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Like most conventional wisdom, ideas about the "best" way to market software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions make sense for some companies. But for other companies, those same ideas don't work at all. Take free trials, for example. For applications and markets where the prospective customer can actually get a good sense of how the solution works over the course of a short trial, where the company has the resources to support the trial, and there's an effective process in place to move prospects fr
Craigslist’s generic market place gave rise to fifty or more single-purpose alternatives some of which are quite valuable companies: AirBnB, Care.com, 99Designs, oDesk, CustomMade, Gazelle. Each of these startups operates verticalized market places that solve customer problems better than Craigslist’s generic platform. In so doing, these startups have grown their observed markets.
Following my posts about electronic signing and vertical SaaS , here's another area that we're very interested in: SaaS solutions with a mobile-first approach While my first two posts of this series were fairly specific, this one is pretty fuzzy as I don't have a good sense for what I'm looking for. I just have a feeling that there are huge opportunities ahead for startups which rethink how people will use business applications in the future.
Contrary to popular belief, sales is not about convincing someone to buy a product, or about explaining why a product is amazing. Any person that advises otherwise shouldn’t be offering advice. Sales is about offering solutions to problems.
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.
As the number of Android users continues approach 1B devices, more and more startups are looking to deploy complementary applications on Android, in addition to their iOS applications. Some startups are beginning looking to launch on Android first. But the dynamics of the Android app store are quite different from iOS. In fact, they are much more challenging for startups.
About a year ago, Peter Thiel spoke at a PandoDaily event where he extolled the last mover advantage : “First mover isn’t what’s important — it’s the last mover. Like Microsoft was the last operating system, and Google was the last search engine.”. I hear this refrain more and more in pitches. The thinking goes the last entrant to the market benefit from mistakes made by earlier entrants.
About a year ago, Peter Thiel spoke at a PandoDaily event where he extolled the last mover advantage : “First mover isn’t what’s important — it’s the last mover. Like Microsoft was the last operating system, and Google was the last search engine.”. I hear this refrain more and more in pitches. The thinking goes the last entrant to the market benefit from mistakes made by earlier entrants.
To many entrepreneurs, hiring the first salesperson is a mystery. When should I do it? How much should I pay this person? How do I structure the work? The great part about sales teams and sales departments is that they quantitative - sales teams thrive on numbers. At the most fundamental level, sales productivity has to exceed costs. So let’s answer the question of when to hire a salesperson by understanding the financial mechanics of a sales team.
Last night, Elon Musk inspired the audience at D. It is hard to overstate the scope and breadth of his ambitions or the impact of his start ups PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX on payments, automobiles and space. Behind the desire to listen to great men like Musk speak about their perspectives is a hope to receive some insight, some pearl of wisdom. Last night, I came away with two of those both about startups.
At the D conference yesterday, Tim Cook said many things without saying much. But one story did strike me. Cook described the product management and strategy process at Apple. Walt Mossberg asked Cook why the iPhone has only one flavor when the iPod had so many including the shuffle, the nano, the mini, and the classic. Even though both products originally launched as a single model, the iPod flourished into a family of products while the iPhone has remained a single SKU.
You have just launched your new software start up. The last webpage to go up on the website is the pricing page. Like many other SaaS startups, you decide to employ some version the three pane pricing plan: first the free version, second a paid upgrade costing between $5-$40 per month, and third an enterprise tier with a “Call for Quote” in place of the price.
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.
At today’s Under the Radar Consumerization of IT (CoIT) , the predominant theme will be antagonism. Friction, dislike, resentment within organizations marks opportunity for consumerization of IT startups. Taking advantage of this sentiment, Expensify employs a very deliberate marketing tactic: “Expense reports that don’t suck.” Talk to anyone who uses antiquated expense report systems and they are bound to sigh and complain, frustrated by the experience but resigned to the fact they can’t do muc
Reading through the tech press since the Facebook IPO, you might get the impression venture capitalists are still reeling from that apocalyptic offering, believe no further successes can be had in the consumer web, and so are fleeing the consumer web in droves to pursue enterprise investments. That’s because in the past year or so most major tech publications have swung from focusing on consumer products to enterprise companies.
