The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 1, 2014
Inspired by Ben Horowitz’ excellent “Good product managers, bad product managers” post and Stefan Smalla’s “Good leader, bad leader” masterpiece I’ve tried to put together my thoughts on what I think makes a great venture capital investor. Thanks go to my colleagues at Point Nine Capital for their invaluable feedback, in particular Michael, Mathias and Rodrigo, who reviewed an early draft of this post and provided lots of great comments.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 30, 2014
What are the pains and aspirations of your customer? Does your product truly solve your customers problems? And fulfill its promise of doing something in a better way? Most startups wrestle with these questions at their outset, when they are in the customer discovery and customer validation phases of the lean startup cycle. But all startups should reevaluate these questions periodically.
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Practical Advice on SaaS marketing
NOVEMBER 8, 2014
It costs SaaS companies $1.07 in sales and marketing expense to acquire $1.00 in annual contract revenue. So says excellent research on the experience of SaaS companies, prepared by David Skok along with Pacific Crest Securities. The SaaS companies included in their survey spent, on average, $1.07 on sales and marketing to win a customer that would be worth $1 in annual contract value.
Chaotic Flow
NOVEMBER 11, 2014
As many of you may know, Trish Bertuzzi and the folks over at the Bridge Group publish a lot of great stuff on Inside Sales strategy and operations, including inside sales compensation benchmarks, lead development rep best practices, outbound selling strategies, and on an on. Their upcoming 2015 Inside Sales Metrics and Compensation report will feature expanded coverage and focus of SaaS inside sales benchmarks in an extra effort to service the SaaS community.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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Aaron Beashel
NOVEMBER 24, 2014
Content marketing can be an incredibly successful approach to customer acquisition for B2B SaaS companies. And there is a lot of content out there that can teach you how to do it effectively as well, with the likes of HubSpot, Marketo and Kapost all producing great content that’ll help you create a winning content marketing strategy for your company.
SaaS Brief brings together the best content for SaaS professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 3, 2014
It seems like my recent post about five ways to build a $100 million business resonated very well with a lot of people. I also got some really good comments and suggestions, and so I'd like to follow-up with another post on the topic. Introducing: the Brontosaurus! A reader by the name of " Vonsydow" commented that another way to get to $100 million is by having 100 customers, each paying you $1 million per year, and mentioned Veeva as an example.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 17, 2014
Negative churn is an incredibly attractive characteristic of a SaaS company because it means that customer accounts are like high-yield savings accounts. Every month, more money comes in, without much effort. This is a powerful effect and can fuel SaaS companies to huge success, as we saw in New Relic’s S-1. The concept of negative churn is a bit amorphous so let’s illustrate the impact on a startup.
Software Platform Consulting
NOVEMBER 25, 2014
The vast majority of tech press is about B2C software companies or software for IT department (e.g., databases, security, performance monitoring and other stuff) that does not excite me. But, there are a few good b2b blogs and newsletters those of you interested in enterprise cloud business applications should follow for inspiration. My nominations, in no particular order, are as follows: Price intelligently.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 26, 2014
Yesterday I posted a brief review of Mikkel’s excellent book “Startupland”. For me, the book is also a good opportunity for some reflections and to share some thoughts in relation to Zendesk’s journey. The first date When I stumbled on Zendesk in 2008 I knew absolutely nothing about enterprise software, B2B or SaaS. I had always been a consumer Internet guy, having founded comparison shopping engine DealPilot.com back in 1997 and personalized homepage Pageflakes in 2005.
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.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 25, 2014
As some of you may know, my friend Mikkel , founder and CEO of Zendesk , wrote a book. It’s called “Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business” and you can learn more about it here. The hardcover version will be released in about two weeks, but the Kindle version just became available on Amazon and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a draft a few weeks ago.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 4, 2014
Most startups play defense when discussing pricing with customers. They dance between asking for too little, leaving money on the table, and asking for too much, only to lose the customer’s interest. The very best companies lead their customers in that dance. They use pricing as an offensive tool to reinforce their product’s value and underscore the company’s core marketing message.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 11, 2014
The modern SaaS startup asks marketing to fill the top of the funnel, sales to qualify and close leads, and customer success to retain customers. Conceptually, this trinity works in unison to grow a business rapidly. But sometimes, SaaS companies struggle with this model, particularly when churn rates increase in a business. The knee-jerk response may be to ask how to change the customer success team’s structure or incentives to increase the revenue at risk save rate (the fraction of dolla
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 9, 2014
Most interviews are a waste of time. According to Adam Grant, a professor of Organizational Behavior at Wharton , “standard interviews only accounted for 8% of the differences in performance and productivity.” The typical interview fails to predict performance accurately because it is subject to interviewer biases and candidate biases, and fails to compare the candidates with a consistent rubric.
