June, 2017

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WTF is PMF? (part 1 of 2)

The Angel VC

I’ve been fascinated by the concept of Product/Market Fit for quite some time. The reason why it’s such an interesting and important concept is that getting to Product/Market Fit (PMF) marks a critical juncture in a company’s lifecycle. At least in theory, the life of a company can be divided into a “pre PMF” phase and a “post PMF” phase, with each of the two phases having very different objectives and requiring very different strategies.

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Why Amazon's Acquisition of Whole Foods Matters for Startupland

Tom Tunguz

Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods is notable for many reasons. Of course, there’s the magnitude $13.7B. The second is the shockwaves reverberating through the grocery industry. Costco fell 10% and Kroger almost 25% on the news. Third, the acquisition underscores the importance of physical retail even to the largest American ecommerce giant.

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SaaS Companies Must Invest in Building Their Brand

Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth

In today’s world of data-driven marketing, it’s easy to get fixated on what’s measurable. While leveraging data is both important and smart, I increasingly find myself wondering if we, as SaaS marketers are overlooking the human dimension of marketing in favour of what’s easy to track, analyse and optimise. Undoubtedly, brand building falls into the “hard to measure” category, but as we see within the business to consumer (B2C) world, brand is hugely important.

Branding 112
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Don't hate your website

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

When they talk about their websites, I find that marketing people fall into two groups: One group thinks their website is awful. The other group is in the midst of re-doing it. They’re unhappy about a lot of things with their website: the way it looks, the number of visitors it attracts, the volume and quality of the leads it collects, and sometimes the number of solutions it sells.

AWS 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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Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough

Brian Balfour

This post is an introduction to a five part series where I explain for frameworks you need to align to grow to a $100M+ company. Subscribe to receive the rest of the series. I’ve been lucky to have been part of building, advising, or investing in 40+ tech companies in the past 10 years. Some $100M+ wins. Some, complete losses. Most end up in the middle.

More Trending

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3 things every cold email should have (backed by research)

CloseSaaS

Have you ever sent an email and been met with nothing but silence on the other end? Have you ever put in the effort to rewrite an email four or five times and still heard crickets?

Sales 52
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How to Tell If You're a Great Manager

Tom Tunguz

I’ve been reading Fred Kofman’s book, Conscious Business. Written in 2006, the book summarizes Kofman’s experiences as a management consultant to some of the great leaders in technology and other industries. In the book, Kofman lists 12 questions Gallup used to identify great managers in one of the largest management surveys conducted.

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5 Lessons for Startups from Edison’s Invention of the Phonograph

Mucker Capital

by Erik Rannala. Real innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, a lesson that the famed inventor Thomas Edison understood better than most. Throughout his life, Edison revealed that great ideas come alive thanks to the proper mix of setting, timing, mindset, and luck. And so it was on the night of July 18th, 1877, during a fairly typical “after-hours” work session at his Menlo Park based lab, when Edison, surrounded by his fellow “muckers,” stumbled upon the invention that would turn him into a nat

Startup 56
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SaaS Valuation FAQ Series - Part 1: The Quick Ratio

Cardin Partners

Q: What’s more important as a determinant of financial value: growth or churn? A: Probably the most common single question we get – and the Quick answer is the Quick Ratio , which accommodates both. The Quick Ratio is the ratio between New/Upsold MRR and Lost (churned)/Downgraded MRR: Let’s take a simple example of an early stage SaaS growth business (HighChurn Inc.) with an SMB focus, currently running @ $1.2M ARR ($100k MRR) and aiming to grow 50% heading into a new calendar/fiscal year.

SMB 53
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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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Inside the 6 Hypotheses that Doubled Patreon’s Activation Success

Brian Balfour

Preface by Brian Balfour: I rarely accept guest posts on this blog, but this opportunity was too good to pass up. A couple months ago Tal Raviv (Growth PM @ Patreon) sent me a short email - "Brian, the results are in. We doubled (yeah, doubled) new creators in our onboarding." My immediate response, holy f*ing YES!!!! My second response, let's write about this.

Scale 84
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Behind the Data Science: Sending Item Alerts to the Right Users

ReSci

The Problem Recommendation algorithms usually try to optimize the best set of items (products) to show a specific user. In certain situations it is necessary to obtain the best set of users that might be interested in a specific item. Many digital marketers face the. The post Behind the Data Science: Sending Item Alerts to the Right Users appeared first on ReSci.

Data 40
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My latest book on cold calling for founders & business owners [free download]

CloseSaaS

We're releasing a new new book for founders and small business owners today, that teaches you everything you need to know to get started with cold calling to get more customers. You can download it here, and if you have comments, questions or want to give us some love, head over to Product Hunt.

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The Intense Power of a Strong Company Culture

Tom Tunguz

Earlier this week, I spoke at 2U’s annual employee conference. Redpoint partnered with 2U at the Series A, and they are now a $2B publicly traded education company that powers online degree programs for Georgetown, USC, Syracuse, Berkeley, and Yale, among others. It was an inspirational moment for me because I observed the intense power of developing strong company culture.

