The Angel VC
MARCH 13, 2014
My colleague Nicolas wrote a great guide with tips and tricks on how to do cohort analyses which I'd like to share with the readers of this blog. Thanks, Nicolas, for allowing me to guest publish it here. Without further ado, here it is! - - - - - - - - - - At Point Nine we believe that the only way to get a real sense of user retention and customer lifetime is doing a proper cohort analysis.
Chaotic Flow
MARCH 25, 2014
My first serious lesson in the criticality of SaaS metrics was about six years ago when I was unexpectedly stumped in a board of directors meeting. I had just presented the booking plan for the year and one of the Director’s in the meeting said that the plan was good, but we really needed to increase our booking rate. My first reaction was something like: “Well our current booking rate is pretty strong and we’re a SaaS business, so even with no immediate improvement to bookings we’ll continue to
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 16, 2014
Last week, Sean Ellis made an interesting comment in response to this post on public SaaS companies’ growth rates : I’m guilty of giving the same advice to startup founders without providing a transparent rationale. This post is my explanation of why the 15-20% MRR growth number is a reasonably good target for post-Seed/pre-Series A SaaS startups to aim for.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MARCH 10, 2014
Over the 10 years since salesforce.com went public, a few things have changed in the way we market software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. For one, companies are getting more comfortable with the idea of running critical business functions in the cloud. Not too long ago, people marketing SaaS solutions spent a lot of time trying to convince prospective customers that putting key applications and data on the cloud was OK.
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
Aaron Beashel
MARCH 13, 2014
In a recent post on my blog titled 4 stages of growth hacking , I make the point that optimising your Growth Engine is often an overlooked step of the Growth process. Without having an optimised growth engine (particularly an optimised acquisition funnel & a low churn rate ) you will have a very difficult time scaling your growth either because you cannot find profitable channels or your high churn rate means you’ll hit a growth ceiling.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Aber Law Firm
MARCH 12, 2014
3 Things to Consider When Creating your Enterprise SaaS Agreement Lots of clients ask me to help them with their enterprise SaaS agreement models. The discussion always starts with; well tell me about your ‘enterprise’ SaaS offering. Too often the clients don’t have it all mapped out, so we then talk about the following 3 issues. Its About Price and When Your Customer Pays.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 31, 2014
As I’ve described in a previous post , this blog’s goal is to create and sustain relationships with readers across the startup landscape. Tuning the engine is proving much harder than I expected and I suspect that content marketers are facing similar issues. For example, over the past 18 months I’ve witnessed a halving of RSS subscribers to this blog.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 30, 2014
Last week, I had a surreal experience with Uber. It was mid-morning on Friday and I pushed a button to request an UberX as I walked out of Sightglass, the coffee shop deep in the South of Market district. When the car arrived a few minutes later, I got in. Without saying a word, the driver passed me his iPhone. Confused, I looked up from my emails and he mouthed to me, “I am deaf.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 26, 2014
Earlier this week, I attended the Spring YCombinator Demo Day. I’ve been attending for six years now. Each time, I’m impressed by the intelligence, ambition and the polish of the founders presenting companies only a few weeks or months old. As I listened to the pitches, I wondered if the types of startups founders decide to build at YC has changed over time and whether those trends are lagging or leading indicators of the market as a whole.
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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
MARCH 24, 2014
Yesterday, Box filed for its IPO and released its S-1. I enjoy going through S-1s because quite a bit about a private company is revealed and though only a subset of information is released, the S-1 discloses some very important details about the business operations. Over the past several months, I’ve analyzed the basket of the roughly 40 public SaaS companies many different ways.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 23, 2014
Imagine a city council meeting with three agenda items: a $100M power plant zoning approval, a request to build a $10,000 bike rack for city sidewalks and and a $100 proposal to buy refreshments for the annual picnic. The power plant discussion takes all of 3 minutes to reach approval, as does the refreshment budget. But the $1000 bike rack debate drags on for hours as council members debate the right materials, the best color scheme and the right way to announce the project.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 20, 2014
Over the past few years, I’ve debated the existence of a Series A crunch and found in that analysis that the volume of Series As was increasing. This trend hasn’t abated. The number of Series As has grown by 31% annually for the past 5 years, reaching more than 831 Series As in 2013, up from 284 in 2009. In short, no founder should be concerned about the Series A market.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 19, 2014
I’ve been getting a few questions about the tools I use to publish this blog, so I figured I’d write about it and reveal the machinery behind the curtain. I use four main tools Jekyll, Github Mou, and RStudio. Jekyll is the blogging engine; Github is the hosting provider; Mou is the app I use to write these posts; and RStudio is the place I analyze data and make charts.
