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Today is a very special day for me as as an entrepreneur and investor. About an hour ago, Zendesk went public on the New York Stock Exchange. The last time I watched an IPO so carefully was when Shopping.com, the company that had bought my price comparison startup, went public – almost ten years ago. Here are a few visual impressions of my love affair with Zendesk, which began six years ago: Huge congrats and thanks to the entire Zendesk team – I couldn't be more proud of you guys!
Predictability is sexy. Startups that have tuned their growth engines well enough to accurately forecast their growth, presuming these growth rates are attractive, will command much higher valuations in the market, simply because there is less risk in the company. As a result, investors prize these companies disproportionately. The challenge with predictability is predictability isn’t an end state.
As a SaaS business matures, the importance and value of SaaS metrics increase. Most SaaS businesses begin their journey down the SaaS metrics path by tracking recurring revenue in relation to customer acquisition costs. After building a solid customer base, churn becomes a priority. These fundamental SaaS metrics are all apparent in the standard SaaS profit equation below.
The junk email I get about replacement windows, oil change coupons, and life insurance doesn’t really bother me. Somehow I got on a list of millions of people who own a house, own a car, and can still fog a mirror. These emails go out in bulk and luckily my spam filter traps most of them. Are you talking to me? Really? What does bother me though is the inappropriate email I get that isn't sent out by the millions.
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.
These days we have more access to great information on marketing our SaaS products than ever before. People like Sean Ellis , Neil Patel , Chris Hexton , Peep Laja and many others choose to share their knowledge of online marketing via blog posts and eBooks and it is all available for us to learn completely free as long as we have the desire. But do you get the feeling that there is just so much you could be doing it’s hard to know how it all fits together to achieve that illusive ‘Growth’?
More and more SaaS companies are implementing customer success strategies and hiring dedicated customer success managers (CSMs). We recently attended Gainsight Pulse, the preeminent gathering for customer success professionals. Here are some of our takeaways from Pulse 2014.
More and more SaaS companies are implementing customer success strategies and hiring dedicated customer success managers (CSMs). We recently attended Gainsight Pulse, the preeminent gathering for customer success professionals. Here are some of our takeaways from Pulse 2014.
I've just added three new charts to my Excel template for cohort analysis. The first one shows the MRR development of several customer cohorts over the cohorts' lifetime: Each of the green lines represents a customer cohort. The x-axis shows the "lifetime month", so the dot at the end of the line at the bottom right, for example, represents the MRR of the January 2013 customer cohort (all customers who converted in January 2013) in their 9th month after converting.
One of the single most effective tools SaaS companies can use in order to grow faster isn’t tweaking the product in a particular way or implementing an AB optimization framework or adopting new marketing tactic. Rather, it’s financial judo for structuring contracts and cash collection. Cash is the lifeblood of startups. Cash empowers management teams to invest in all kinds of growth mechanisms.
Becoming a Metrics-driven SaaS Business is no easy task. It takes time, commitment and plenty of customers. However, the financial rewards of moving beyond standard SaaS financial metrics to SaaS customer success metrics and ultimately to sophisticated predictive analytics are significant. Each step toward SaaS metrics greatness builds upon the last.
At a board meeting last week, one of the VPs of Marketing I’m lucky to work with presented a brilliantly simple way of explaining the evolution of a startup’s marketing tactics. I’ve drawn a diagram of the idea above, which borrows heavily from McKinsey’s 3 horizons. Startups have many different marketing options at their disposal: SEO/SEM, print, radio, TV, mail, affiliate, content marketing…The list goes on and on.
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.
Startups are in a state of perpetual change. During a startup’s first few years of establishing product market and winning the first set of customers, this state of change is obvious. But as a startup scales, the company must adapt by learning and reinventing. Whether it’s building the processes to grow the team, creating new sales and marketing initiatives to pursue adjacent customers, developing customer success teams or handling an unforseen crisis, this process of reacting to the
Is there a common characteristic of successful freemium companies? Piotr asked this question earlier this week. This is the framework I’ve seen work well for freemium startups. At its core, freemium is a novel marketing tactic that entices new users and ultimately potential customers to try a product and educate themselves about its benefits on their own.
