July, 2013

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SaaS Marketing | Accelerating Customer Acquisition

Chaotic Flow

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.

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The Three Phases of Startup Sales

Tom Tunguz

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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Don't do tradeshows the wrong way

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

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.

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I'm selling my SaaS dashboard and all it costs is a tweet

The Angel VC

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.

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Airflow Best Practices for ETL/ELT Pipelines

Speaker: Kenten Danas, Senior Manager, Developer Relations

ETL and ELT are some of the most common data engineering use cases, but can come with challenges like scaling, connectivity to other systems, and dynamically adapting to changing data sources. Airflow is specifically designed for moving and transforming data in ETL/ELT pipelines, and new features in Airflow 3.0 like assets, backfills, and event-driven scheduling make orchestrating ETL/ELT pipelines easier than ever!

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6 things we do that don’t scale but help us succeed

CloseSaaS

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.

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Negative Churn | It’s Not that I Don’t Dislike It, I Do

Chaotic Flow

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.

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Community Marketing: Starting A Movement For Your Product

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Maximizing the Value of Investor Referrals

Tom Tunguz

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.

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How CrowdFunding Embodies Amazon’s Product Management Process

Tom Tunguz

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

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Build the Case: Quantify the Real Costs of In-House Testing and QA Gaps

Underinvesting in software testing costs more than you think, and now you can prove it. This guide helps you quantify hidden costs like developer time, support overhead, tech debt, and lost revenue. Use the companion calculator to model your own data, and present your findings with a ready-to-edit presentation template. Whether you're making the case to leadership or validating outsourcing, this toolkit gives you the numbers and tools you need.

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Why Support Software Is the Future of Work Email

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Framing Your Startup’s Sales Pitch: Focus on Value, Not on Cost

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Product Market Engagement: The Missing Step in Lean Startup Methodology

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Your Startup’s Office Is Missing a Room

Tom Tunguz

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.

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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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The Five Characteristics of An Ideal SaaS Company

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Data, Data Everywhere, Not a Second to Think

Tom Tunguz

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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Why Starting a Company Is Completely Irrational

Tom Tunguz

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.

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Peak Smart Phone: What Happens to the App Economy When Smartphone Penetration Reaches 100%?

Tom Tunguz

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.

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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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The Compounding Returns of Content Marketing: The Data Behind Why Persistence Pays Off in Blogging

Tom Tunguz

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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Activity timeline redesign

CloseSaaS

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.

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Introducing Sent Email Reporting

CloseSaaS

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.

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Acceptance and Completion Criteria

Aber Law Firm

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.

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How Clinic Sense Reduced Churn and Unlocked More Revenue

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.

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Manage any sales objection successfully!

CloseSaaS

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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Get the FREE 30 day Startup Sales Success Email Course

CloseSaaS

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.

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Acceptance and Completion Criteria

Aber Law Firm

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.

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Acceptance and Completion Criteria

Aber Law Firm

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.

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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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Acceptance and Completion Criteria

Aber Law Firm

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.

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The Difference Between Acceptance and Completion Criteria in a SOW (View of a SaaS Attorney)

Aber Law Firm

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.

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Minor opportunity improvements

CloseSaaS

A few improvements to "Opportunities" have been launched.