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
NOVEMBER 2, 2014
What a difference a few quarters make! In the past nine months, Series A valuations have skyrocketed. In fact, 2014 Series A pre-money valuations have surpassed median Series B valuations from 10 years ago, accounting for inflation. The same is true for Series B valuations exceeding Series C valuations. Cooley, a top tier startup law firm, reported this trend in their valuation quarterly report , which tracks these figures where they are counsel to either investors or founders.
The Angel VC
NOVEMBER 21, 2014
By now you’re probably sick of my infamous animal analogies. Sorry. But I just love them and want to resort to them one more time. :) Namely, what I want to talk about are deers that can morph into elephants, or more generally, smaller animals that can morph into bigger animals. (1) In other words, I want to talk about account expansions, which are the result of a successful “land and expand” strategy.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 24, 2014
After your SaaS startup has found product market fit, the next evolution of the business is to discover the fundamental unit of SaaS growth. A fundamental unit is the atomic go-to-market team: the minimum number of people in the marketing, sales and support roles to be able to support X customers and generate Y in revenue. At the point that a startup has discovered their fundamental unit, time, cash and execution become the limiting factors of the business.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 23, 2014
It’s hard to overstate how powerful negative churn is for a SaaS company. Both New Relic and Zendesk have grown to billion-dollar-plus publicly traded businesses by achieving fantastic negative churn figures: 114% and 120% respectively. in other words, each year existing customers pay these businesses 14 and 20% more than last year. The recent 2014 SaaS benchmark survey aggregated by Pacific Crest and Matrix indicates that expansion revenue accounts for between 8-26% of total annual bookin
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Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 20, 2014
At the DEMO conference, Danielle Morrill, the founder and CEO of Mattermark presented an impressive statistic. Seed, Series A, Series B and Later Stage startups employ 1M people, up from 650,000 just six months ago, according to Mattermark’s data sources. While it’s logical to think that the largest and fastest growing startups might employ the majority of startup employees because they hire at stupendous rates, this isn’t the case today.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 19, 2014
Hortonworks filed their S-1 last week. Reading through the document, I noticed the company had quite a substantial fraction of professional services revenue; 41% of trailing 12 month revenue is services. Of the companies we have studied in our S-1 analyses , Hortonworks generates more professional services revenue as a fraction of total revenue than any other company.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 16, 2014
This post is part of a continuing series evaluating the S-1s of publicly traded SaaS companies in order to better understand the core business and build a library of benchmarks that might be useful to founders. New Relic is San Francisco based, 534 person company providing tools for engineers to understand how well their code is performing. The company operates in the Application Performance Management category, which New Relic calls Software Analytics.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 13, 2014
At the beginning, a startup is only people, a group of friends who share a passion to change the world in some way. There is no product, no brand, no management team, no PR, no swag, no internal processes, no hierarchy. Over time, by virtue of all the effort of the people within the company, startups evolve into semi-autonomous machines; machines that acquire and serve customers with a great product in exchange for revenue.
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Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 5, 2014
Seed investments are booming. According to Crunchbase data, the number of seed rounds in US companies has grown by 10x in 6 years from 200 per year to more than 2,200 in 2013. This is driven by the expansion of the institutional seed investor and the tripling of seed stage capital available to founders. With all that capital entering the market, seed round sizes have also increased.
Tom Tunguz
NOVEMBER 3, 2014
The median equity stake of US venture-backed post-Series A CEO has increased from 15% to 21%, a 40% increase in five years. This trend is also manifested in Series Bs, but as the chart above shows, post-Series C and D, total founder/CEO equity positions have remained constant. Meanwhile the equity stakes of founding VP of Engineering and VP of Product have remained relatively constant throughout the same five year period across all stages of company.
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 27, 2014
We're excited to announce an upcoming change to how email syncing works with Close. We're calling it "automatic historical email import".
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 24, 2014
Many startup founders have this unhealthy fascination with data, metrics and analytics. They think all these numbers contain the answers to the mystery of business success.
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
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 19, 2014
One of the things that's preventing people from achieving sales success is not about which words to use, or the mechanics of sales. It's their attitude - they don't have a solid sales mindset.
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 17, 2014
If you’ve ever written a book, you know how painful the process is. There’s a handful of really large, big pains: how to best present the big ideas, the right way to structure your book, and how to give it a cohesive narrative.
CloseSaaS
NOVEMBER 17, 2014
Hey Closers, A minor update for you. Some of you have asked for two features to help make your own accounting of Close invoices a little easier.
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