Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 22, 2012
Examining a user’s motivations at the entry point of every major feature in a product and matching the product to this motivation is key to building a great product users love. BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model Theory is a succinct summary of this idea in a formula: Motivation + Trigger + Ability = Behavior. This model says that a user will perform a behavior when given the means, the motive, and the opportunity.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
OCTOBER 9, 2012
If you manage a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, at some point you'll be forced to make a tough decision about your customer acquisition process: Feed it or starve it? Should you pony up the money to feed a full-blown sales and marketing effort? Or should you starve the process and keep the cash in your piggy bank? Because of the way the SaaS business model works, if you feed the customer acquisition process, you hurt profits and burn cash.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
The Angel VC
OCTOBER 18, 2012
Continuing my little series using the "minimum viable" approach , here is my 2nd DO for SaaS startups: Build the right team I've written about the topic before, so if you've read this post from early this year most of what I'm going to write now won't be new for you and you may want to skip this article. I'm going to assume that you want to build a modern SaaS solution for the "Fortune 5,000,000" – a great product that's easy to understand and so useful that it will almost sell itself.
Chaotic Flow
OCTOBER 9, 2012
Which is more important in B2B social media, social or media? For way too many B2B marketers, the answer is media. In the B2B marketing community, content marketing has eclipsed blogging, engagement is measured in click-throughs, and gamification is sexier than conversation. Too many B2B professionals see social media as just another marketing communication channel.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
Aber Law Firm
OCTOBER 4, 2012
Don’t be surprised if you don’t totally understand this SaaS agreement question, even though you want to know the answer. Ok, let me explain, and this will (hopefully) become clearer. In every SaaS transaction, the law imposes a liability model that is limited only by what your customer can prove as its damages under contract law. Therefore, each SaaS agreement has an embedded contractual risk/liability model (i.e. limitation of liability clause) that modifies the liability model with the purpo
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 31, 2012
Ariel Diaz wrote an insightful post in PandoDaily yesterday outlining the state of affairs in online education. Ariel touched on the history of education, catalogued the problems of the status quo and pointed to a few innovative initiatives. Most Edu Innovation is Post-Secondary. Reading the post and reflecting on the startups I’ve seen, I concluded most of the innovation in education has occurred in post-secondary education instead of K-12, despite the fact that the K-12 market is about 50% lar
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 30, 2012
Peter Senge has been called the most influential business strategists of the century and in my view Senge is the successor of Peter Drucker, the management visionary. Senge published a book in 1990 called The Fifth Discipline which I think every manager, founder and CEO should read. Great companies transcend their great products. Not defined by one product, these companies adapt, innovate and reinvent.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 29, 2012
The Verge profiled Google Now, Google’s newest search technology which uses “predictive” queries to show users the information they want to see, before users ask. In a single app, the company has combined its latest technologies: voice search that understands speech like a human brain, knowledge of real-world entities, a (somewhat creepy) understanding of who and where you are, and most of all its expertise at ranking information.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 28, 2012
Over the last six months, I’ve been delving deeply into R, linear regressions and machine learning. Part of the rationale has been to remember some of the concepts I learned in grad school studying signal processing. But a more important driver has been the need to better understand how to qualify, evaluate and hire data scientists because data science is a massive competitive advantage.
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.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 25, 2012
Last week, a close friend, who is a product manager/designer, told me he’s starting a company. He asked me where I thought the biggest opportunity lay given his skills and his passions. He’s incredibly capable and driven, but he hasn’t yet found the right place to apply his energy. My friend is in search of a problem to solve. He’s in the right place.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 24, 2012
When I walk into a bank today, I might deposit my cash in exchange for some interest rate. The interest rate is my cut of the profits the bank made on my deposit through their trading and lending activities. The more assets under management, the more money a bank can make on its own account. Like banks, web companies are in the business of maximizing gigabytes of user data under management.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 23, 2012
I met the Electric Imp team in April. I had bumped into one of their engineers at a party and he pinged me a few weeks later to say he was working for a startup and the company was raising. The company came in to the office on a Monday at noon. Hugo, the founder, Electric Imp demoed their product to me. Ten minutes in, I stopped the pitch meeting, pulled 3 partners from their Monday partner meeting, and issued a term sheet that afternoon.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 21, 2012
It’s tempting to burrow within a garage or basement or apartment to develop a product for several months and emerge from the darkness with a new shiny product. But the launch will likely fall flat. Products must be launched into ecosystems, in particular, into receptive ecosystems. In my view, there are three types of ecosystems that startups should cultivate.