What are the tradeoffs when considering different sales hiring plans and which is the right one for your startup? There are many different considerations in creating a sales hiring plan. Balancing them all can be tricky, but thinking through the trade-offs is important to scaling the business well. First, let’s compare the financial impact of three different sales hiring strategies: six sales people hired at once, two sales people hired for each of three quarters and one sales person hired
Last week, Redpoint held our annual Founder Day gathering. At the event, I listened to the stories of Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking jump from 120,000 feet, heard about the astonishing comeback of the US America’s Cup team and took part in a creativity workshop led by a Stanford Design School professor. In short, the event revolved around doubt.
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
BYOBI is an acronym I first heard on a telephone call with a VP of Technology at a large corporation. The word is almost unknown today, but I think that it will be one of the largest trends to impact data in the next five years. BYOBI means Bring Your Own Business Intelligence. This VP of Technology was struggling to enable the sales people, marketers, engineers and others within his business to access the data they needed.
I’m a perpetual freeloader. Like a houseguest who has overstayed his welcome with hundreds of people, I depend upon the generosity of strangers - in particular, software teams. I’ve used HelloFax to sign documents for years, but I haven’t paid them a nickel. The same is true for GMail, Google Docs, TripIt, TypeKit, UberConference, LogMeIn, Evernote, the list goes on.
At an Internet of Things conference last week, I took part in a panel in which we discussed the future of connected devices. Will simple products win or will complex products dominate in the IoT?, we were asked. I think the question misses the point and raises another problem about the Internet of Things more broadly. It’s not about Things. It’s about Services.
Fenwick’s report on the state of the venture market and I came across these three data points that summarise one facet of the market in Silicon Valley succinctly: 11 venture backed companies raised funds at a valuation of over $1 billion in Q114, more than did so in all of 2013. Hedge and mutual funds participated in 23 venture deals through mid-April, compared to 41 in all of 2013.
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.
In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore reviews Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace , a book whose author asks the question, what is the work place of the future? The information worker is a relatively new concept. Peter Drucker coined the term in the 50s. By then companies had already developed new ways of housing information workers. The very first information workers were accountants hunched over “Bob Crachit” desks in the back rooms of factories.
Yesterday, I spoke on a panel at the Gainsight Pulse conference with Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue , Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures who authors SaaStr , and Brian Stafford, a customer success expert from McKinsey. It was great fun to be on the panel and discuss how customer success is transforming SaaS companies by increasing revenue growth, decreasing capital needs, building better products and consequently retaining more customers.
Has there been optimal time of year to raise a seed round? The chart above shows the number of seed rounds by quarter of the year from 2009-2013. At first blush, it would seem that the first quarter of the year is the most attractive period to raise a seed round. But that’s a faulty conclusion. First, there’s no statistical difference between the number of rounds raised in each quarter, according to a t-test on the four years of Crunchbase data I tested.
Last week, we reviewed the state of the public SaaS market and observed the average company had lost 33% of its value from their highs. How have newly public consumer companies fared in the same environment and what does that mean for the tech industry broadly? I created a basket of most of the venture-backed consumer IPOs since 2010 and added bellwethers Facebook and Google.
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.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the increase in cash compensation and decline in equity grants to VPs of Engineering and Product in startups. I received a lot of comments about the analysis, and in particular hypotheses to explain the data. I dug a bit deeper into the data set to find an explanation. Founding employees keep more equity today than ever through the Series A and Series B.
Conducting sales, like any business skill, requires practice and focus. So much focus that frequent distractions, interruptions or even a sub-optimal workflow can mean the difference between a successful salesperson or even that next, big deal.
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
If you want to gain more traction for your startup and get more signups for your product or service, then these tried-and-tested steps to building a sales pitch will be invaluable.
Smart Views help you save common search queries that you and your team members are using to target specific leads. We created this feature to save your precious time and make searching for relevant lead groups faster.
There's a reason why enterprise deals are big, and it's not just about how many users you sign up. Selling SaaS products to enterprise customers is arduous.
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