The Angel VC
JUNE 28, 2017
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 11, 2017
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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Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
JUNE 5, 2017
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.
Brian Balfour
JUNE 28, 2017
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.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JUNE 3, 2017
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.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Mucker Capital
JUNE 13, 2017
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
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 18, 2017
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.
Cardin Partners
JUNE 26, 2017
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.
Brian Balfour
JUNE 20, 2017
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.
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
JUNE 30, 2017
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.
ITPro
JUNE 27, 2017
In-depth. We explain the history of Citrix, its key products and key people.
ReSci
JUNE 27, 2017
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 15, 2017
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.
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
Cardin Partners
JUNE 19, 2017
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).
Ramp Ventures
JUNE 24, 2017
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).
CloseSaaS
JUNE 28, 2017
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 13, 2017
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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Tom Tunguz
JUNE 28, 2017
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 6, 2017
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 19, 2017
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 25, 2017
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.
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Tom Tunguz
JUNE 29, 2017
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.
Tom Tunguz
JUNE 3, 2017
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.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 26, 2017
All salespeople go through dry spells. They fall short of sales goals. They stress over missed opportunities and ineffective pipelines.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 21, 2017
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?
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 19, 2017
How often are your deals derailed by the unexpected?
CloseSaaS
JUNE 12, 2017
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.
CloseSaaS
JUNE 5, 2017
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.
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