The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 29, 2013
“What gets measured gets done” – it seems like the source of this quote, often attributed to management expert Peter Drucker, isn’t certain, but its meaning is clear and very relevant for every SaaS founder. If you want to make sure that you make best use of your scarce resources, you need to have a clear understanding of your objectives and the KPIs that measure your progress towards those objectives.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 13, 2013
Earlier this week, I chatted with a friend of mine who has founded an incredibly successful business, which he and his co-founder have been scaling impressively. I asked him about his biggest learning over the past few years. He said before having started his company and having built the team, he perceived management as a Band-Aid, as a fix for something wrong in the organizational design, communication or day-to-day operations of the company.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 4, 2013
When you're selling business solutions to companies, at some point in the sales process you're likely to end up doing a demo. Too bad. Most demos are useless. They usually don't help the prospective customer make a good choice. They just confuse and bore them. And they don't help the vendor make the sale, either. That's especially true for software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 27, 2013
This is a guest post by our good friend Aaron Ross. Aaron is the author of the best-selling book Predictable Revenue. During this video, he discusses why you should hire salespeople. Overview This advice will help you in understanding the importance and effects of hiring salespeople. 1.
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Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 10, 2013
Constrained by a limited budget while seeking to grow as quickly as possible, startup founders must decide how to balance growing their engineering teams with their sales & marketing teams. To help inform those decisions, I’ve benchmarked the relative sizes of the sales and engineering teams of the 36 publicly-traded SaaS companies from founding to IPO, typically 7 years later.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 19, 2013
At its core, a startup’s advantage in the market is the speed created by focus. When a team is well orchestrated, they can accomplish amazing things. Creating an environment that fosters communication best is therefore an essential part of startup management. But how best to do it? Founders have to balance span-of-control with span-of-managerial-responsibility.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 14, 2013
In response to yesterday’s post on management design patterns, many readers asked for examples of best practices. So I’m going to write about the management best practices I have been taught and I have observed in startups. This is the first post of that series. The first management technique is called Situational Management , one that my wife, a terrific manager at Google, taught me.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 12, 2013
Steven Blank wrote yesterday about a novel way of depicting a startup’s competitive landscape in a pitch deck, called a petal diagram. While the petal diagram is a great way of describing an ecosystem or a go-to-market strategy, I don’t think it’s a great way to show a competitive landscape because petal diagrams don’t communicate the startup’s unique way of competing in the market.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 4, 2013
A little more than a week ago we did the second PNC SaaS Founder Meetup. Around the same time a year ago we organized our first SaaS Founder Meetup in San Francisco, this time we did it in Berlin. Thanks to the incredible speakers and guests who came to the event it's been a truly amazing day, and I think all of the SaaS founders returned with a number of actionable insights which they can't wait to implement.
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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.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 21, 2013
I first learned about Sankey diagrams in my thermodynamics class and they’ve since become one of my favorite data visualizations and analysis tools. Sankey diagrams, like the one above of visitors to this blog, show the flow of things. Originally created for measuring the flow of energy through powerplants, they are incredibly useful for content marketing analysis, visitor analysis or any other kind of funnel analysis.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 18, 2013
When I first started programming at a startup, I were proud even snobbish about the language we used: Java. I derided JavaScript. I couldn’t have been more wrong. JavaScript has become the dominant language of the web. Every browser, PC and mobile, understands Javascript. It is a lingua franca among computers. Some hardware even speaks JavaScript.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 17, 2013
How much cash does a tech venture-backed company burn through before IPO? The median 2013 VC-backed tech IPO burned $33M and the average company burned $76M. The chart above shows the net income/burn rate of 2013 tech IPO by years since founding. Four categories of companies jump out in the chart: the profit leaders, the middle-of-the-pack, the negative hockey stick, and the go-for-broke.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 20, 2013
The typical mobile phone’s home screen is occupied by more than 30 applications. A digital tragedy of the commons, each additional mobile application a user downloads decreases the odds of an average application re-engaging a user. After all, the time spent on mobile isn’t increasing fast enough to cover the marginal application. Developers have used push notifications effectively to re-engage users , but push overload drives more and more users to opt out of push.
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
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 16, 2013
If you’re building a startup, content marketing is a powerful tool to build a brand, develop customer relationships, and develop a a hiring pipeline. Blogging requires diligence and a few tricks to build a following. I’ve been writing for about 3 years and I’ve analyzed a few hundred of my posts to better understand what makes for effective content marketing.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 12, 2013
At the bottom of this blog, there’s an inocuous sharing bar with links to share this post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, HackerNews and subscribe by email and RSS. 1.5% of visitors click on one of these buttons. Despite the similarity of the buttons and the clicks, the value they generate as sharing tools varies dramatically. The chart above shows data from the widget on this blog for the past 30 days, comparing the number of clicks on each button and the traffic that results from that ch
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 6, 2013
Twitter is the first form of communication that changes depending on who is using it. Like the telephone, the fax, email, Twitter enables all types of communications: friendly banter, customer support requests, news syndication and public service announcements to name a few. But Twitter imposes a three new wrinkles that set it apart as a new form of communication.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 3, 2013
In 2008, iGoogle represented 20% of traffic to Google. Seven years later, the mobile phone is the home screen of choice for a billion people. iGoogle is dead. Mobile killed it. The typical mobile phone user checks their phone 110 times per day. I suspect iGoogle’s most avid users visited about 10 times daily. By that math, mobile home screens generate an order of magnitude more engagement.
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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?
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 21, 2013
This is the story of how one day of live blogging got us 10,000+ unique views on our blog, 4 hours on the front page of Hacker News, hundreds of free signups and more than a thousand dollars in new monthly recurring revenue.
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 25, 2013
If you’re a B2B SaaS startup, you need to be calling all your free trial signups to convert more of them to paying customers and raving fans.
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 4, 2013
TL; DR: look at the new search query examples at the bottom of this post.
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 13, 2013
This is a recent talk from our CEO Steli Efti at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna.
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.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 5, 2013
I’ve always wanted to read a newspaper like The Daily Prophet from Harry Potter, a daily with animated images and with articles that respond to the reader. Last week, the Guardian, the world’s third-most widely read paper, published NSA Files: Decoded which explores the many different points of view on the NSA’s information collection efforts.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 4, 2013
In 2013, growth trumps all other considerations. For the average 2013 venture backed tech IPO, half of the startup’s enterprise value is explained by its growth rate, while none of it is explained by profitability. The market has spoken and startups have responded. Of the 25 IPOs I surveyed, both pending and completed, only 20% are profitable.
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