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Since publishing the original SaaS metics blog series and subsequent SaaS Metrics Guide to SaaS Financial Performance , I’ve received numerous inquiries on various details and hidden gotchas in SaaS metrics implementation. This new series of SaaS Metrics FAQs explores some of these finer SaaS metrics points in a simple Q&A format. In this second post, I examine SaaS MRR churn, a SaaS metric that extends from SaaS customer churn which was covered in the first installment.
To be truly successful, I believe startups should determine which of the four core disciplines is their strength: product, engineering, marketing and sales - and focus, focus, focus on leveraging that advantage in the market. Product driven startups - At their outset Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram were exploratory products driven by their respective creators, Jack Dorsey Ben Silbermann, and Kevin Systrom, who were each product managers building a product of their own vision.
Recently I stumbled on the term "unscalable hack", in a blog post by Chris Dixon. This really struck a chord with me because it's a very important concept for many startups but I didn't have a term for it until I read Chris' post. What exactly is an "unscalable hack"? Google doesn't return a lot of useful results and neither does Quora , so let me try to explain it.
When it comes to putting together a marketing plan, there are lots of reasons to spend first and think later. The "spending" I'm talking about is spending on marketing programs like PR, events or collateral. And the "thinking" is about developing a compelling value proposition and messages. One reason why marketers spend first and think later… it's more fun.
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
Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.
Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.
Many of the SaaS companies I work with are buzzing about a new concept: product qualified leads (PQL). It’s typical to see outbound sales teams create new leads by cold-calling - think Glengarry. And marketing also qualifies leads (MQL) using online advertising, branding, content, email and other channels. But the PQL concept is novel. PQLs are potential customers who have used a product and reached pre-defined triggers that signify a strong likelihood to become a paying customer.
Photo: flickr/nemabix. I don’t remember much of junior year chemistry class except the lab experiment in which we made fireworks. My lab partner and I doubled and tripled the amounts of strontium, potassium, calcium and other explosives specified in the instructions. Our firecracker dwarfed our classmates' in size and when we lit them after two unbearable weeks of baking, there was no question we misunderstood chemistry.
The most important principle of start up fund raising is: Raise enough money to achieve a set of milestones that will attract a subsequent round of investment from new investors. Last week, a founder of a seed stage company came to pitch. When I told him the opportunity wasn’t a fit for us, he asked me what milestones he would need to achieve to raise a Series A - as he was raising a seed round!
Brokers serve two key roles within ecosystems. First, they introduce buyers and sellers. Second, they lend their expertise to help buyers and sellers make the right decisions in the market. The internet neutralizes the first value proposition of brokers by leveling the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers at a far greater scale with much better data than any broker ever could.
Your payments integration is more powerful than you think. In today’s complex business landscape, treating payments as just a software feature is a missed opportunity for significant growth and customer acquisition. With the right partner, payments can become a strategy that leads to competitive advantages. Designed for software leaders, this playbook outlines how to harness the full power of a payments strategy to drive substantial revenue and enhance the overall customer experience.
Once each month I met Peter at Café Habana in Nolita for huevos rancheros drenched in tomato sauce and a glass of fresh orange juice. Mopping up yolks with tortillas, Peter and I chatted about his business: the techniques of scalable customer acquisition, the priorities of the product and engineering team, the structure of sales quotas and the ebbing and flowing dynamics of the market place he and his team were building.
Each time I open Salesforce in my browser, I think of Stephen Hawking. It’s because of an aphorism an entrepreneur shared with me a few weeks ago. He said: The cost to fix a data error at the time of entry is $1. The cost to fix it an hour after it’s been entered is $10. And the cost to fix it several months later is $100+. Take for example a venture capitalist’s CRM tool.
The valley and startup-land does not fetishize failure despite the increasing reports to the contrary. FailCon is not the Darwin Awards for startups. Founders do not start businesses with the express interest to fail. Instead, the valley is infatuated with the post-mortem of failures and successes alike because within every venture are pearls of wisdom - a subtle but important difference.
“It’s something I thought I’d never do,” one founder told me yesterday. He had hired a recruiter to help him grow his team. But at some point in time, most quickly growing startups will need help forming their teams. We kicked off searches at two Redpoint companies in earlier this year in addition to several last year and I’ve been taking notes on each of the processes.
