Chaotic Flow
JULY 9, 2013
SaaS marketing professionals know that customer acquisition is the name of the game. What they generally don’t know is that sustainable SaaS growth requires accelerating customer acquisition. In the long run, acquiring more customers is not enough. Your SaaS marketing strategy must aim to acquire more customers, faster. Otherwise, churn wins and you stop growing.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 16, 2013
Earlier this week, I met an experienced head of sales. During our meeting, the candidate shared a simple way of thinking about a startup’s sales process that resonated with me. A startup’s sales evolution contains three phases: beta, reference customer, ROI calculator. Beta : A founder of the startup develops relationships with a handful of customers who will work in tandem with the company to design, tune and improve the product.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
JULY 15, 2013
Tradeshows can be an effective way to get in front of prospective customers. But not if you do them the wrong way. You'll know it's the wrong way when you find yourself standing in a small booth in a remote corner of a vast exhibition hall, desperately hoping that some lone soul will meander their way past and glance in your direction. You'll know it's the wrong way when you're checking your email every two minutes, trying to relieve the monotony.
The Angel VC
JULY 12, 2013
My financial planning sheet for SaaS startups , my KPI dashboard for SaaS startups and my "9 Horror Worst Practices in SaaS Metrics" slides got a fair bit of popularity lately and two hundred or so people emailed me and requested one of the original Excel files. That brought me to the idea of selling them. But fear not, I don't want your money, all I want is a tweet.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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CloseSaaS
JULY 30, 2013
Inspired by the latest essays from Paul Graham urging startups to Do Things That Don’t Scale and followed up by 37Signal’s Jason Fried’s excellent post about why their newest product is launched using lots of strategies that don’t seem to scale, the Close Team wanted to share some of our most.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Chaotic Flow
JULY 30, 2013
Most of us were taught at an early age that double negatives are a bad thing, because they are unnecessarily complicated and increase the chances of miscommunication. It is with this principle in mind, that I propose that we permanently ban the ridiculous term “negative churn” from the SaaS metrics vocabulary. Churn is negative growth. Negative churn is simply growth.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 30, 2013
How should a successful marketing initiative for a startup operate? It’s possible to jump right into performance marketing immediately after launch, optimizing conversion funnels and squeezing every cent out of ad spend. But I think there’s an important step that precedes performance marketing: community development. . Yesterday, I met with an entrepreneur who was researching how best to build a marketing team for her business.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 28, 2013
From time to time, entrepreneurs ask one investor for referrals to other investors. After all, investors network frequently, work together and have long term relationships with each other so a referral should go a long way. But not all introductions are equal. The most successful investor-to-investor referrals are those where the referring investor is investing in the business and is seeking to fill out the round with complementary capital.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 28, 2013
Crowdfunding platforms solve three key problems for startups, two of which are obvious. Kickstarter and Indiegogo, among others validate demand and provide short term financing by marketing product ideas and accepting pre-payment for future delivery. Consumers vote with their dollars to catalyze product development. The third, less obvious benefit, is the platforms cajole startups to follow a product management process similar to Amazon’s process, described below by Ian McAllister in his Quora p
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
JULY 25, 2013
In 2005, I started as a customer support rep in the AdSense team at Google. Over the next few months, I was trained in the art of handling hundreds of emails per day. My training focused on using a customer service tool called Trakken that Google had acquired and heavily modified to enable AdWords and AdSense teams to manage the torrent of inbound support emails from customers.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 23, 2013
Sales pitches ought to frame a product in a way to maximize the chances of success of a sale. One trend I’ve been seeing in pitches is to talk about how software can save costs by reducing a customer’s head count. A pitch that focuses on cost savings by reducing staff should be delivered only after much consideration because of a few objections created in these pitches that might slow or halt the sales process.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 21, 2013
Atul Gawande, the American surgeon known for his book “ Better ”, wrote an article in this week’s New Yorker called “ Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t? ” He describes the challenges faced by healthcare institutions all over the world: despite the advances in research, the most difficult part of improving care isn’t availing doctors and nurses to these breakthroughs, but changing their behavior.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 17, 2013
This week, I visited a startup whose office had a very unusual feature: a usability lab. There I was in a soundproofed room with a table in the center flanked by two chairs, one for a user and one product manager or UX researcher. On the table, a constellation of web cams record a user’s facial expressions and interactions with a mobile phone or laptop while a microphone captures the user’s voice.
