The Angel VC

MARCH 23, 2016

Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. I received a lot of great feedback on the template and the original post remains one of the most viewed posts on this blog up to this day. In the last few weeks I've finally found some time to create a "v2" of the template. just in time for a little Easter gift to the SaaS community. ;-) I'd recommend that you read this post first since it inc

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SaaS Payments Headcount SaaS Payment Methods 217

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 23, 2016

A user has maximum intent. She has watched the humorous demo video, chuckled when reading through the clever marketing copy, and filled out the abbreviated, optimized user registration form. She wants to give the product a spin. How long does the account verification link take to appear in her email box? Is it long enough for her to switch tabs, change contexts and lose interest?

Acquisition 118

Acquisition User Experience Engineering Software 118

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MARCH 5, 2016

First a confession. Every once in awhile I get a call from a SaaS company looking for help with their customer acquisition plan, and my first thought is "Are you kidding? The company tells me that they've developed a wonderful solution with a boatload of impressive features. But they're selling into a market that's already crowded with other vendors.

Marketing 113

Marketing Acquisition Pricing Education 113

OnStartups

MARCH 21, 2016

Late last year, I combed through the Montclare SaaS 250 — a directory of the biggest SaaS companies in the world — to find common trends in what I thought would be a significant dataset. As it turned out, 80% of the 250 biggest SaaS companies didn’t have a pricing page at all. Expecting to find a set of data more representative of what I’m used to seeing around (essentially startups), I turned to a bigger sample, scraping information from the first 400 startups in AngelList’s ‘Trending’ category

Pricing 76

Pricing Startup Scale SaaS 76

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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.

Payment Solutions

CloseSaaS

MARCH 30, 2016

Cold calling is a powerful tool to grow your business. Done correctly, cold calling will allow you to build rapport and trust, to display authority, and to increase the desire for your product or service.

B2B 52

B2B Business 52

The Angel VC

MARCH 11, 2016

Judging from the number of Facebook likes and retweets, as well as comments on Twitter and elsewhere, my last post resonated with quite a lot of people. Some people thought it was provocative though, and some chimed in with good feedback: @hunterwalk building ANY business is hard — Jonathan Abrams (@abrams) March 5, 2016 Therefore I thought it would be worth following up on the topic to make sure that my message is clear.

Venture Capital 190

Venture Capital Business Scale Startup 190

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 26, 2016

Sales velocity is the equation that governs the effectiveness of your SaaS startup’s sales team. Often, sales teams use the word sales velocity to refer to the number of signed contracts in a given month or quarter. But sales velocity classically defined is a different concept. Sales velocity originates from operations research , field of study pioneered by Charles Babbage , one of the fathers of computing, and Georges Doriot , the patriarch of the venture capital industry.

Government 111

Government Scale Outsourced Development Venture Capital 111

Software Platform Consulting

MARCH 23, 2016

Three separate events last week reminded me that every spend category has its “dirty little secrets” Suppliers can exploit these “dirty little secrets” to squeeze a little more from buyers than buyers bargained for. Not all of these secrets are nefarious, but all reflect the inherently deeper category knowledge suppliers have and the limited resources buyers have to “sweat the details” in every category.

Payment Solutions 40

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payment Services Airlines 40

OnStartups

MARCH 21, 2016

Late last year, I combed through the Montclare SaaS 250 — a directory of the biggest SaaS companies in the world — to find common trends in what I thought would be a significant dataset. As it turned out, 80% of the 250 biggest SaaS companies didn’t have a pricing page at all. Expecting to find a set of data more representative of what I’m used to seeing around (essentially startups), I turned to a bigger sample, scraping information from the first 400 startups in AngelList’s ‘Trending’ category

Pricing 40

Pricing Startup Scale SaaS 40

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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

CloseSaaS

MARCH 29, 2016

Wonder how you can make 300+ calls per day per sales rep without a power dialer? It's not rocket science, it’s all about having the right CRM and workflow. One of our customers wanted to increase his calls per day from 30 to 60—but we helped him increase it to 152, a 406% increase in calls!

Sales 52

Sales 52

ReSci

MARCH 18, 2016

Amazon's product recommendation feature is the gold standard in eCommerce and continues to be the leader in the market to this day. Product recommendations can boost average order…. The post How Amazon Set The Standard for Product Recommendations appeared first on ReSci.

Marketing 40

Marketing 40

The Angel VC

MARCH 29, 2016

Since I published v2 of my SaaS Financial Plan a few days ago, two alert readers have kindly pointed out two formula errors in the Excel sheet. Sorry about that. Here's a corrected version. The Excel sheet that was linked from the original post has been corrected as well. In case you've started to modify the template already and want to keep working with the previous version, here are the two bugs that you need to correct: 1) Cell U124 on the Costs tab, i.e. the costs for external recruiters in

SaaS 101

SaaS Software Revenue 101

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 8, 2016

As a SaaS startup grows, recurring revenue begins to fuel the company. Not too far into the future, the existing customer base begins to contribute more of the startup’s revenue than new customers and bookings. Each startup will observe this revenue composition transition at a different point in its evolution because it’s a function of growth rate and churn rate.

Scale 105

Scale Startup Revenue Sales Hiring 105

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

Software Platform Consulting

MARCH 7, 2016

For those of us who follow pricing strategy in two-sided markets, last week was a milestone. Angie’s List, which invented the home services marketplace (in 1995) announced it would drop its “paywall” The paywall charged buyers to search its directory and reviews before communicating with contractors. Angie’s List will now offer a freemium model for homeowners (buyers) and will continue to offer a freemium model to contractors/service providers.

