Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 2, 2018
The SEC announced last week that it wants to find ways to let Main Street investors access stage private venture companies. This news item underscores an important trend that is reshaping the industry. Today in Startupland, startup access is the scarcest commodity. Everybody wants an allocation, an opportunity to invest in the very best companies. The SEC story highlights how much has changed in Startupland.
Intercom, Inc.
SEPTEMBER 26, 2018
In the world of recurring revenue, SaaS companies realize they need engaged customers if they are to grow a healthy, sustainable business. This is where having a solid customer engagement strategy comes in. Remember those halcyon days when software was sold through licenses and you only had to win over each customer once to stay profitable? Those days are over.
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Sales Enablement, SaaS and Growth
SEPTEMBER 17, 2018
Everybody likes to win. And while you undoubtedly learn much about your skills, attributes and character from losses, there’s nothing quite like that sense of satisfaction when your team secures a hard earned victory. I’ve been fortunate, both as an individual contributor and as part of a team to have racked up some important wins (jobs, promotions, new business and awards), but in truth, there’s only been three periods where I’ve been part of teams where there’s been an expectation of winning.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
SEPTEMBER 1, 2018
If you’re marketing your SaaS solution without a compelling and consistent value proposition and messages, you’re doing something wrong. Without a value proposition – a crystal clear explanation of who should buy your solution, what problem it solves for them, and why they should buy it from you – you’re missing an essential foundation for all your marketing efforts.
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.
Entrepreneur - SaaS
SEPTEMBER 26, 2018
Even the smallest businesses can benefit from readily available technology, so why won't they use it?
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 30, 2018
In early markets, customers prefer entire solutions, not best in class point products. These solutions often include significant professional services and education. At the beginning of a new wave, most customers don’t understand the technology well. So, they seek experts to guide them. Companies that provide services and education often win the early market.
Intercom, Inc.
SEPTEMBER 17, 2018
The ideal onboarding experience is an easy and frictionless path to finding value. Consumer products perfected this by building onboarding experiences with maniacal focus on a single metric: Facebook’s 7-friends-in-10-days, or Pinterest’s 1rc7 (percentage of new signups that repinned a pin or clicked on a pin in the week following signup). But some products include irreducible complexity.
Incredo
SEPTEMBER 28, 2018
Having an awesome SaaS in mind is a great start, but you also need to think about execution. ReactJS and Angular are both front-runners as JavaScript technologies, leading developers to choose typically either one for the project. Both of these are neck-in-neck when it comes to competition, so it can be a bit difficult to pick a preference. For this reason, we’re going to look at the pros and cons of both to understand which is the right fit for your SaaS.
Inturact
SEPTEMBER 5, 2018
All successful business owners know that the key to their success is due to the customer’s satisfaction. The customer always comes first. Being proactive about the customer’s needs by going out of your way to anticipate them will undoubtedly provide you with a satisfied and consistent customer base.
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.
FastSpring
SEPTEMBER 21, 2018
Thanks to the pervasive presence of the internet, digital marketing has become an increasingly popular tactic in the go-to-market strategy for many SaaS businesses. In fact, over half of the world’s population now has access to the internet, according to Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends report. When done well, digital marketing allows your business to tap into both organic and paid channels to place memorable marketing campaigns in front of your ideal audience.
Sales Hacker
SEPTEMBER 24, 2018
Sometimes, simple ideas can spark revolutions. What if I can bring and use a phone anywhere I go? (Hello cellphones; goodbye phone booths !). What if my friend can receive my letter as soon as I send it? (Goodbye snail mail; hello email!). What if sales reps can really harness the full potential of the pricy software tools we thought would turn us into sales superstars?
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 9, 2018
Last week, Elastic filed their S-1 to go public. Elastic is a Dutch company founded in 2012. Just five years later, the company generated $159.9M in revenue. Elastic commercializes open source software called the Elastic Stack, a set of different products that enable users to search and store data in many different sources and formats. This software is used for application search, website search, enterprise search, application performance monitoring, and analytics for business and security data.
Intercom, Inc.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2018
As a human being, storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. It works in just about every situation where other human beings are involved and, contrary to what you might think, it’s actually surprisingly simple to construct a compelling story. In my talk for Intercom’s tour last year, I walked the audience through a simple structure for building strong stories and spoke to several experiences I’ve had where a story made all the difference to the outcome.
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
A Smart Bear
SEPTEMBER 5, 2018
We all know that startups should make decisions quickly. Fast decisions leads to rapid action, which accelerates the loop of production and feedback, which is how you outpace and out-learn a competitor, even one that already has a lead. But some decisions should not be made in haste, like a key executive hire , or how to price , or whether to raise money, or whether to invest millions of dollars in a new product line.
Inturact
SEPTEMBER 19, 2018
You know that content is king for creating a loyal and engaged customer base. But businesses sometimes find that content marketing is just as challenging as marketing the product that the content is designed to sell. Content marketing should seamlessly drive customers to the product or service you're selling, not become just another source of stress for your business.