Incorporating generative AI (gen AI) into your sales process can speed up your wins through improved efficiency, personalized customer interactions, and better informed decision- making. Gen AI is a game changer for busy salespeople and can reduce time-consuming tasks, such as customer research, note-taking, and writing emails, and provide insightful data analysis and recommendations.
I see a recurring three step pattern with data waves: First data collected. Then it’s presented. Last it is made actionable. In every data wave, the companies that transform data into actionable insights are the most valuable because their products not only identify but solve problems. Knowing about an issue without understanding the mechanics required to fix it causes paralysis.
Four and a half years ago, I left my role at Google as a product manager to join the team at Redpoint. The transition became the biggest professional challenge of my career up to that point. Suddenly, I was working with a smaller team, managing massive ambiguity in job definition, time allocation and decision-making, and giving up the adrenaline of launch day.
Products aren’t sold in isolation - they exist within ecosystems. Great product market fit and sales pitches hinge on understanding and serving all the members of an ecosystem. Should a product fail to meet the needs of any one member, company success and sales velocity will falter. One tool I use with portfolio companies is the Value Proposition Diagram (VPD) which shows why a product is compelling to every customer - and most products are sold to more than one customer at the same time.
If you’re like me, you switch task managers every six months at the point that you have added a bunch of items in your list that you’ll never get around to and can’t bear to be reminded of them again. At which point, you conclude that the app has failed you. It must have because you haven’t completed any of these tasks! Task management tools fail users because they operate without context.
A failed payment isn't just a lost transaction - it could mean a customer churning for good. But not all payment declines are the same. For SaaS businesses, decline reasons vary, shaped by customer demographics and the nature of your service. Understanding your decline reason make up can be a game changer when it comes to improving retention and revenue.
Startups are discovery teams - they venture into the abyss, like Shackleton, aspiring to cross the Antarctic, plant a flag and live to tell the tale. Because every expedition is unique, no one knows what will work: product features, marketing tactics, sales pitches, fundraising stories. Nor can the team fully anticipate the precipices and risks: competitive, legal, hiring, market timing and management risks.
Hardware competition is cut-throat. Walking through the halls of CES, every Android phone is identical. LG has copied each Samsung model. Because of the competition, tablet prices are plummeting - I saw a $49 7inch tablet ( and some were giving Nexus 7s away for free with subscription. Not constrained to large competitors, startups like FitBit and Jawbone launched competing (and nearly identical) products within weeks of each other: the FitBit Flex and the Jawbone Up Even newer segments like ges
There is no prouder boast, but also no better prescription, for executive leadership than the words Andrew Carnegie, the father of the U.S. steel industry, chose for his own tombstone: “Here lies a man who knew how to bring into his service men better than he was himself.”. Amen. This epitaph captures succinctly so much of leadership: the ability to articulate a vision and convince others of the importance of that mission; the self awareness of knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses; the desire
In the last 12 years, marketing has been reinvented. No segment has benefitted more from this transformation than startups who have both created the new marketing and leveraged its skills to transform industries. These new marketers creating this wave have been so effective they can delay or even obviate the need for outside sales teams. Historically marketing has been pseudoscience - an undisciplined hand-wavy concoction of story telling and a “throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks” menta
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
Daniel Pink, former speechwriter for Al Gore, has written an unconventional book on sales called To Sell is Human. In this well researched book, Pink observes a few surprising evolutions in society and their impact on sales. The hard sell is dead. Enabled by the internet, prospective buyers know more about a product than a salesperson. This is true for cars as much as enterprise software.
We should be living in the future already. I should be controlling my home lights from my phone. My coffee machine should reorder coffee from Amazon automatically and my washing machine should schedule its own maintenance. This kind of future demands that machines act with human intelligence. I’m asking my coffee machine to think like me, so that I don’t have to.
Communication is essential to the success of every startup. Startup teams collaborate in product and engineering conversations, in general management, and in recruiting. Externally, startups sell customers using marketing and sales. Startups also pitch investors during fundraising conversations. Clearly, great communication makes demands of the audience.
Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.
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?
Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.
Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.
Microsoft Finally got it Right. They Created a Plain English EULA! Microsoft drafted their new Windows 8 EULA in plain English and in a way that has never been done before (at least based on what I have read … and I read lots of EULAs). The New EULA Structure. It has 3 sections: (1) FAQ, (2) Additional Terms and (3) Limited Warranty. Now you may say that is not a big deal, well actually it is a big deal.
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