Pricing 40

Pricing Marketplace as a Service Marketing Software Review 40

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 31, 2016

Q1 venture capital investment remains steady relative to Q4 2015 at about $15 billion, but down from the near records attained in 2015. Over the last five years, seven of the twenty-nine quarters have reached or exceeded the $15 billion mark, all of them within the last two years. So, on a historical basis, venture capitalists are still investing at rates substantially above average. 2016 is off to a slower start than 2015.

Trends 100

Trends Investment Startup Venture Capital 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 30, 2016

There’s a new class of company that wield data to create long-term competitive advantage. TheRealReal uses this morning’s sales data to inform this afternoon’s marketing campaigns. Hubspot motivates its sales teams not just with a target quota, but a blend of key sales metrics that reflect the strategic priorities of the company. Zendesk’s data team educates and trains its employees to use data in meetings to prioritize key product management and marketing efforts.

Data 100

Data Interviewing Data Analysis Benchmarks 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 28, 2016

A senior executive described her management philosophy as heavily influenced by Daniel Pink’s book Drive. In his 20 minute TED talk , Pink argues traditional incentive structures like bonuses and raises don’t work for knowledge workers. Instead, autonomy, mastery and purpose motivate them best. Autonomy grants employees the flexibility to achieve their goals as they see fit.

Management 100

Management Development Marketing 100

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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?

Enterprise

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 21, 2016

There are two common ways to model the growth of a SaaS business I’ve seen in pitches. the first one helps founders develop a sense for the trajectory of the business, while the second one helps teams plan for different scenarios and model the trade-offs with each strategic decision. The Percent Growth technique averages the company’s growth rate over the last quarter or so and projects it forward.

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Engineering 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 20, 2016

What are your top three priorities in your job right now? If I asked you that question, I suspect within a minute or two you could articulate them. Is the software you are selling at your SaaS startup solving one of those three needs for your target customer? And, if it is, does your software meaningfully differentiate along one of the key competitive axes that your customer cares about?

Development Team Review 100

Development Team Review Technical Review Software Review Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 17, 2016

Clay Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, asserted in a recent interview that we understand only half of the marketing puzzle: the marketing science involved in a competitive ecosystem, when consumers are buying millions of products. In these markets, concepts like Westendorp Price Sensitivity and conjoint analyses work. But to incite disruption requires a different set of marketing skills.

Innovation 100

Innovation SaaS Payments Payment Solutions SaaS 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 16, 2016

Questions interlace conversations. Where is Priceline stock trading? Where do the San Francisco Giants stand in this year’s pennant race? When hiring a litigation attorney, what are the key questions to ask? Are there any grammatically sound sentences in English where every word starts with the same letter? All of these questions are instantly answerable.

Data 100

Data Mobile Startup Technology 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

MARCH 14, 2016

Numi is a little calculator with a twist. Unlike most calculators, it understands English and other languages. I’ve used many different types of calculators: from the Texas Instruments TI-89 graphing calculator to a HP 12C with its Polish notation, to software calculators Excel and R. All of them employ similar user interfaces. There’s a syntax to translate the user’s desires into something the calculator can understand.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Technical Review Software Review Machine Learning 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 12, 2016

The value of all public technology companies exceeds $10.7T. At the beginning of 2016, that figure touched an all time high of $11T. It’s taken more than a decade for public technology companies to replicate/recreate the market cap observed in the dot-com era, even when adjusting for inflation. The preponderance of that increase has occurred in the last four years.

Marketing 100

Marketing Cloud Technology Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 9, 2016

We all recognize great leadership when we see it. But what characterizes great leadership? Is it an inspirational speaker articulating a goosebump-inducing vision? Or an executive with the five universally praised characteristics Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeiffer identified: modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness and selflessness? Or is it a great manager of people, someone who understands the aspirations of each report, charts a career path, assigns meaningful work along that pa

Leadership 100

Leadership Management Business 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 6, 2016

The startup fundraising market in 2016 has been difficult to characterize. Punctuated by a concentrated decline in public tech stocks, the sentiment in Startupland has changed from resolute ebullience to a calmness approaching caution. Two months in, we can analyze January and February data. This posts analyses US headquartered information technology companies which VC-led investment rounds, except for the $793M Series C in Magic Leap , which I excluded as an outlier.

Marketing 100

Marketing Finance Investment Startup 100

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

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 3, 2016

In “ How People Learn to Become Resilient ” Maria Konnikova retells the story of Norman Garmezy and George Bonnano, the first developmental psychologists to study grit and resilience. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Entrepreneurship 100

Entrepreneurship 100

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 1, 2016

This weekend the New York Times Magazine published the annual Work Issue, a compendium of 9 articles reimagining the modern workplace. They span topics from building the perfect team, to managing a company fewer meetings, to eliminating bias in recruiting processes - even the social ramifications of so many people eating lunch at their desks, “desktop dining.

Startup 100

Startup Communication Management 100

CloseSaaS

MARCH 28, 2016

It happens all the time. You catch yourself listening to the tail end of a sales call between one of your sales reps and a potential customer. Everything sounds right—the right words, tone, and energy.

Sales 52

Sales Management 52