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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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Don’t Let Receipts Request Disease Kill Your SaaS Startup

Ramp Ventures

You can spot receipts request disease in your customer support system. Every time we looked into helpscout at one of our companies, there it was in the unassigned tasks, waiting for someone to pull the short straw and have to deal with it. On the flip side, receipt requests are an issue for your customers. They need receipts to file expense reports (which is something they don’t want to do either).

Startup 40
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Preparing For Acquisition - The Due Diligence Checklist

Cardin Partners

Preparing to sell your company requires a lot of work. Whether planned or unsolicited, when the time comes to ready the company for sale, you will be able to move much more quickly if your financial house is in already in order. The better prepared you are, the faster you can move (including interviewing advisors, and aligning on valuation expectations).

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Everything you need to know about Citrix

ITPro

In-depth. We explain the history of Citrix, its key products and key people.

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7 Interesting E-Commerce Trends for 2017

ReSci

It’s always helpful to be able to see how E-Commerce trends change over time. We’ve seen a lot of flux in the industry and technology, and have a lot of data from our clients and various publications that we believe will really help you plan. The post 7 Interesting E-Commerce Trends for 2017 appeared first on ReSci.

Trends 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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What every inside sales team needs to know about using LinkedIn for prospecting, qualifying & closing deals

CloseSaaS

In the inside sales rep’s toolkit, LinkedIn is definitely a hammer. But as with any tool, if you’re not equipped with the training and knowledge to use LinkedIn correctly, you’re never going to reap the full benefits.

Sales 52
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SaaS Fundraising in 2017

Tom Tunguz

When I analyzed the SaaS fundraising market in 2016 , three trends emerged. The number of SaaS companies raising rounds had stalled, while the total number of dollars plateaued. Meanwhile, round sizes swelled. In other words, there was a concentration of capital in an increasingly small number of names. A year later, those trends have continued to converge, and SaaS valuations have resurged, reaching their highs of the 2014-2015 boom.

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Prioritizing Your Startup's Roadmap

Tom Tunguz

One typical Friday morning in 2004, I walked into a government building and headed to work. I was a junior Java engineer and part of a hired team building an internal system for a government agency. We were a few days behind on schedule, and a technical issue arose. During the morning team meeting, we made a plan to refactor a small key part of the codebase - an effort that should have taken just the morning.

Startup 169
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Apprenticeship

Tom Tunguz

I am most grateful for my work experiences that were apprenticeships. Whether it was Philip who taught me how to write a proper Java function (10 lines or less), or Kim and Scott who are great managers, or the partners at Redpoint who invested a huge amount of time to educate me, those collections of experiences have taught me far more than I could’ve expected.

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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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What the Online Advertising World Can Teach Us about the Evolution of Machine Learning in SaaS

Tom Tunguz

In software, we’ve moved from a world where a customer buys a piece of software to run on their own infrastructure, to a world where a customer pays a vendor to run software on the vendor’s infrastructure. With machine learning, we may see another evolution of this. Machine learning startups create models based on data provided by customers.

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Plant Trees You'll Never See

Tom Tunguz

The New Zealand All Blacks are the most successful athletic team perhaps of all time. A rugby outfit whose name originates from the solid black uniforms, they have won 79% of their international matches spanning 68 years. James Kerr followed the All Blacks, interviewed them and distilled his learnings into a book, Legacy. Kerr organizes the book into 15 life lessons, three of which stood out to me.

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Adoption Chain Risk - The Importance of Selling to Everyone in Your Startup's Supply Chain

Tom Tunguz

In the Wide Lens , Dartmouth Entrepreneurship professor Ron Adner explores the risks associated with innovation. Execution risk is the obvious one. Then there’s co-innovation risk, what might be called chained technology risk. For example, to build a new ML focused microchip, a startup relies on the chip fabrication plant to develop 7nm equipment.

Startup 129
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Gratitude

Tom Tunguz

A friend died this week. It’s the first time I’ve lost a friend of a similar age. I don’t often see the fragility of life first hand, but this is one of those moments. I’ve felt many different emotions after I received the news: despair, grief, fear. The one I’m currently experiencing, though, is gratitude. And I hope that’s the feeling that persists.

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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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The founder’s guide to sales operations

CloseSaaS

For those of us in startup world, we’ve all heard and lived the phrase: “Do things that don’t scale”. Feature Announcement Email Sequences: email drip campaigns for salespeople. Schedule sequences of emails to be automatically sent over days or weeks.Learn moreortry for free.

Scale 52
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How to overcome the “your startup is too small” objection

CloseSaaS

You’ve managed to impress a roomful of enterprise-level executives. They love your product. They share your vision. And they laughed at the cat joke you practiced all morning.

Startup 52
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Assign Leads with the "User" Custom Field type

CloseSaaS

Custom Fields store arbitrary data on your Leads. Until now, Close had 6 Custom Field types (Choices, Date, Date & Time, Number, Text, and Hidden) to help you store different types of data more effectively.

Data 52