Tom Tunguz
MAY 19, 2018
Technology innovations swing to a pendulum’s cadence. Sometimes innovations begin with infrastructure changes and reverberate up the stack. Other times, front-end engineers innovate at the application layer, which demand downstream changes in the infrastructure to scale. The last major epoch of front end evolution has celebrated its ten year anniversary.
Intercom, Inc.
MAY 16, 2018
Despite the mountain of evidence contradicting the mantra of “if you build it, they will come”, it’s still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Why? First, most founders don’t have a background in either sales or marketing, and even though they’re told to “ start marketing the day you start coding ”, they just don’t know where to begin, or they’re incredibly overconfident.
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The Angel VC
MAY 12, 2018
In last week's post I shared some thoughts about Dropbox and why, although Dropbox is unquestionably one of the most amazing SaaS companies ever built, I am a tad less confident in the company's long-term future than I am in other SaaS leaders such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, or Shopify. As mentioned in the first part of the post, I took a closer look at Dropbox’s recent IPO filing and would like to share some tidbits, along with a few observations. #1 – Dropbox on consumerization "Individual us
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
MAY 4, 2018
Everybody’s got a story about bad customers. In case you can’t get your fill, a Google search on “customers from hell” fetched 33,100,000 results. These customers can be infuriating, frustrating, and just plain rude. But if you’re a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, bad customers can be much worse than that. They can be downright dangerous. No way to recover your costs For one thing, these bad customers are likely to cost you money, not make you money.
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Neil Patel
MAY 30, 2018
When you hear the words “site architecture,” the first thing that comes to mind is probably SEO. It doesn’t take much digging into SEO best practice to learn that Google loves a site with clearly defined architecture that’s easy to crawl and index. But if you stopped your site architecture planning with just your SEO, then you’ve missed out on the greater picture.
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Tom Tunguz
MAY 1, 2018
“Don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well.” I think this is one of the hardest pieces of advice to follow. Chance is an important contributor to any outcome. sometimes we just get lucky. That recent crypto trade in which you made 25% in an hour. The time you met your significant other for the first time.
Intercom, Inc.
MAY 10, 2018
What do Dropbox, Uber, AngelList, Front, Gusto and Boba Guys have in common? All have benefited from the sage advice of growth expert and Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen. Andrew’s been an angel investor and advisor for a slew of name-brand startups; however, he’s most widely known for his invaluable essays on growth. He’s written more than 650 of them over the past decade and has been featured and quoted in The New York Times, Fortune, Wired and Wall Street Journal.
The Angel VC
MAY 4, 2018
I’m late to the party here, I know. Dropbox went public a bit more than a month ago and I’ve finally had a chance to take a close look at the company’s S1. I’ll be sharing a few specific observations from the S1 review, but let’s start with some more general thoughts about the company. The mighty king of Freemium Like Zendesk, Yammer, and a few other SaaS companies that were all founded around 2007-2008, Dropbox was one of the early champions of the "consumerization of the enterprise" movement.
Think Strategies
MAY 21, 2018
Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of becoming affiliated with the rapidly growing Catalant expert network which has enabled me to extend my consulting services to a wider assortment of enterprises seeking help with their Cloud strategies. Catalant recently gave me an opportunity to provide my perspectives regarding the state of the Cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketplace, as well as the new business opportunities and challenges which these unprecedented technological de
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
Neil Patel
MAY 29, 2018
You can attribute a lot of great relationships to perfect timing. When you connect with the right person at the right time, everything seems to just fit. This is especially true for sales. Connecting with your lead too early means they won’t be ready to buy. But if you wait too long, they may have moved on to a competitor. Unfortunately, finding the perfect time to connect with a customer is complicated.
Sales Hacker
MAY 17, 2018
Let’s take a minute to ensure the most important factors that affect the bottom line have a spotlight on them. Specifically, we’re focusing on the sales development process and how to build a sales pipeline—all from a high level. We’re charging forward with 6 simple steps to ensure that the focus is not lost along the path to accurate sales forecasting and predictive revenue.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 3, 2018
There’s the challenge of dealing with uncertainty, where you’re operating in the weird zone that you’re making decisions that have significant long term impact or that are difficult to reverse or course-correct in the face of great uncertainty. Uncertainty is often unnecessary in the sense that you could, in principle, reduce the uncertainty. You could go research the question more.
Intercom, Inc.
MAY 1, 2018
Convincing potential users to sign up for your product isn’t easy. But what happens next is far more important. The latest batch of billion-dollar companies are built on high customer retention. They help their users be successful, and that means providing great onboarding. At Traction Conference, an event all about how to keep and grow customers and revenue at scale, I explained how to build onboarding based on your customers’ goals, and why when your product improves, your onboardi
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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.
