The Angel VC

MAY 15, 2014

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!

Startup 189

Startup Pricing SaaS 189

Tom Tunguz

MAY 7, 2014

Some of the best content to be found about startups is locked in books. Thomas Kjemperud asked me yesterday for a 140 character recommendation of one book for founders. Reducing my list to just one and condensing an argument for why founders ought to read it in just 117 characters was just too great a challenge for me. Instead I’ve written a blog post about the nine favorite books I’ve read over the last five years have helped me understand startups and the processes that make them s

Underperforming Technical Team 154

Underperforming Technical Team New CTO CTO Government 154

Chaotic Flow

MAY 6, 2014

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.

Acquisition 149

Acquisition Metrics SaaS Customer Success 149

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

MAY 5, 2014

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.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Business Model SaaS Payment Features 100

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Payment Solutions

Aaron Beashel

MAY 5, 2014

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’?

Engineering 100

Engineering Scale SaaS Acquisition 100

The Angel VC

MAY 6, 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.

Data 157

Data Metrics Revenue Pricing 157

Tom Tunguz

MAY 11, 2014

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.

VP of Engineering 137

VP of Engineering Startup Sales Hiring Forecasting 137

Chaotic Flow

MAY 13, 2014

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.

Metrics 135

Metrics SaaS Compensation Benchmarks 135

Tom Tunguz

MAY 20, 2014

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.

Startup 129

Startup Payments SaaS Compensation 129

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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.

Payments

Tom Tunguz

MAY 4, 2014

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.

Startup 129

Startup Marketing Advertising Scale 129

Tom Tunguz

MAY 12, 2014

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

Startup 111

Startup Scale Scaling Customer Success 111

Tom Tunguz

MAY 29, 2014

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.

Scale 100

Scale Education Startup Finance 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 27, 2014

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

Sales Hiring 100

Sales Hiring Scale Startup Strategy 100

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

Revenue

Tom Tunguz

MAY 26, 2014

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.

Consulting 100

Consulting Innovation Development 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 22, 2014

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.

Data 100

Data Benchmarks Cloud Engineering 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 21, 2014

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.

Engineering 100

Engineering Benchmarks B2B Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 19, 2014

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.

Technology 100

Technology Data Software SaaS 100

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Enterprise

Tom Tunguz

MAY 18, 2014

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.

Marketing 100

Marketing Investment Trends Enterprise 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 15, 2014

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.

Construction 100

Construction Mobile Startup Development 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 14, 2014

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.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Startup Headcount Compensation 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 8, 2014

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.

Investment 100

Investment Trends Startup Data 100

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.

Trends

Tom Tunguz

MAY 5, 2014

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.

Technical Review 100

Technical Review Marketing Enterprise Mobile 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 1, 2014

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.

Trends 100

Trends Fractional VPE Startup Part-Time VPE 100

CloseSaaS

MAY 29, 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.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Sales Hiring SaaS Strategy 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 23, 2014

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.

Sales 52

Sales Business 52

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

Artificial Intelligence

CloseSaaS

MAY 13, 2014

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.

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CloseSaaS

MAY 4, 2014

I had the pleasure of speaking to hustling superstar and entrepreneurial energizer bunny Gary Vee last week and I'm thrilled to share this video interview with you.

Interviewing 52

Interviewing Sales Startup 52

CloseSaaS

MAY 7, 2014

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.

Enterprise 52

Enterprise SaaS Sales Startup 52