Hitenism

OCTOBER 17, 2016

When raising money, most founders start by creating a pitch deck. Investors see countless versions of these pitch decks every day. Between cold emails, warm introductions, founders I know and incubators I help, I personally get ten to twenty a day. Every single one of these businesses is unique. Yet most of their decks look and sound the same. With titles like “The Problem” “The Opportunity” “Market Size” and “Team” these decks aren’t differentiated.

Venture Capital 168

Venture Capital Software Review Forecasting Startup 168

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2016

Startups fail when they run out of money. Startups run out of money when they lack focus. Without a maniacal focus on serving customer needs in a unique way, startups can flounder amidst competition. Without product market fit, the business is challenged to generate strong metrics and faces fundraising challenges. That’s why it’s critical to identify and focus on your startup’s competitive advantage. most of the time, start up competitive advantages fallen to five categories: p

Startup 113

Startup Banking Data Analysis Innovation 113

Aaron Beashel

OCTOBER 31, 2016

Just a few months into my stint at Campaign Monitor, a new CEO joined to lead the company. That CEO was a guy named Alex Bard. Alex co-founded the well-known SaaS company Desk.com before selling it to Salesforce and becoming the VP of Service Cloud (their second largest business unit, behind Sales Cloud). During his time at Salesforce, Alex was fortunate enough to work directly with Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff, and together they utilised a framework Benioff himself devised called

Scale 100

Scale Underperforming Technical Team B2B Marketing 100

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 8, 2016

Sometimes marketing pros focus on the wrong things. When there’s a problem attracting prospective customers, marketers usually look first at their lead generation programs. They ask questions like: Is our email campaign targeting the right people? Is our website visible to search engines? Are we participating in the right events? Are our social media campaigns working?

Social Media 100

Social Media Engineering Development Marketing 100

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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.

Payment Solutions

Brian Balfour

OCTOBER 12, 2016

We have a big addiction problem in our industry. Hacktics, the tips, tricks, hacks, tools, and secrets that promise to solve our growth problems. A glance at the front page of GrowthHackers.com , Inbound.org, or any other growth hacking community is all it takes to understand the obsession. As a result, marketers now get the majority of their “learning” through this hack-tic based content.

Growth Marketing 94

Growth Marketing Marketing Underperforming Technical Team Growth Hacking 94

Hitenism

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Two tweets about raising money was all it took to get 81 email responses and 53 customer development calls with founders. I haven’t had this big of a reaction to an idea and I’ve done this type of research on product ideas for the last 13 years! That’s when I realized that fundraising may be startup founders’ biggest pain point.

Development Team Review 166

Development Team Review Software Review Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing 166

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 18, 2016

Why is this ad appearing on this site? This was a frequent questions both advertisers and publishers asked of Google. Behind the scenes, machine learning models match the best ad to the best website, given a set of constraints including budget and the dynamics of the ad auction. To untangle the decision chain across the many different targeting systems to answer the question is a knotty task indeed.

Machine Learning 101

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Startup Advertising 101

Hacking Revenue

OCTOBER 27, 2016

There is a tectonic change in the retail and services industry. The Direct-To-Consumer movement. While it already began a few years back, these brands and entrepreneurs are now in every industry, changing the habits, preferences and share of wallet of the most desirable consumers. Direct-To-Consumer brands are products or services that are financed, designed, produced, marketed, distributed and sold by the same company.

Payment Methods 73

Payment Methods Branding Payments Payment Services 73

Stack Commerce

OCTOBER 19, 2016

The holiday season is approaching quickly, and having a strong digital commerce strategy is essential. At StackCommerce, we’ve helped hundreds of publisher-owned online shops flourish during the holiday season through our native commerce platform. From preparing unique and exciting inventory to organizing specialized gift shops, we’ve had our hands in it all.

Revenue 57

Revenue Strategy Marketing 57

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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.

Payment Solutions

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 31, 2016

Hustling is about showing up, following up, and possibly messing up until you hear "yes". But success isn't just about hearing yes—it's also about learning to say "no". Learning to say that one word is the difference between hyperfocused and successful startups vs distracted and failing startups.

Startup 52

Startup Sales 52

ReSci

OCTOBER 27, 2016

It’s time to call it: the “customer journey,” as you know it, is officially dead. It’s a concept that sprang into the industry’s collective consciousness when retail met the Internet, forever changing the way people interact and shop with brands. With…. The post The End of the Customer Journey appeared first on ReSci.

Branding 45

Branding 45

Saasler

OCTOBER 24, 2016

In part 1 of the series, we talked about the factors that affect integration costs. Now, it’s time to get down to business and start crunching the numbers. Spending by Stage. In order to better assess the time/cost commitment of building integrations, we will breakdown the process into four stages: 1.Research . This step begins even before any code is written.

