Chaotic Flow
JUNE 11, 2013
SaaS growth isn’t a goal; it’s an obsession. The good news is that SaaS growth can be very smooth and predictable, because of the SaaS recurring revenue subscription model. The bad news is that SaaS growth can also be predictably slow the bigger you get. After a few years of rapid SaaS startup growth, it’s easy to find yourself on the short end of the hockey stick if you don’t know the right levers to push.
The Angel VC
JUNE 9, 2013
Example for a Geckoboard KPI dashboard Last week I spent a day in Stockholm to attend a metrics seminar organized by our friends at Creandum. It was a great event with talks from people of some of the best Internet companies from the Nordic region such as Spotify or Wrapp. Thanks Johan , Joel , Daniel , Frederic and everyone at Creandum for setting it up and inviting me!
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 3, 2013
Sorry to break this news to you, but customers don't really care about you. Even when they ask about you , it's really about them : "What problems can you solve for me?" "What experience do you have with companies like mine?" "What do you know about my business, my market, my product?" "How can you help me?" You may have a broad range of expertise. You might have solved problems for all kinds of different companies in all kinds of different industries.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 23, 2013
When I first started in venture capital five years ago, I wanted to create a programmatic way to analyze companies well. My goal was to be able to step into a meeting with an entrepreneur with some kind of form that I would fill out throughout the meeting, so that by the end of the meeting I might have an understanding how the startup fits into its ecosystem.
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
CloseSaaS
JUNE 28, 2013
Analytics matter, so today we’re releasing real-time reporting numbers you can quickly drill into for more detail.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 5, 2013
The reason most startups go out of business is they run out of money. The CEO bears the responsibility for raising money, managing those assets and growing the business into profitability and ultimate sustainability. But the CEO shouldn’t bear this load alone. To help defray that critical responsibility, the CEO ought to have a consigliere, an advisor who helps plan, allocate resources, and illuminate the trade-offs between decisions.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 27, 2013
I started playing around with Google’s programming language called Go yesterday. There’s a tour of the language found here. Clearly, Go has been designed by a group of incredibly smart people and makes a series of terrific design decisions that enable a tremendous amount of flexibility and performance while reducing the amount of code an engineer has to write.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 26, 2013
I’m asked with some frequency which startup sectors are booming. Mobile messaging and big data are knee-jerk reactions at this point. But these days I often respond “financial services.”. In the last two years, financial services startups have been innovating impressively quickly and challenging some of the fundamental ways in which capital and credit are distributed.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 25, 2013
At about 11pm on a Tuesday night in 2006, I began coding a skeleton CRM web app for our internal use at Google called Toothpaste that tracked the key details of our larger inside sales customers. It was my first real Rails project after spending quite some coding Java. After I ran “rails server”, I watched the terminal as the program spit out a few lines from the built in app server, Webbrick, and refreshed my browser to see the Ruby on Rails Welcome page.
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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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 20, 2013
What is a social product? This was the question Sandi MacPherson, founder of Quibb posed to me, over lunch earlier this week. In Startupland, we bandy about terms like social, social media, virality and community when talking about products but it wasn’t until that moment that I stopped to think a bit more about what each word really means. Sandi has thought a lot about these concepts while building Quibb and she has some of the clearest points of view on social products I’ve encountered.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 18, 2013
There’s an adage that is being passed around by entrepreneurs that goes something like this: “As soon as you raise this round, it’s time to start worrying about the next round.” I think it’s a wise adage. It’s similar to my most important principle of fund raising which is “Raise enough money to achieve a set of milestones that will attract a subsequent round of investment from new investors.”.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 16, 2013
One of my favorite courses in engineering grad school was Marketing which was taught by a brilliant quirky professor. On the first day of class, our professor wrote on the board this equation: Innovation = Invention + Go To Market. Addressing a group of engineers who prided themselves on their technical skills, this professor of marketing tried to instill in us that invention alone isn’t enough to create innovation.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 13, 2013
In the past 12 months, we’ve seen at least three major acquisitions of social networks by larger social networks. Facebook acquires Instagram. Google acquires Waze. Yahoo acquires Tumblr. And we are likely to see quite a few more given the dramatic growth of mobile messaging clients and social networks of all different kinds. While each of these acquisitions has their own particular motivations, underpinning all three is user engagement.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 12, 2013
Recently, hardware companies have been popping up in all kinds of places. Nest is building the next thermostat. Sonos sells seamless and beautiful soun systems. Thalmic Labs and Leap Motion are innovating in alternate forms of computing control. Electric Imp is building the platform-as-a-service to connect devices to the web via Wifi and so on. Hardware investments are blossoming because software is reinvigorating the market.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 11, 2013
In the center of Google’s campus lie a cluster of four buildings: 40, 41, 42 and 43. Contained within building 42 was the epicenter of product management: Jonathan Rosenberg’s office. Immediately next to his office stood a collection of three bookcases containing a library of different books on various topics that JR curated. I used to pass that library every day on my way to meetings and each time I walked past, I would pause to see which new volumes had arrived.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 10, 2013
Pricing is one of the most challenging decisions for any startup. One of the simplest ways of discovering customer willingness to pay is simply to ask them. At first blush, that might seem a reasonable and effective solution, it is prone to wild inaccuracy. Absolute pricing judgments are hard without reference points. For example: How much would you be willing to pay for a new iPhone?
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 9, 2013
Over the past 15 years, we’ve seen a wholesale migration of software development on the web towards cloud away from client/server models. The cloud offers many benefits: seamless upgrades, synchronization of data across different devices and lesser hardware requirements. But the cloud centralizes all the data. All of our Dropbox files, Google documents, and emails are held within one or few companies' servers - which provides easy access for hackers and government.
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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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 6, 2013
Reading TechMeme and HackerNews this morning, you’ll find more stories about legal issues relating to technology than stories about innovation: the PRISM affair, the DoJ’s suit against Apple for anticompetitive ebook pricing, Samsung’s win of a sales injunction banning iPhones and iPads, Chinese hacking of US assets, patent trolling and reform and so on.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 4, 2013
We all type quite a bit. I’ve never measured how many words each day I type but I imagine it’s probably a few thousand each week between my laptop and my mobile phone and across emails and blog posts. And no one can deny the toll this takes on our wrists. In the past week, I’ve been suffering from some carpal tunnel pain particularly as I’ve been coding more.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 3, 2013
Do you measure your product’s time to utility? If not, you should. The best products reward users as quickly as possible after installation and account creation. But it’s easy to forget about this and as a result, watch conversion rates from download/install-to-active fall. CRM products have the longest time to utility of most software products. The end user, a salesperson, logs into a blank Salesforce installation.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 21, 2013
Plenty of SaaS products claim email as a core focus—but none of them have a more seamless email integration than Close. Here are just a few of the ways we ensure Close’s email experience is best-in-class.
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
JUNE 5, 2013
Custom fields in Close are powerful & flexible ways to add additional information to your sales data.
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