August, 2017

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When, If Ever, Should Profitable Bootstrapped Startups Raise Capital?

Tom Tunguz

“Would you compare a bootstrapped SaaS company to a seeded company? At what point does the bootstrapped company have to raise if it’s profitable, if ever?” One founder asked me this question recently. I hesitate to compare and contrast bootstrapped and venture backed businesses, because I’m a venture capitalist and it’s very easy to dismiss any analysis as biased in favor of venture investment.

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A sneak peek into Point Nine's investment thesis

The Angel VC

Over the last couple of weeks and months we spent some time putting our investment thesis on paper. The purpose of this exercise was to challenge and discuss our implicit assumptions and to get everyone on our team aligned on what kind of investments we seek. One of the things that being very clear about our investment focus helps with is getting to “no” faster.

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I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.

A Smart Bear

Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer. Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers. We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine. The motivation behind the MVP is still valid: Build something small, because small things are predictable and inexpensive to test.

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Listen to what your competitors say, not just what they do

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

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.

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5 Project Management Mistakes That Can Harm Your Business

Entrepreneur - SaaS

Adjusting to the unexpected is good. Winging it from beginning to end is not.

More Trending

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Has SaaS Become Commodified?

Tom Tunguz

A founder asked me if we had reached the point that SaaS is commodified. “Can you build a venture scale SaaS company anymore?” He made three key points to support the argument. First, the technology barriers to starting a SaaS company continue to fall. Amazon, Google and Microsoft provide sophisticated, scalable, and easy to use infrastructure as a service.

Scale 189
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Starting a SaaS in Berlin – 3 years in

Chart Mogul

I wrote a blog post back in November 2014 about the reasons for choosing Berlin (over London) as the city to launch ChartMogul from. When I wrote the original post I’d only had around three months of living in Berlin to form an opinion. This follow-up is an attempt to give a more thorough look at the pros and cons of starting a SaaS startup in Berlin, drawing from the past three years of experience.

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Want to start a company in Silicon Valley? Don’t do what I did (the first time)

CloseSaaS

Every year, hundreds of startup founders move to Silicon Valley. But even if you’ve had success elsewhere, it’s a risky move.

Startup 72
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Has Your SaaS Hit A Growth Ceiling? 12 Ways To Reignite Growth

Chargify

You’ll likely recognize this description of the beginning of a well-known retail giant: “There was nothing to stop the company from selling everything. You could order from the comfort of your own home. You could pay a fair price. They would ship the goods right to you. Sales exploded, and if you’d picked up a big enough chunk of stock when the company went public, you’d never have to work again.”.

Scale 53
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5 Ways to Improve Revenue from Integrated Payments

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.

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The Case Against Budgets, Forecasts, and Performance Targets

Outseta

By Geoff Roberts 15 min read Forecasts, budgets, and performance targets; these activities have long been seen by business people as critical activities in the operation of companies of almost any size. They provide a necessary compass for the business, an accepted and understood path towards a business achieving its goals. They are also critical activities in driving accountability within an organization - performance will ultimately be measured against the budgets, forecasts, and performance t

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Sales Success, Operations, and Tools with noHold CEO Diego Ventura

Mattermark

The options around assembling tooling to make a sales funnel operate efficiently are numerous and daunting. We’e talked about this quite a bit in the past between this blog and the Mattermark Daily. We thought it’d be great to chat with some founders of companies building sales tools to see how they not only use their own products, but how they use other products and processes as well.

Sales 51
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Why Cash Conversion Cycle Matters for Your Startup

Tom Tunguz

The cash conversion cycle is a key metric for startups, but one that often isn’t talked about until a business hires a CFO. Once a business established product market fit, the cash conversion cycle is a key metric of a company’s cash efficiency - how quickly a company can convert a dollar of investment into a dollar of cash flow. To calculate the cash conversion cycle for a software company, the formula is.

Startup 189
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Building a churn prediction machine, part one

Chart Mogul

We have all the data and insights, so why can't we be better at calculating churn risk? This first part looks at some of the data points and leading indicators of churn we can use to piece together a better prediction tool. Leading and lagging indicators of churn. Every metric and measurement you have is measuring a specific snapshot — a single event in a long funnel.

Churn 51
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How to Achieve High-Accuracy Results When Using LLMs

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

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5 smart secrets to crafting an email that always gets opened

CloseSaaS

There’s a simple checklist I use before pressing send on every outreach email.

Sales 52
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Real Customers, Real Experiences – Part II

Totango

Part II of this video series of interviews with Totango customers features two companies who maximized their investment in Totango to solve for specific, but not uncommon, business use cases. See how Totango has proven itself to be a cut above. Nate Richardson, Business Operations Director and Analytics Manager, xMatters. Nate sits at the intersection of multiple teams at xMatters who all have different use cases for customer data, including the customer success, sales, marketing, support, and p

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Are You Sending Price Drop, New Arrivals, and Back in Stock Emails to The Wrong Customers?

