The Angel VC
AUGUST 4, 2013
Failure may not have been an option for the Apollo 13 mission , but it certainly is an option for startups. In fact, since statistically the majority of startups fail, you could argue that it's the default option. Most successful entrepreneurs have a few failures under their belt, and most "overnight" successes are the result of years' of hard work – and in many cases years' of trial and error.
Chaotic Flow
AUGUST 27, 2013
What’s the stronger driver of SaaS company growth: customer acquisition or customer lifetime value? The answer is yes. Rapid, sustainable SaaS growth is equal parts customer acquisition and customer lifetime value. Simply multiply these two numbers and you get your SaaS growth ceiling , the most revenue your SaaS business can ever achieve. Period.
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Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 29, 2013
At Google, the director of my team repeated a management mantra to us quite often. “Manage yourself out of a job; make yourself redundant”, she would say. “Empower your people and then get out of the way.” Our director was a terrific team builder. Before Google, she founded a startup where she learned to build a company. When she told us her mantra, she was sharing her learnings with us.
Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
AUGUST 7, 2013
An entrepreneur who's just been accepted into a start-up accelerator that provides cash for young companies asks : "How would you spend a $30,000 budget for marketing an SMB software-as-a-service (SaaS) application?" He's selling into "a huge but highly competitive market." Based on feedback from about 10 active users, he explains, "I feel confident my application is ready to go to market. " Now it's just a matter of where to spend the $30,000.
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CloseSaaS
AUGUST 8, 2013
Quick update: Your opportunities in Close can now have an optional "Contact" field, which allows you to link a specific contact (from the company you’re looking at) to an opportunity.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 25, 2013
How much should your SaaS startup spend on sales and marketing? I’ve written about using unit economics and lead funnel performance to answer this question. Emulating the patterns of successful SaaS companies is another technique. There are about 34 publicly traded SaaS companies that have published their revenue and sales & marketing expenses. Though their revenue growth rates are each unique, the sales and marketing spend patterns are quite similar.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 15, 2013
Credit: Karl Scotland. When I started at Redpoint in 2008, I wanted to find every way of analyzing companies I could. Consultants scrutinize the inner-workings of companies daily and create simple frameworks for explaining their operations. So I bugged a handful of friends with experience at the Big 3 consulting firms for their most used frameworks.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 4, 2013
I never thought learning how to write better might help me understand product design but it has. Great literature and well designed products share one defining attribute: they create a telepathic connection between the creator and the consumer. Before you chuckle and write me off as a palm reading gypsy, hear me out. The idea isn’t mine, but Stephen King’s.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 29, 2013
There’s a force in mobile app distribution that isn’t talked about much despite its magnitude: mobile social networks. Mobile social nets are becoming the predominant mobile app paid discovery/distribution platforms. How big is this force? Line, the Japanese mobile messenger with more than 200M users is on a $400M run rate , 60% of which is derived from app distribution.
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
AUGUST 28, 2013
There’s a concept in computer programming called operator overloading that neatly describes the current Series A investment market. Overloading means using the same code for two very different purposes depending on inputs. For example, a programmer could redefine the + function so that instead of adding two numbers, the function would multiply the numbers if one of the numbers was negative.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 25, 2013
I’ve been promoting my Twitter account since October 2012 in effort to better understand social media content marketing and to promote that great vanity metric, Twitter follower count. At the outset, I promoted my account and links to blog posts. I prize followers more than one time visits to a blog, because the long term marketing relationship provides many chances to bring someone to my blog.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 21, 2013
Product and engineering teams are inseparable and at the core of most startups. One degree removed, sales and customer support teams ply the voice of the customer to influence product and eng. Of the five teams in a startup, marketing teams tend to have the least influence because traditional product marketers must influence others to enact change. Marketing works with product and engineering to update branding and communication within the product.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 20, 2013
A team of founders who had just made their first their first hire asked me about culture and on boarding. How do they go about managing people? How do they maintain the values of the business? The underlying question of successful management is: How can founders lead and learn at the same time? I think a bastardized version Tolstoy’s well-worn refrain is apt: Happy teams are all alike; every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way.
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
AUGUST 18, 2013
For bloggers and content marketers, choosing the right content syndication tools to distribute posts is critical to developing an audience. The author/marketer must balance four attributes: distribution, measurement, retention and brand. Table 1: Balancing Syndication Tools Attributes. Channel. Distribution. Measurement. Retention. Brand. RSS. Poor : only one subscriber.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 14, 2013
Over the past few years, there has been a pronounced shift in the seed market. VCs now participate quite actively in the market. As a result, seed investment volumes have roughly doubled in the past year. But is the seed strategy working for startups and VCs? Do hugely successful businesses raise seed capital? Do those businesses include VCs in their seed rounds?
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 13, 2013
Credit: xkcd.com. Over breakfast, I caught up with a close friend, an entrepreneur who is exploring a number of ideas for his next venture. He and his co-founder want to test their way to success with the Lean Startup Model. But they have added a twist to the Lean Startup process I call the Founder’s Null Hypothesis. Here’s how it works: First, this entrepreneur assumes each of his ideas will fail - the null hypothesis.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 11, 2013
Cohort analysis provides deep insight into customer bases because cohorts expose how customer accounts grow, evolve and churn. Plus, cohort analysis provides a framework to evaluate product releases, marketing pushes and advertising campaign performance. The Six Cohort Reports I Use to Understand Trends. Below is a list of the six reports I create when analyzing cohorts.
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Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 6, 2013
Control4’s IPO last week and Nest’s massive success mark the beginning of mainstream, useful connected devices. In the decade to come, the most successful will be united by one common characteristic. They will anticipate our needs and make us lazier. Living is hard work. So many things to remember, like buying milk on the way home tonight. Plenty of software has been written to help us manage our daily torrent of to dos.
Tom Tunguz
AUGUST 12, 2013
Big data technologies like Hadoop, HBase, Redshift, Vertica and others store ever greater quantities of data. As the capacity to store this data increases, so does the importance of extracting value and insight from it. Big data adoption is a four step process : generate data, store data, hire specialists to analyze the data, and finally democratize data exploration.
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