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.

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Acquisition Scale SaaS Headcount 124

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.

Sales Hiring 121

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup Outsourced Development 121

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.

Engagement 111

Engagement Development 111

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.

B2B 104

B2B Social Media Business B2C 104

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Payment Solutions

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 52

SaaS Software Review Education Enterprise 52

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

Education 100

Education Startup Innovation Government 100

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.

Startup 100

Startup Advertising Innovation Engagement 100

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.

Machine Learning 100

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Technology Communication 100

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.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Data Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 100

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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.

Payments

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.

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Interviewing Startup Software Marketing 100

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.

Management 100

Management Banking Scale Advertising 100

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.

Engineering 100

Engineering Startup Technology Investment 100

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.

Startup 100

Startup Development Branding Investment 100

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

Revenue

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.

Startup 100

Startup Engagement Churn Communication 100

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

Innovation 100

Innovation Enterprise Mobile Trends 100

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

Data 100

Data Business Startup Enterprise 100

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.

Startup 100

Startup Data 100

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Enterprise

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?

Startup 100

Startup Advertising Interviewing Pricing 100

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.

Data 100

Data 100

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.

Construction 100

Construction Startup 100

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

Entrepreneurship 100

Entrepreneurship Banking Engineering Education 100

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.

Trends

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.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Startup 100

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.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Technology 100

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.

Entrepreneurship 100

Entrepreneurship Development 100

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 52

SaaS Software Review Education Enterprise 52

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.

Artificial Intelligence

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 40

SaaS Software Review Education Enterprise 40

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 40

SaaS Software Review Education Enterprise 40

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 40

SaaS Software Review Education Enterprise 40