ReSci

Create revenue generating Price Drop, New Arrivals, or Items Back in Stock emails with our proprietary AI models that will easily find your customers who have a high affinity to an item. Keep in mind, this feature is not the same as our product recommendations! The post Are You Sending Price Drop, New Arrivals, and Back in Stock Emails to The Wrong Customers?

Pricing 40
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MVPs out SLC in, Startup Funding Rounds Explained, lots more – Mattermark Daily

Mattermark

Help People Affected By Hurricane Harvey. Houston, Texas and the surrounding areas have been devastated by Hurricane Harvey. We at Mattermark urge you to donate anything you can , whether it’s to the Red Cross or another local or national organization ( the New York Times has a good list of organizations , as well as advice on how to avoid scams ).

Startup 45
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SaaS Essentials: Failed Payment Solution Guide

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.

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Hiring for a Discipline You Know Little About

Tom Tunguz

Your startup is growing. You suspect you have initial product market fit. Time to hire the first head of each department. Sales, marketing, customer success, engineering, product management. Some founders might have experience or exposure into one of these teams. But rarely do they understand every one well enough to hire the right department chief.

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Is all-in-one SaaS incompatible with SMBs?

Chart Mogul

All-in-one SaaS is a term that’s seen a lot of use in recent months, and is something we’ve discussed a number of times at ChartMogul. But are all-encompassing platforms really the right solution for startups and smaller SaaS businesses? The Coffee Thoughts series on ChartMogul is a place for short thoughts and musings on SaaS industry trends. We welcome you to join the discussion in the comments below!

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Stop f#cking around with growth hacks if your metrics look like this

CloseSaaS

Startup founders love to experiment, especially when things aren’t going well. They map out hundreds of tests and hacks, hoping to find that one perfect path to success.

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Real Customers, Real Experiences – Part III

Totango

Part III of this video series of interviews with Totango customers features two companies who used Totango to frictionlessly scale their customer success operations and teams. If your company is at a similar stage, these videos can provide ideas about how you can achieve similarly impressive results. Anthony Enrico, Director of Customer Success, Emailage.

Scale 48
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An Omnichannel Payment Solution––Without the Complexity

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.

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Warby Parker: Customer Journey Breakdown and Marketing Review

ReSci

WARBY PARKER MARKETING BREAKDOWN Today, we’re going to examine and study a pivotal piece of Warby Parker’s marketing: How they communicate and build relationships with customers visiting their website. I’ll take you step-by-step through a timeline of my own customer journey with Warby Parker, and include. The post Warby Parker: Customer Journey Breakdown and Marketing Review appeared first on ReSci.

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Talking SaaS, What Makes a Good Pitch?, WeWork and the Letter B, more – Mattermark Daily

Mattermark

What Makes a Good Pitch? Sarah Guo at Greylock Partners has put together an in-depth guide to help answer this question, emphasizing that the point of a tight deck is not just to “sell” potential investors, but to ensure a founder understands their own value proposition. “ What Do I Look For in a Pitch? ” explains not only how to structure a narrative, but explicitly identifies the aspects of the business that are crucial to being successful in growing a company fueled by

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How to Decide When To Move Upmarket

Tom Tunguz

At some point in the life of most SaaS companies, the business will be faced with the question, when should we move up market? The strategic question might be catalyzed by increasing cost of customer acquisition in the core SMB segment. Alternatively, a surge of large customers paying for the product might trigger the question. Or account executives might raise it.

SMB 185
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Tips & Tricks: How does language support affect churn in different regions?

Chart Mogul

If you operate a global business, but only offer customer support in English, you may see higher churn rates in countries where English is not the primary language. In this article, we will analyze whether customers who residing in a non-English speaking country are at greater risk of churning. Adding location attributes to customers. ChartMogul’s native billing system integrations automatically detect customer location information as recorded in the billing system.

Churn 40
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Usage-Based Monetization Musts: A Roadmap for Sustainable Revenue Growth

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

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5 struggles every inside sales rep feels (and how to overcome them)

CloseSaaS

There’s no question that inside sales can be a challenge.

Sales 52
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IDG Contributor Network: How immersive technologies will reshape networks

Network World

In the late 1990s and early 2000s when it became too difficult for large companies to manage their own WAN footprints, they adopted managed multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services. These offered a simple connection at every location and offloaded the complexities of building large-scale routed networks from enterprises to the service provider.

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Female, Male, or Neutral? Filtering Based on Gender

ReSci

Background In predictive recommendation systems, sometimes events will occur that appear counterintuitive. As a marketer, you may notice some male users in your customer list receiving recommendations for some women’s skin care products. Sometimes, this is simply because those male users were shopping for their mom, The post Female, Male, or Neutral?