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
JULY 14, 2013
With more than 80% of venture capital investments occurring in enterprise and with the public markets disproportionately rewarding SaaS companies with huge enterprise value-to-revenue multiples ( median is 7.6 ), it’s no surprise that interest Software-as-a-Service is booming. After meeting quite a few SaaS companies, I’ve compiled a list of my ideal characteristics for a SaaS business below.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 10, 2013
I once read a book by Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist researching decision-making from USC, about a man who had lost the capacity to feel emotions after he was struck by lightning. Much to my surprise, his man was totally incapable of making decisions. His cognitive ability, the capacity to process and analyze data, remained fully intact. He could articulate the pros and cons of every alternative to each decision.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 5, 2013
We’re already seeing the impact to hardware vendors of peak smart phone. Over the past six months, Apple, Samsung and HTC share prices have fallen 20 to 25%. These share prices have tumbled because smart phone penetration is hurtling towards 70% in the US. True saturation has occurred in certain segments: 87% of 30 to 49 year olds with income greater than $75k own a smart phone.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 1, 2013
It is easy to write off content marketing as a waste of time. Effectiveness is difficult to measure; it is time consuming and the payback period on the investment is uncertain. But unlike most forms of paid marketing, content marketing has a cumulative and compounding return. Each of the posts of a blog continues to attract traffic from SEO and social channels long after it has been published.
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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.
CloseSaaS
JULY 24, 2013
A core concept in Close is that each lead has an “Activity Timeline” which shows—in one place—all the activity pertaining to a specific lead: all phone calls, emails, notes, and when it was created.
CloseSaaS
JULY 18, 2013
We made another step in our journey towards better and more insightful analytics. You’re now able to see how many emails you sent, how many of them were opened, and the corresponding percentage. The numbers are also broken down per email template.
Aber Law Firm
JULY 11, 2013
The Difference Between Acceptance and Completion Criteria in a SOW (View of a SaaS Attorney). As a SaaS attorney, I have been running into this issue a lot recently, so I thought it warranted a blog post. What is the difference between acceptance criteria and completion criteria in a SOW, and why should you care? Well, there are many differences — with significant consequences — and you definitely should care.
CloseSaaS
JULY 6, 2013
Most salespeople are coming up with answers to objections on the fly. That’s a huge mistake. What you need is to develop an objection management document. Successfully manage any objection by downloading your free objection management template.
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Aber Law Firm
JULY 11, 2013
The Difference Between Acceptance and Completion Criteria in a SOW (View of a SaaS Attorney). As a SaaS attorney, I have been running into this issue a lot recently, so I thought it warranted a blog post. What is the difference between acceptance criteria and completion criteria in a SOW, and why should you care? Well, there are many differences — with significant consequences — and you definitely should care.
Aber Law Firm
JULY 11, 2013
The Difference Between Acceptance and Completion Criteria in a SOW (View of a SaaS Attorney). As a SaaS attorney, I have been running into this issue a lot recently, so I thought it warranted a blog post. What is the difference between acceptance criteria and completion criteria in a SOW, and why should you care? Well, there are many differences — with significant consequences — and you definitely should care.
Aber Law Firm
JULY 11, 2013
The Difference Between Acceptance and Completion Criteria in a SOW (View of a SaaS Attorney). As a SaaS attorney, I have been running into this issue a lot recently, so I thought it warranted a blog post. What is the difference between acceptance criteria and completion criteria in a SOW, and why should you care? Well, there are many differences — with significant consequences — and you definitely should care.
Aber Law Firm
JULY 11, 2013
As a SaaS attorney, I have been running into this issue a lot recently, so I thought it warranted a blog post. What is the difference between acceptance criteria and completion criteria in a SOW, and why should you care? Well, there are many differences — with significant consequences — and you definitely should care. Let’s go through it.
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
CloseSaaS
JULY 10, 2013
I’m very excited to announce the brand new free email course we’re launching! Learn everything you need to create a predictable and scalable sales model for your company in 30 days.
CloseSaaS
JULY 3, 2013
A few improvements to "Opportunities" have been launched.
Tom Tunguz
JULY 11, 2013
More and more companies realize their proprietary data contains insights that drive tremendous competitive advantage. Enabling an organization to make data driven decisions is a long term process. Below is the current big data adoption process and where we are within it: Companies generate proprietary data whose volumes can’t be handled by existing tools.
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