The Angel VC

OCTOBER 5, 2014

Some time ago my friend (and co-investor in Clio , Jobber and Unbounce ) Boris Wertz wrote a great blog post about "the only 2 ways to build a $100 million business". I'd like to expand on the topic and suggest that there are five ways to build a $100 million Internet company. This doesn't mean that I disagree with Boris' article. I think our views are pretty similar, and for the most part "my" five ways are just a slightly different and more granular look at Boris' two ways.

Scale 280

Scale Business Customer Lifetime Value Enterprise 280

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 21, 2014

Bill Macaitis, the former CMO of Zendesk, articulates how a SaaS marketing team should operate better than anybody else I’ve met. At a recent Point9 conference, Bill outlined the 9 marketing disciplines of great SaaS companies and how they fit together to create a marketing powerhouse. I’ve copied my notes from Bill’s talk below. Ops & Analytics Team.

Scale 192

Scale Marketing Growth Hacking SaaS 192

Aaron Beashel

OCTOBER 13, 2014

The PDF eBook has been a staple of content marketing for a very long time, and for good reason too. It’s a great lead or subscriber magnet to offer people, and when done right it can significantly increase the amount of leads you generate and help build your all important email list. So when I sat down to plan out our latest guide on How to get Better Marketing Results with Beautiful Design , my natural inclination was to create a PDF eBook that would live behind a landing page with a lead captu

Content Marketing 100

Content Marketing Marketing Engineering Engagement 100

Practical Advice on SaaS marketing

OCTOBER 2, 2014

Why in the world would I want a box of business cards with a different design on each one? In radio ads, I’ve heard a company that sells business cards promoting that very feature: “Business cards with a different design on each one.” I’m sure they use some very nifty software to make this happen. But why? Do people expect me to hand over more than one card when I introduce myself?

Acquisition 100

Acquisition SaaS Software Marketing 100

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Payment Solutions

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 28, 2014

In SaaS sales, it’s not enough to sell your customers on buying your product. You need to sell them on using it too! Many founders underestimate how much this matters, and their SaaS startups will never gain traction until they get this right.

SaaS 69

SaaS Sales Startup 69

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 19, 2014

Of the ten most important metrics on a startup’s financial statements , revenue might seem to be the most important. But it isn’t. Gross margin matters more because it is directly tied to a company’s ability spend to grow and achieve profitability. Imagine two startups, both selling products at $1M price points. The first has 5% gross margins and the second has 95% gross margins.

Startup 129

Startup Metrics Revenue Scale 129

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 12, 2014

People often ask me questions like: "How many people can I expect to sign up on my SaaS website?" "My conversion rate is x% – is that good or bad?" "My churn rate is x% – is that OK?" "What kind of growth rates are VCs looking for?" While we have quite a lot of data from our SaaS portfolio companies and from SaaS startups pitching to us (which I'll be happy to share, in aggregated form, in another post), I thought it would be good to increase our sample size by asking a larger number of SaaS sta

Benchmarks 125

Benchmarks Startup SaaS Churn 125

The Angel VC

OCTOBER 26, 2014

Last week, we've held our third annual SaaS Founder Meetup in San Francisco. Following the first PNC SaaS Founder Meetup in San Francisco in 2012 and the second one in 2013 in Berlin, this has become a tradition for us: Once a year we're bringing together the founders of our SaaS portfolio companies, co-investors and leading experts for a full day of intensive knowledge sharing.

CTO 111

CTO SaaS Customer Success Revenue 111

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 13, 2014

The startup acquisition market is poised to have its best year in nearly a decade. If acquirers maintain the same pace from the first nine months of the year through Q4, more than 450 venture-backed startups will have been acquired, generating more than $25B in proceeds. Given this state of affairs, it’s a good time to take stock of the major trends in the startup market.

Acquisition 111

Acquisition Trends Startup Marketing 111

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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

OCTOBER 29, 2014

The real promise of the Internet of Things isn’t simply linking millions of devices together, just like the real innovation of the web wasn’t networking a bunch of computers. Instead, the true and still unrealized potential of IoT is to transform business models; it’s enabling companies to sell products in entirely new and better ways that benefit both the company and the customer.

Airlines 110

Airlines Payment Services Business Payments 110

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 12, 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. Today, we’ll explore one of the enterprise behemoths, both in market cap and average revenue per customer: WorkDay. WorkDay envisions being the place of record for all Human Resources data for companies with more than 5,000 employees.

Benchmarks 110

Benchmarks Deferred Revenue Venture Capital Outsourced Development 110

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 9, 2014

The WSJ published a recent chart of the 49 startups with billion dollar valuations. According to their research, there have never been as many privately held companies with such high valuations ever. The absolute number of these massively valuable companies alone is amazing. Ten years ago, most of them would have gone public by now. But what other insights can we tease from the data about these very special businesses?

Finance 110

Finance Startup Social Media Technical Review 110

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 30, 2014

It’s Q3 earnings season and about half of the major public tech companies and recent startup IPOs have reported their figures. I keep track of earnings to get a sense for how these companies perceive their markets. Meeting or exceeding earnings indicates companies can forecast their growth and demonstrates how predictable these businesses are.

