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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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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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.

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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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How to Nurture Customers During the Long Growth Stage

Totango

After new customers are fully onboarded, they move along the customer journey into the growth stage (nurture or adoption stage). For most recurring revenue companies, this stage is the longest. Looking at the representation below, customers typically spend 30 days in the new or onboarding stage, 30 days in the renewal stage, and the remaining time or 305 days of the year, in the growth stage.

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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 188
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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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Why Most Companies Fail At Moving Up or Down Market

Brian Balfour

This is part five in a series about 4 Frameworks To Grow To $100M+. Subscribe to get the rest of the series. In the introduction I explained there are two types of companies: Tugboats, where growth feels like you have to put a ton of fuel in to get only a little speed out. Smooth sailors, where growth feels like wind is at your back. The difference between these two are not the common mantras of build a great product, product market fit is the only thing that matters, or growth hacking.

Scale 57
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How B2B Subscription-Based IoT Businesses Are Changing The World

Chargify

We’ve been hearing hype about the Internet of Things (IoT) for a while, but now we’re at a time where it is becoming a reality. Many are calling IoT the fourth Industrial Revolution; the other revolutions brought us factories, the steam engine, and the internet. At its most basic definition, Internet of Things is “a network of internet-connected objects able to collect and exchange data,” according to Business Insider.

B2B 54
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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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Building Customer Centric Organizations – TSIA Keynote Recap from Customer Success Summit 2017

Totango

Customer Success Summit is the industry-leading conference on customer success because it brings together experienced customer success professionals and industry thought-leaders, as well as research institutes for industry benchmarking. To that end, one of the keynotes from #CSSummit17 was Thomas E. Lah, Executive Director at TSIA, a for-profit research institute that does deep operational benchmarking with member companies.

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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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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 179
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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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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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Change: Damned if you do, damned more if you don’t

A Smart Bear

Top workplace complaints: 1) The way things are 2) Change. — ?????? ????TT (@akannett) June 1, 2015. This plays out in many important ways: Customers demand an improved UX , but they don’t want to learn a new UX. Team members want consistency but don’t want policies. Developers want to be more efficient but don’t want to change how they work.

Startup 51
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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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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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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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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

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?

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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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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 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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Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali

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.

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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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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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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 152
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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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Launching LLM-Based Products: From Concept to Cash in 90 Days

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.

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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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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