Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 10, 2015
In “The Rule of 40% for a Healthy SaaS Company,” Brad Feld shared a simple rule of thumb growth investors often apply to judge the attractiveness of a $50M business. “The 40% rule is that your growth rate + your profit should add up to 40%.” I was curious if this theory were broadly true, applicable for growth stage companies Brad mentioned, but also early stage companies.
The Angel VC
FEBRUARY 22, 2015
If you've followed my blog for a while, you know that I have a bit of an obsession with churn. Having significant account churn doesn't necessarily have to be a big problem and can't be avoided completely anyway. MRR churn sucks the blood out of your business though. That's why I think that SaaS companies should work very hard to get MRR churn down, as close to zero as possible, or even better achieve negative MRR churn.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
FEBRUARY 7, 2015
After months or years of development, your software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution is finally ready. Now you just need to find customers. So you put up a website, attend a tradeshow, and produce a video. Then you host a webinar and post to a blog. On top of that, you toss in a bit of search engine marketing and prepare a couple of press announcements.
CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 23, 2015
It's common advice that you should keep your emails short, and in most cases, I agree with it. For example, if you're sending out cold emails, be concise and have a clear call to action.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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ReSci
FEBRUARY 27, 2015
US consumers spent slightly more in fashion for 2014, but increases were driven by athleisure brands like Nike, Under Armour, and Lululemon. NPD…. The post Millennials, Yoga Pants, and the Future of Retail appeared first on ReSci.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 5, 2015
In 2011, a team of researchers from Stanford and Harvard led by Teresa Amabile collected daily work journals from more than 250 people at large and small companies in a variety of roles. In each journal entry, an employee described one work event that stood out that day. Over the course of a few months, the study received more than 12,000 responses.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 23, 2015
In The Shape of Things to Come , the New Yorker profiles Sir Jony Ive, the man they call Apple’s greatest product. Ive is iconic. His products have been sold 1.5 billion times. For all of his success, Ive’s personality isn’t well known. Neither is his personal history. Or how he manages the Apple Design Lab. The New Yorker article reveals some of these three things.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 16, 2015
If I were asked to create a content marketing strategy for a person or a business from scratch, I would craft a strategy with three dimensions: customer segments, customer lifecycle stage and content type. **Customer Segments: **Product managers/marketers are responsible for identifying the most important customer segments a startup will pursue. Picking the right customer segments increases profitability , maximizes market size and prioritize the most attractive customer for the business.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 12, 2015
In 2009, the Corporate Executive Board, a consultancy providing expertise to some of the world’s largest companies, studied the distinguishing characteristics of great sales people and well-run sales processes. They surveyed more than 6,000 sales reps across 90+ businesses. The analysis revealed three interesting things. First, most customers don’t perceive a difference between competitive products.
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.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 9, 2015
It’s becoming more and more expensive to scale a startup in San Francisco. In fact, it’s twice as costly to operate a startup in 2014 as it was in 2009. According to data from Jones Lang LaSalle, office prices in San Francisco have nearly doubled in five years from $36 per square foot per year to $63. Typically businesses allocate about 150 square feet of office space per employee.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 8, 2015
After a SaaS startup has achieved some degree of product market fit, the business will likely ramp the go-to-market teams, and in particular the sales team. Measuring and tracking the performance of a growing sales team is critical to the growth and financial health of a business. The report above is the most effective view of the performance of a sales team I’ve found for SaaS startups.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 4, 2015
SaaS companies are marvelous businesses. They are more predictable than most other kinds of companies and in addition they demonstrate leverage from technology. The best SaaS companies are able to build strong brands, develop scalable products and hire teams to bring those products to market effectively. To show the power of the convergence of these forces, I’ve analyzed the employee productivity patterns of the 50+ publicly traded SaaS companies.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 3, 2015
Each quarter, Zendesk releases a Customer Satisfaction Benchmark to help companies build more effective customer support teams. The Q4 2014 differs from the previous in an important way. Instead of comparing companies in the same industry, for example, Education, Zendesk clustered companies with similar customer support characteristics, including ticket volumes, product support complexity and a few others, which revealed some important conclusions.