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
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 17, 2012
Every social service aims to achieve massive growth and deep engagement. But if forced to choose just one of these attributes, I would pick engagement every time. An active user base implies product/user fit for a social service. Aside from the core functionality of social services, which is a solved problem (profiles, messaging, feed), the essence of a social startup is culture - the values of the community, the mores, the manners of interaction.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 16, 2012
The first mobile phones were purchased by corporations and given to employees. Thirty years ago, most people used computers at work but not at home. Most of the innovation flowed from the enterprise into the home. Today, it’s very much the opposite. The big trends in enterprise trace the opposite movement both at the software layer and the device layer: consumerization of IT means using consumer channels to acquire customers and bring your own device (BYOD) means 66% of employees bring their own
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 15, 2012
Freemium businesses' marketing techniques are immensely powerful. They drive large amounts of users to try a product and convert some small fraction of those to paid, upending the enterprise sales model. In some sense, freemium businesses are real world Monte Carlo simulations. Because of the large volume of users using the product, freemium businesses can generates gigabytes of interaction data and conversion-to-paid data, which makes these kinds of startups particularly well suited to data sci
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 9, 2012
In Silicon Valley, we cherish stories of great struggles, persisting failure, and grind-your-teeth kind of grit that eventually leads to great success. These stories are our collective folklore. Today, I want to highlight one of these stories. Amy Cuddy gave a TED talk on how body language shapes who we are and our career trajectories. Her story is insightful, motivational, and electrifying.
Advertisement
For SaaS businesses, improving retention is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive revenue and profits. With a clear link between failed payments and customer churn, having a robust failed payment recovery solution isn’t optional—it’s essential. Achieving your retention goals starts with the right solution.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 8, 2012
This week Amazon made public its advertising initiatives. Given the massive trove of invaluable purchasing data Amazon collects, I’m certain Amazon could build a rival to AdSense. But they aren’t. Below is a quote from an interview with Lisa Utzschneider , the head of Amazon Media Group: Q: Can you give us a sense of how important advertising is to Amazon?
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 7, 2012
Over the weekend, I analyzed my Twitter performance over the past 4 weeks. I wanted to determine what if any best practices I could tease from the data. Below are my four conclusions: The best time for me to tweet is 9am Pacific. On average, tweets at 9am generate 2.3 times the number of clicks as those in the 8am hour and 3.3 times those of the 12pm (lunch) hour.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 4, 2012
The payments ecosystem is complicated. But FastCompany constructed an illuminating diagram walking through a typical payments flow that I’ve copied here. Just look at all those steps! Simplifying this complexity is the opportunity for many startups like Stripe, Dwolla and others.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 4, 2012
The flurry of media activity in entrepreneurship including the spate of new TV shows like X-Factor for tech and Shark Tank, the refocus of the NYTimes and WSJ on technology, and the number of entrepreneurs on mainstream magazine covers gave me the impression that entrepreneurship is on the rise. While this may be true in pockets like New York or California, entrepreneurship in the US is shrinking - at least according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a report from the NYTimes: When Job Creat
Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting
Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 3, 2012
Everyone is learning statistics because making sense of data is the difference between success and failure. R, the open source statistics language, is about a third as popular as Ruby and growing fast. Statistics are essential because data is ubiquitous and volumes are growing exponentially, even in startups. CEOs measure key company metrics. Engineers measure application performance and build machine learning models.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 2, 2012
Over the last few months, I’ve been helping a few companies build hiring pipelines to recruit at nearly every experience level and for technical, sales and business development roles. Below are the lessons I’ve learned. Identify your ideal candidate. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Narrow your search focus to find the right candidate.
Tom Tunguz
OCTOBER 1, 2012
Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world. Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You. In his book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, Cal Newport, a college classmate, champions the idea that passion lags work, instead of passion inspiring work. It’s the same philosophy embraced by sushi master Jiro, in the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
Aber Law Firm
OCTOBER 4, 2012
Don’t be surprised if you don’t totally understand this SaaS agreement question, even though you want to know the answer. Ok, let me explain, and this will (hopefully) become clearer. In every SaaS transaction, the law imposes a liability model that is limited only by what your customer can prove as its damages under contract law. Therefore, each SaaS agreement has an embedded contractual risk/liability model (i.e. limitation of liability clause) that modifies the liability model with the purpo
Advertisement
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.
Aber Law Firm
OCTOBER 4, 2012
Don’t be surprised if you don’t totally understand this SaaS agreement question, even though you want to know the answer. Ok, let me explain, and this will (hopefully) become clearer. In every SaaS transaction, the law imposes a liability model that is limited only by what your customer can prove as its damages under contract law. Therefore, each SaaS agreement has an embedded contractual risk/liability model (i.e. limitation of liability clause) that modifies the liability model with the purpo
Aber Law Firm
OCTOBER 4, 2012
Don’t be surprised if you don’t totally understand this SaaS agreement question, even though you want to know the answer. Ok, let me explain, and this will (hopefully) become clearer. In every SaaS transaction, the law imposes a liability model that is limited only by what your customer can prove as its damages under contract law. Therefore, each SaaS agreement has an embedded contractual risk/liability model (i.e. limitation of liability clause) that modifies the liability model with the purpo
Aber Law Firm
OCTOBER 4, 2012
Don’t be surprised if you don’t totally understand this SaaS agreement question, even though you want to know the answer. Ok, let me explain, and this will (hopefully) become clearer. In every SaaS transaction, the law imposes a liability model that is limited only by what your customer can prove as its damages under contract law. Therefore, each SaaS agreement has an embedded contractual risk/liability model (i.e. limitation of liability clause) that modifies the liability model with the purpo
Expert insights. Personalized for you.
127 
Let's personalize your content