Baremetrics
SEPTEMBER 20, 2018
It’s pretty clear that when Allen Gannett, CEO and Founder of TrackMaven, wrote his first book The Creative Curve , it was to scratch a certain itch. On the one hand, it was time for him to write a book. Every founder is “supposed” to write a book after a certain amount of success in the industry. It’s almost like a rite of passage in a way.
Sales Hacker
SEPTEMBER 6, 2018
Sales is a hyper-social, customer-facing role that can get highly stressful. In this article we talk about the top indicators of sales burnout and how to tackle them. We all know Sales is the job for the people person — the high-flying, always-on-the-go charmer that’s on the phone, in meetings and/or closing deals. The same goes for recruitment — you’re constantly talking to people, helping them find their next big opportunity.
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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
SEPTEMBER 15, 2018
A founder asked me recently if there were any trends in professional services across public SaaS companies. I had examined the gross margins and share of revenue from professional services about 3 years ago. Professional services are consulting fees software companies charge to customers for software configuration, customization and education. What has changed over the past 3 years?
Intercom, Inc.
SEPTEMBER 12, 2018
In many ways, how we do business today is a model of efficiency and convenience – people come to our websites and we sell to them. That interaction is increasingly being conducted over live chat , and at Intercom, we strive to make those interactions as personal as possible. As this mode of business has evolved, however, there are two unavoidable facts that we sometimes prefer to ignore.
A Smart Bear
SEPTEMBER 19, 2018
You roll down the windows and wear a helmet when you take your car to the track. This does not make me less terrified of a fiery death. The American Autocross champion was sitting in my passenger seat screaming at me to not let my foot off the pedal until I bounced off the RPM limiter. She was properly intense. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it’s fun to power through curves in a high-speed tenuously-controlled skid in my Mini Cooper S (plus Cooperworks).
Ryan Berg
SEPTEMBER 12, 2018
Is it possible to build a billion dollar SaaS without focusing on traditional marketing channels like paid advertising, using high pressure sales tactics, or relying on manipulative growth hacks? After spending several weeks reverse engineering and dissecting InVision’s growth marketing strategy I can say the answer is: yes! InVision’s un-orthodox approach to growth marketing is not only.
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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.
FastSpring
SEPTEMBER 13, 2018
It doesn’t matter if you’re an established digital business or an up-and-coming online store looking to sell software, digital downloads, or digital content, a key part of selling online is making sure you’re familiar with how online payment processing works. However, many businesses quickly realize that is easier said than done. Especially since there is a lot of technical jargon and terminology within the payment ecosystem.
Sales Hacker
SEPTEMBER 19, 2018
Have you ever dreamed of becoming a VP of Sales? This is the podcast for you. This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak to Dan Cook, SVP of Sales & Success at LucidChart, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the US, about what it takes to become a sales executive at a top company. If you missed Episode 24, check it out here: PODCAST 24: Building a Tier 1 Saas Company From the Investor Perspective.
Tom Tunguz
SEPTEMBER 23, 2018
About two years ago, Marketo was publicly traded and valued at roughly $1.1B. Vista Equity paid $1.8B to take the company private, a 64% premium. At the time it was taken private by Vista, Marketo generated $241M in trailing revenue, growing at 35% annually. Its net income margin was -31%. Last week, Adobe announced they acquired Marketo for $4.75B.
Intercom, Inc.
SEPTEMBER 10, 2018
For a long time, many companies had only one way to capture visitors to their website: contact forms. Lengthy lead forms became the lifeblood of modern customer acquisition. But more and more businesses are starting to ask, why do we make people fill out forms just to talk to us? Why aren’t we trying to connect and speak with them when we have their attention?
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
InsightSquared
SEPTEMBER 20, 2018
Kaizen. The Japanese term “Kaizen” stands for the continuous improvement of a process. Adopted by Japanese manufacturing companies after World War II as a way to reduce waste and create competitive advantage, kaizen evolved beyond the assembly line in manufacturing to all business processes and became the precursor to lean manufacturing. “Kaizen is a daily process, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement.
Unbounce
SEPTEMBER 24, 2018
Ah, they grow up so fast. The fifth annual Call to Action Conference has now come and gone and it was a helluva time, as always. Having been at Unbounce for 4 years now, I’ve seen CTAConf grow from a grassroots sproutling with 300 attendees to a 1,000-person event taking over the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. This year’s theme was “The Marketing Revolution” in response to the fact that marketing has changed.
FastSpring
SEPTEMBER 25, 2018
It should come as no surprise that one of the two certainties of life also follows you into the digital world. We’re talking about everyone’s favorite topic, taxes. But if you thought the same policies for collecting sales tax in physical brick and mortar stores applied to digital businesses, think again. Online stores enable customers to shop anywhere around the world, regardless of their physical location.
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