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
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 2, 2015
At Google, Product Reviews were held on Fridays at 130pm in a big room with a long table, two projection screens at one end and red couches along the walls called Marrakesh in Building 42. Each week, Eric, Larry and Sergey invited three product and engineering teams to present their progress each for about 30 minutes. On several occasions, I updated the executive team on the status of our team’s project, social network monetization.
Tom Tunguz
FEBRUARY 1, 2015
How much should your startup budget for its employee stock option pool? One way of answering this question is a blanket addition per year, say a 2% renewal. Another way is to look at the cash based cost of the stock based compensation. We’re going to examine the second one today by looking at the basket of 50+ SaaS companies. The chart above shows the average stock-based compensation (SBC) per employee by years since founding across the basket of publicly traded SaaS companies.
CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 9, 2015
About us. At Close, we’re building the sales communication platform of the future. We’ve built a next-generation CRM that eliminates manual data entry and helps sales teams close more deals.
CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 26, 2015
This post is part of a new series featuring 3rd-party integrations with Close. Want to build a Close integration into your own app? Check out our API. Drip is lightweight marketing automation built for startups.
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CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 19, 2015
There are a lot of great resources to learn about drip emails, but one of the best ways to see what’s working now is to steal fromstudy what successful, fast-growing companies are doing now.
CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 16, 2015
Here's an interview I did with Noah Kagan, one of my favorite hustlers on the world wide web. We talk about sales and marketing tactics, business strategies, regrets and most importantly: the inner game of hustling.
CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 13, 2015
Do you sometimes wonder which of your marketing efforts have the highest ROI?
CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 11, 2015
Maybe you're a bootstrapping startup, or you're a single founder, or your just burning through your funding so fast that you urgently have to cut expenses. and hiring someone is just completely out of question.
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CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 5, 2015
Do you know these prospects that are great fit for your offer, yet they don't buy? They're engaged during the sales process. There are no insuperable objections in the way of closing the deal. Yet, they postpone their buying decision until next quarter. again and again.
CloseSaaS
FEBRUARY 4, 2015
We had just completed Y Combinator and were flying high during Demo Day. Investors lined up in front of our proverbial door, eager to invest in Swipegood, the name of our startup at the time.
ReSci
FEBRUARY 27, 2015
Who cares what color you see? We care about what color you like. The Dress. Dressgate. The dress that broke the Internet. Ruiner of friendships and starter of fights. Whatever you're calling it, and whatever colors you see, The Dress has set the Internet ablaze. It's a testament to…. The post What retailers can learn about personalization from #TheDress appeared first on ReSci.
ReSci
FEBRUARY 26, 2015
The Bronto Summit starts next Monday, and we're so excited to participate - in Miami, no less! Our partners at Bronto have put together a jam-packed four days of speakers, workshops, and keynotes that will engage and inspire. We had a hard time not picking every session to highlight, but here are…. The post Marketer’s Guide: Top Picks for the 2015 Bronto Summit appeared first on ReSci.
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
ReSci
FEBRUARY 24, 2015
This article first appeared on Forbes.com on November 19, 2014, where our CEO Jerry Jao is a regular contributor. You can find the original version as well as his other pieces here.…. The post Why Customer Retention Is King: The Evolution Of Retention Marketing appeared first on ReSci.
ReSci
FEBRUARY 20, 2015
Happy Lunar New Year! While there's been some debate on whether it's the year of the Sheep or the Goat, we're calling it as irrelevant: in our book, it's definitely the year of mobile. 58% of American adults…. The post Move aside, Sheep/Goat – 2015 is the Year of Mobile appeared first on ReSci.
ReSci
FEBRUARY 19, 2015
Move over, Content Marketing - the new buzzword for 2015 is Contextual Marketing. While Big Data and Content Marketing reigned as the top marketing topics last year,…. The post Why You Should Optimize Content to Get More Sales appeared first on ReSci.
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