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Tom Tunguz
MARCH 18, 2014
Each morning’s news seems to bring another fund-raising announcement of ever larger scale. Just a few months ago, Pure Storage raised $150M in the largest ever venture investment in a storage company. These record financings certainly generate significant press interest. But how representative of the fund raising environment are these mega-rounds?
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 12, 2014
At the time of the IPO, the median Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company generates $100M in revenue, creates $2.6M in profit and holds $85M in cash on the balance sheet. A company in this position typically raises $107M in its IPO and trades at 11x revenue, for a $1.1B market cap. The path to getting there is revealing. Below is a chart showing the median revenue ramp of the 41 publicly traded SaaS companies by year since founding.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 10, 2014
SaaS companies are the darlings of the public market. The average publicly traded SaaS company enjoys twice as strong a revenue multiple as ten years ago. SaaS companies’ time to IPO has been decreasing steadily from over 10 years since founding to under 7. Despite the decrease in time to IPO, the average dollars raised at IPO has tripled from the early nineties and grown by 50% since 2000.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 9, 2014
One of the most important trends in the Internet at the moment is unbundling. Entrepreneurs are picking apart Craigslist and eBay, vertical by vertical. At the same time, other entrepreneurs have replicated the core functions and features of Facebook and LinkedIn , creating hugely valuable companies. But simply calling this trend unbundling doesn’t do the movement justice, particularly in the transactional web.
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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
MARCH 5, 2014
Since the first transistor, increasing speed has been at the core of much innovation in Silicon Valley. Over more than three decades, Moore’s Law has remained the engine of progress in chip technology. I’ve been wondering if a analogous productivity law will be written for data. One level up the stack from the chip, software has benefitted tremendously from chip speed.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 4, 2014
Most SaaS companies provide tools to help people accomplish a goal in a better way than they could before. A key part of a SaaS startup’s toolkit, then, is changing end user behavior. A startup that doesn’t change the behavior of a customer will see the customer churn in a few months or at the expiration of their contract. Customers don’t change their behavior for many reasons.
Tom Tunguz
MARCH 2, 2014
Over the last 12 years, the number of startups founded has grown each year by 25%, according to Crunchbase data. That’s quite an acceleration each year! See the chart here. As the number of companies in a sector grows, do the odds of successfully raising capital decrease? The chart above shows startup company formation rates, the number of new companies formed each year from 2004-2011 by Crunchbase sector.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 26, 2014
When you're talking with prospective clients, they'll sometimes ask you for references. They want to talk with someone other than you to get a real customer's perspective on your product and service.References of happy customers are one of the most powerful sales tools you have.
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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?
CloseSaaS
MARCH 24, 2014
Someone recently asked us "How should a startup hustler hustle?" We thought we would put together some resources to help you get your startup hustle on!
CloseSaaS
MARCH 21, 2014
In an effort to be more transparent about product improvements, here's a list of some things we launched this week (along with making Call Forwarding available on all calling-enabled plans).
CloseSaaS
MARCH 19, 2014
Call forwarding is now offered on all of our calling enabled plans (Pro/Business/Enterprise). We've also enabled call forwarding for our non-US customers who are on the Business and Enterprise offering. No matter where you are in the world, you'll always stay on top of your sales game.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 18, 2014
How to find the best sales talent for your cash-strapped startup? Hint: it’s not where 90% of entrepreneurs search.
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CloseSaaS
MARCH 17, 2014
When startup founders decide to hire their first salesperson, they try to assess the risks involved in changing their engineering-focused culture by bringing in someone for sales.They know what the upside could be, but wonder what the downside of making their first sales hire might look like.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 13, 2014
One month ago, we launched customizable columns on the Leads search view, which let you add some extra basic fields (lead description, URL, custom field, creation user/date, or last updated user/date) to the table.
CloseSaaS
MARCH 13, 2014
If you're doing outbound sales, you'll need to anticipate objections and prepare for them. Part of your outbound sales preparation should be to create an effective outbound sales calling script as well as your sales objection management document.
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