Marketing 100

Marketing Forecasting Startup Enterprise 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

OCTOBER 28, 2014

At some point, most startups will begin to measure their customers’ happiness. Customer satisfaction is an important predictor of loyalty and can foster fantastically efficient word-of-mouth growth. Many companies employ Net Promoter Score to quantify customer satisfaction. NPS measures the fraction of a customer base which are promoters and detractors of a company’s product.

Startup 100

Startup Data B2C Benchmarks 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 25, 2014

When we analyzed the impact of location on a startup’s ability to raise capital, we found no statistically significant difference. Startups in San Francisco, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Austin and many other cities all demonstrated similar ability to raise follow-on rounds. But is the same true for investors of various locations? Do investors across the US invest similarly across Seed, Series A and Series B?

Investment 100

Investment Startup Enterprise Pricing 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 23, 2014

I met a really smart vice president of sales a few weeks ago working in a company with mid-market customer values in the $10-100k per year range. When I asked her about her sales process, she described how her team employs statements of work (SOW), which isn’t something I hear about very frequently in startups, despite the fact they are very powerful sales tools.

Customer Success 100

Customer Success Sales Marketing Construction 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 16, 2014

In “ Time to Hang Up on Voice ,” Sam Lessin argues voice isn’t the interface of the future for three reasons. First, voice is hard to use in public places because background noise complicates interpretation, and because many people are in earshot, voice isn’t private. Second, speaking to computers is less efficient than typing or using gestures.

Communication 100

Communication Technology 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 15, 2014

In the past, we have benchmarked the revenue per employee of large publicly traded SaaS companies and determined that the average is about $200k of revenue per person. But, that analysis examined revenue per employee that only one point in time. As Jesse Hulsing pointed out to me, examining this figure over five years reveals quite a bit about the health of the business.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks Revenue Scale Metrics 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 8, 2014

Yesterday, I attended an event held by the IT team of a major bank. When the data analytics team took the stage, I listened with great interest as the chief of the group described their internal struggles with data and the areas where startups might help them achieve their goals. He articulated his team’s needs and goals in a very concise way by bucketing his users into three personas.

Startup 100

Startup Development Marketing Banking 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 7, 2014

I started working in venture capital three months before Lehman imploded. After the bankruptcy, the fundraising market contracted as investors internalized the new normal of the public markets. Over the past six years, the fundraising markets flipped from quite bearish to mildly bullish to extremely bullish. Or at least, that’s the way it feels to me.

Venture Capital 100

Venture Capital Startup Marketing Trends 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 5, 2014

The market for startups raising capital has changed dramatically over the past few years. Round sizes have ballooned: startups raise 50%+ larger rounds than a few years ago. The looming Series A crunch never occurred. Instead, we’ve seen the bifurcation of the Series B market. Series Bs are the spring of hope for some startups who raise megarounds and the winter of despair for others who must compete for increasingly scarce Series B dollars.

Startup 100

Startup Finance Data Marketing 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

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Come work at Redpoint! The Redpoint Software team would like to add a new associate to the software team in our Menlo Park office. We’re looking for someone to work alongside the small, tightly-knit group managing Redpoint’s early stage software practice. This person will work shoulder-to-shoulder with all the members of the team, discovering new startups, evaluating their market opportunities, working with portfolio companies , expanding the firm’s network and contributing to

Software 100

Software Investment Startup Technology 100

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 29, 2014

One of our reps was in the process of selling our inside sales CRM to a pretty large company. They had sales teams all over the world, and their US team manager loved our product, and wanted to champion it within the company.

B2B 52

B2B Sales Management Enterprise 52

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 24, 2014

When was the last time you did something that made you feel like you looked stupid to others? When was the last time you put yourself out there in a way that was uncomfortable to you because it was totally out of your comfort zone? When was the last time you chose to trade your dignity for a new.

Startup 52

Startup Sales 52

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 20, 2014

It can happen to the best of us. We pursue a deal, negotiate for the terms, put in all this effort and get them to sign the dotted line. Only to figure out a short while later, that the terms of the deal are bad. That’s sellers remorse.

Sales 52

Sales 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

OCTOBER 17, 2014

The difference between good salespeople and great salespeople is probably not what you think it is. Most people would say something along the lines of: great salespeople are charismatic, slick, outgoing alphas.

Sales 52

Sales 52

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 16, 2014

If you’re doing sales—whether you’re pitching a potential investor, demoing your product or just cold calling prospects—you’ll feel nervous at times. Everybody does. What matters is how you deal with this anxiety. Do you let it throw you off your game, or do you use it to fuel your success.

Sales 52

Sales 52

CloseSaaS

OCTOBER 14, 2014

You've got a prospect on a sales call, or even in the room with you. How do you captivate and keep his attention? It's not enough that he hears you speak—you want him to really listen.

Sales 52

Sales 52