished themselves had been promoted every quarter for more than a year, and were managers, senior managers, even directors. And I wanted the same type of trajectory.
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
Hitenism
JANUARY 9, 2017
Building a company is a lot like trying to predict the future. You’re looking through a crystal ball to see where the market is moving, and how you can adapt your product accordingly. You have limited cash, which means that you only have a finite amount of time and resources to scale your business. The longer you take to make decisions about your company, the more time and money you burn.
Ramp Ventures
JANUARY 2, 2017
CMI’s 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Survey found that 88% of B2B companies are using content marketing. Why? Because it works. Content improves customer and brand relations. It can influence purchasing decisions. It can rank in the search results and drive qualified traffic to your site. It can encourage people to link back to your site and improve its overall long-term health and visibility.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 25, 2017
If you work on growing a B2B startup—whether as founder, marketer or sales person—grab a free copy of our latest book: From 0 to 1,000 customers and beyond - The 4 steps to scaling your B2B customer acquisition.
Hitenism
JANUARY 16, 2017
In 2014, Mixpanel’s Series B pitch deck spelled out the company’s expansion plans over the next two years: 3x sales headcount and rapidly race towards distribution. Reduce sales ramp time by 30-50% via sales enablement. Double headcount every 6-9 months. Double down on marketing to widen our lead flow to lower cost per acq. long-term. They raised $65 million dollars with that plan.
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 31, 2017
Which is the more important priority? Growth or churn? Churn or growth? Early-stage companies have limited resources to focus their efforts. On one hand, growth is important in order to raise a venture capital round. Growth shows demand for a product. On the other hand, churn is a huge source of friction and raises questions of product market fit. Especially in the early stage, churn is the more important of the two priorities, and when founders ask me which to emphasize that the seed and series
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 23, 2017
Cisco announced yesterday it would acquire AppDynamics for $3.7B. We’ve analyzed AppDynamic’s growth and key metrics, because the business had filed its S-1 to go public. However, the management team and board changed plans and made history. By my estimate, AppDynamics is the fifth largest software acquisition in modern times. More astounding, the AppDynamics acquisition does set the absolute high water mark in one regard: acquisition multiple.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 21, 2017
For the nine years I’ve been a venture capitalist, there’s always been a buzzword of the year. Solomo (social local mobile). Mobile-first. Realtime. Big data. 2016 was the year of machine learning. Is ML just another wave to crash and dissipate on the trough of disillusionment ? I don’t think so. In this rare case, I think hype is masking quite a bit of true technical innovation.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 19, 2017
Over the last few days, I’ve been reading Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s autobiographical tale describing the formation of Nike, and I think it might be one of the very best founding stories I’ve read. Easy to read, brimming with passion, full of harrowing business crises, the book is an inspiration to anyone who has a crazy idea and commits to persevering.
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Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 17, 2017
I’ve been struggling with the right way to enable commenting on this blog for a long time. In 2013, I wrote a post called Letter to the Editor about my challenges with comments. Most notably, comments meaningfully changed readers’ perceptions of the content they read, even if the comments are not sound. In addition, I haven’t found a way to effectively moderate comments at scale.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 16, 2017
Most SaaS companies dream of attaining the $100M ARR mark. The very fastest attain the goal in 6-7 years. Last week, Workday halted trading to announce it had signed Walmart as a customer. Brian White, research analyst at Drexel Hamilton investment bank, estimated this one customer could generate $100M-$200M per year for Workday in recurring revenue - a single customer.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 8, 2017
Calendars contain one of the under-studied data sets within companies. How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives, wrote Anne Dillard. How we spend our days at work determines what we and the company ultimately achieve. I remember meeting Ryan Fuller of Volometrix several years ago. He shared the story of the business he and his colleagues had built analyzing the way companies spend their days.
Tom Tunguz
JANUARY 4, 2017
The fundraising market is in flux. The data indicates that it is certainly reverting to the mean after two record years in 2014 and 2015. Late stage market dynamics are changing as hedge funds and mutual funds seek other areas to invest. In 2017, there will be a lot of comparison between the prices public bound companies fetch at IPO compared to the last round private valuations as the public window opens.
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
JANUARY 1, 2017
Founded in 2008, AppDynamics is a leader in the application performance management space. AppDynamics technology helps engineers determine how software applications behave as users interact with them. Based in San Francisco, AppDynamics employs about 1200 people and has raised approximately $315M to date. The company filed their S-1 recently to take the company public.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 25, 2017
Here is a recording of our live webinar "SMS in Close + best practices for using SMS in B2B sales". Just in case you couldn't make it, here is a full recording of the webinar and links to the resources we referenced.
CloseSaaS
JANUARY 23, 2017
Monday morning, 10:00 a.m. Meeting time. You’ve got an appointment with a major prospect who seems really interested in your product. You take a deep breath, lean back in your chair, and stare at the phone in eager anticipation. Any time now.
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