Investment 40

Investment Development Engagement Data 40

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 30, 2016

The number of vendors selling to sales and marketing has exploded from 500 to more than 3000 over the last three years. Are we reaching the end of an expansionary cycle? The software pendulum tends to swing between software suites, offering a collection of different tools, and best-of-breed point solutions. But, have we reached the point where the best-of-breed, fragmented ecosystem is a permanent fixture?

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital SaaS Acquisition Cloud 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

Hacking Revenue

OCTOBER 25, 2016

For what it’s worth, this is my take on why WeWork is worth so much money. I believe WeWork is building an Operating System for buildings. The same way that you install OS or Windows on your computer and then install apps on top of it. Soon, you’ll be able to install “WeWork” on your commercial property or multifamily (WeLive).

Finance 40

Finance Software Sales Management 40

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 25, 2016

Demand generation is a critical limiting factor to the growth of many startups. I had the opportunity to moderate a panel of demand generation experts recently at Heavybit , an incubator in San Francisco. I asked the panelists, how well understood is demand generation, considering it is one of the core elements of business needs to sustain its growth?

Startup 100

Startup Scale Social Media Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 19, 2016

What is the optimal contract length with for your SaaS startup? Monthly, annual, multiyear? It’s common to see SaaS startups initially price their products on a monthly basis, then add an enterprise “Call Me” plan which hides behind it an annual contract. As the business increases its price point, it may eventually book contracts spanning two, three or even five years.

Outsourced Development 100

Outsourced Development SaaS Payments Startup Sales Hiring 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 16, 2016

2016 has been a volatile year. Major capital investments fell 55% in Q3. The IPO market is a tale of two cities with some companies able to go public and catapult their valuations, but the overall number remains in the single digits. Last, M&A activity seems quite brisk with more than 30 $1B+ billion acquisitions in the last nine months alone. How do all these factors commingle to influence today’s acquisition environment?

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Software Software Delivery Pricing 100

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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?

Enterprise

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 11, 2016

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. Antoine de St. Exupery. I remember launching a new filtering feature a Google within the AdSense product. At the time, we had hundreds of thousands of website publishers using our user-interface to accomplish many tasks. They might download reports of their revenue from running AdSense ads, configure ads to match their website’s style, and indicate their preference

Advertising 100

Advertising Engineering Revenue Startup 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2016

What are the attributes of the ideal SMB SaaS company, an entrepreneur asked me recently. It’s a good question. There are product, marketing, and sales attributes to that ideal company that successful SaaS business have exemplified in the past. Product. A beautifully designed, simple and elegant product is the first and most important thing. The product satisfies the top three priority for the software buyer and consequently the software buyer uses a software very frequently.

SMB 100

SMB SaaS Acquisition Education 100

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 26, 2016

The first potato chip ever made was intended as an insult. The year was 1853. George Crum was a chef at the upscale Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, NY. One day, a patron complained about Mr. Crum’s fried potatoes. He called them soggy and bland. He sent them back and demanded a new batch.

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CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 25, 2016

Everyone wants A-players on their sales team. However, most salespeople are B and C-players. What makes A-players different? And can B and C-players be trained into A-players?

Sales 52

Sales 52

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali

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

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 19, 2016

In our previous post, we explored how to successfully evaluate sales calls with your junior reps. The post tackled seven attributes that are crucial to having a successful sales call. 1. Setting a goal 2. Knowing the pitch 3. Sticking to the facts 4. Exercising confidence 5.

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Sales Management 52

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 12, 2016

How often do you conduct sales call reviews? Once a week? Once a month? Take a moment to answer that question.

Sales 52

Sales Management 52

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 3, 2016

We’ve updated the way you can organize the contact information for your leads, our call bar has been improved and we’ve killed even more bugs. Let’s see what’s new.

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ReSci

OCTOBER 15, 2016

Unless you’ve been living in the literal woods playing Pokémon Go for the past week or so (entirely plausible), you’ve already heard the unicorn success story taking the Internet by storm: Unilever is acquiring Dollar Shave Club for a cool $1 billion. It’s no surprise. The post What Makes Dollar Shave Club “F**king Great” appeared first on ReSci.

Payment Features 40

Payment Features Subscription Business 40

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

Saasler

OCTOBER 12, 2016

The concept of building third-party integrations is quickly shifting from being thought of as an added value to becoming a critical element in the SaaS landscape. In fact, a successful integration ecosystem has the power to influence many aspects of the business, including customer satisfaction, retention, and churn rates. Perhaps you’ve just started thinking about adding third-party integrations to your business, or maybe you’ve had some in place for a while.

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Churn Retention Investment Data 40

ReSci

OCTOBER 4, 2016

Retail transparency can be an asset in building credibility and loyalty as a brand, but it’s not as simple as just letting consumers know where your products come from. It’s easy to say that your products are “100% natural,” but customers are smarter than that. The post In eCommerce, Transparency is Still Radical appeared first on ReSci.

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Branding 40