I started working in ad tech in 2005 and during the past eight years, the ad tech ecosystem has progressively become more sophisticated, competitive and oligopolistic. It’s hard to innovate in ad tech. But if you’re looking to start a company in the sector, you’ll need to amass proprietary data or develop a market place with unassailable liquidity to vie successfully in the market.
On the day of Tableau’s IPO, a company known for innovating in data visualization, I thought I would share the most impressive HCI concept I’ve seen in a long time. In my view, Bret Victor is on the forefront of human computer interaction design. In the first two or three minutes of this video at Stanford, he demonstrates his home-built software that combines data analysis with visualization.
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
When I was a little boy, I watched a cooking show on Sundays called “Jacques Pépin.” Over the course of 30 minutes, Jacques would orchestrate a symphony of raw ingredients into a dish that I yearned to smell and taste. That chicken paillard looked sumptuous. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been coding in Rails 3 quite a bit, building a collection of tools to be more effective as a VC.
Derek Powazek questions the intrinsic economic viability social networks in his post “What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?”. It’s a logical question to pose in the aftermath of the Digg sale and the wobbly Facebook IPO. There is one clear lesson from Digg’s sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000.
How deeply do you consider the impacts of building a public API for your startup? It’s no small decision: you could be enabling your disruptor. APIs are incredibly powerful tools for enabling partners, building ecosystems and engendering success among customers. For example, Salesforce’s Force ecosystem , which enables developers to build products atop customer Salesforce installations and increases the value customers derive from Salesforce selling more seats and retaining customers longer.
We’re looking for an analyst to join the early stage consumer investment team at Redpoint. This person will help us find and evaluate investments and work closely with the early stage team. If you know anyone who is a recent grad, is passionate about technology and is looking to work hard and learn a ton, please send them our way. Details are below: Job Specification: Redpoint Ventures is looking for a full-time analyst to join our investment team.
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 the summer of 2008, a crisis evolved on my team at Google: social networks had grown exponentially. The AdSense network was flooded with social network page impressions whose poor performance challenged advertisers and Google alike. During that summer, we formed a tiger team of about four or five key people. We shed our daily responsibilities, relocated our desks to a conference room in a deserted building on the edge of campus where we brainstormed and debated and wrote patents and developed
Who can forget gems like these word problems from 3rd grade math class? Q: Jack walked from Santa Clara to Palo Alto. It took 1 hour 25 minutes to walk from Santa Clara to Los Altos. Then it took 25 minutes to walk from Los Altos to Palo Alto. He arrived in Palo Alto at 2:45 P.M. At what time did he leave Santa Clara? It was during those classes that our mathematics teachers taught us how to work backwards through the problem.
Kenny van Zant drew this diagram for me on white board and I think it’s the best visualization of how SMB SaaS freemium business grow. The diagram highlights a few important mechanics of the SMB SaaS business model. In any given freemium user base, small-office/home-office (1 to 20 employee shops) users tend to be a few times larger in size than true SMB customer (20 to 500 employees).
Could you grow your users at 5% for 15 months? Or at 7% for 12 months? Or at 10% for 9 months? That’s how long it would take to double your user base at those growth rates. Though there is some science to growth developed by the technology-fluent marketer, aka growth hacker, growth remains a confounding art because there isn’t one feature - like implementing FB Connect or promoting Tweets or having a big red button on a home page.
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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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
You can now create a new lead from your email client by simply forwarding or BCCing an email to Close. If a matching lead already exists, the email will be attached to the existing lead. Otherwise, the email addresses will be added as contacts and the email contents will be attached to a new lead.
In part 1 of this series, we built a search query parser using pyparsing which generates an abstract syntax tree (AST) that represents the structure of a search query. In this part, we will cover how to generate an Elasticsearch query by extending the code of the first part.
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