Chargebee
MAY 3, 2018
The tiny details in user onboarding make the difference between good and great. It’s important we think about them and take time to get them right. Here’s something that can help.
Sixteen Ventures
MAY 15, 2018
Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company. If you focus on Customer Success , churn will not be an issue. At least in theory. To take that from a simple theory to your Operating Model , you need to put systems in place, be able to monitor their effectiveness, and routinely perform root cause analysis when things go wrong (and also when things go well so you can replicate, right?).
Baremetrics
MAY 9, 2018
As founders, a lot of our identities get wrapped up in our companies. Certainly within our industries, but even to family and friends it’s how people know us. And over time, we sort of become our companies. Most founders or CEOs are the “face” of their businesses and eventually they’re inseparable. Maybe that’s fine in the short run if you’re trying to go hard for 2-3 years then bank on some big exit, but if you’re in the business of businessing (i.e. an entrepreneur), you just can’t do that lon
Sales Hacker
MAY 29, 2018
A lot has happened in the s ales tech space since I introduced my first sales tech landscape last summer. I’m now counting over 830 vendors, a 15% surge. The 38 categories illustrate the extreme fragmentation of the market. Both sales and sales operations are sharing an increased frustration with the number of applications they have in their stack.
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Tom Tunguz
MAY 5, 2018
At Redpoint’s annual investor meeting earlier this year, I quipped, “The day-trading taxi drivers of the dotcom era have been replaced by crypto-trading Uber drivers.” But over the weekend, a grizzled Uber driver with a mane of grey hair and wind-and-sunburnt cheeks asked me about crypto. “Can you explain to me why public key/private key technology is important on the Blockchain?
Intercom, Inc.
MAY 22, 2018
In today’s data-driven world, the idea of using research to build great tech companies has gone from being buzzworthy to expected. User testing is now a must-do, thanks to the lean build-measure-learn mantra that has inspired modern product development. It’s also been great to see exploratory research gaining ground as a strategy for identifying product opportunities.
FastSpring
MAY 7, 2018
The impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) deadline is a hot topic on everyone’s mind these days. However, these regulations are a small step forward in the data privacy movement.
ITPro
MAY 15, 2018
News. CRM vendor also adds new GDPR-friendly features to platform.
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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.
Chart Mogul
MAY 17, 2018
I spoke to Max about his experience with complete transparency at Buffer and how he managed to get his first paying customers for his side project PixelMe. A lesson in early-stage B2B growth. “You just have to think about what you really want to achieve with a side project…I really wanted to have a sort of laboratory to be able to experiment with ideas…” Today really excited to share this conversation with Maxime Berthelot ( @Maxberthelot ).
Sales Hacker
MAY 9, 2018
Being a good salesperson , or good at selling, is difficult to quantify. More of an art than a science, sales plays a critical role in almost all businesses. Yet, businesses rarely use best practices or proven sales process tips to increase success rates. That’s why every year Pipedrive analyses anonymized metadata from 70,000 SMEs and hundreds of thousands of salespeople around the world.
Tom Tunguz
MAY 8, 2018
I remember the first time I wrote an OKR (objective and key result) at Google. “You should set your goals so that you attain 70%. That’s success,” my manager told me. “Even better if you have a moonshot goal in there, with a 5% likelihood of success.” I was uneasy with calling 70% goal achievement as success. The habits formed from 17 years of schooling and a 100 point scale run deep.
Intercom, Inc.
MAY 18, 2018
There’s a key turning point for your hiring strategy in a rapidly scaling team or organization. The inflection point is when you go from only being comfortable hiring star candidates who pose very little risk to taking chances on candidates who don’t tick all the boxes but who have promise and potential. Making that transition smoothly is crucial for your longer-term growth.
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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?
FastSpring
MAY 21, 2018
What’s one issue online stores face all over the world?
The SaaS CFO
MAY 10, 2018
What is Monthly Recurring Revenue in SaaS? There is no shortage of terms and acronyms in SaaS, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is one of them. SaaS revenue terms can be quite confusing, especially around revenue. Is it MRR, ARR, ARPA, or bookings? In this post, I’ll define monthly recurring revenue and how you calculate […]. The post What is Monthly Recurring Revenue?
Casey Accidental
MAY 29, 2018
Many people are familiar with Dan Pink’s work in Drive that to be the most productive, happy at work, etc., you need to have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. While a lot has been written about how to create purpose inside companies and crafting compelling missions, I would like to spend some time to dig into the details on autonomy. As founders and senior leaders of companies, it can be tough to understand how to give autonomy to employees and also drive toward a singular vision and commit to thi
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