Sat.Oct 12, 2019 - Fri.Oct 18, 2019

article thumbnail

How pricing strategy helps shape your entire business model

Intercom, Inc.

The SaaS industry is constantly evolving, and for many companies in the space, that means having to evolve their business model. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean a “pivot”, but more often the evolution is a shifting business model as the company scales and the user base grows and changes. The classic example sees a company move from niche startup to mainstream scale-up, but it can also see companies hone their product-market fit by focusing on a more specialized, and yet more lucrative, us

article thumbnail

Design and Open Source: A Potentially Powerful Combination

Tom Tunguz

We are very excited about open source software. Open source is a powerful distribution mechanism to get software and people’s hands early and easily. In an era where SaaS customer acquisition cost increases monotonically , open source can be a powerful antidote. The other area that we are spending time in is open source at the application tier.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Average churn rate for SaaS: What is a good churn rate?

ProfitWell

It’s the question on every SaaS founder’s lips: Is my churn rate too high? While it might sound like a simple question on the surface, the answer is anything but. A “good” churn rate for one company might be terrible for another. Worse, comparing average churn rates across different markets and industries will leave you mired in confusing statistics and contradicting studies.

Churn 55
article thumbnail

Silos-in-the-Enterprise: Good. But Not All They Are Cracked Up to Be.

SaaStr

Just a few years ago, as the next generation of SaaS companies were beginning to scale, the idea of building a Big or Biggish SaaS Company using Silos-in-the-Enterprise was all the rage. For many it still is. But there are a lot of flaws to this thinking it’s worth taking a look at. First, just to get on the same page … a Silo-in-the-Enterprise is a small or smallish group in a BigCo that adopts your product.

article thumbnail

State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

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.

article thumbnail

Customer Experience Strategy: How This Startup Used Customer Reviews to Gain Traction

Groove HQ

Josh Kohlbach developed a unique customer experience strategy during his time working as a marketing consultant for small businesses. Business was good, and demand was strong. So strong, he soon hired two developers to help him keep up with the work. The problem was: the business was taking over his life. “I think we ran […]. The post Customer Experience Strategy: How This Startup Used Customer Reviews to Gain Traction appeared first on Groove Blog.

Startup 97

More Trending

article thumbnail

Churn Monster: Know-It-All Customer

ChurnZero

Churn Monster #14: Know-It-All Customer. . Hi churn fighters! We have a new churn monster to introduce to you today – a Know-It-All customer. A Know-It-All customer is someone who behaves as if they know everything, and constantly presents their input as though they were professionally trained or have firsthand insight into subjects when it is evident that is not the case.

Churn 40
article thumbnail

6 Ways Your SaaS Company can Have Award-Winning Customer Support

Chargify

Customer support has always been important in the SaaS industry, but its importance is only growing. . Customers expect more authenticity in their relationships with the companies they do business with — and excellent customer support is perhaps the most critical component of customer relationships. If you’re not providing award-winning customer support, you might find yourself quickly losing your competitive edge.

article thumbnail

What the Future of Sales Onboarding Looks Like (SaaS Sales)

Sales Hacker

Many sales leaders think their onboarding process stinks… . And it’s true. . According to Bridge Group, 26% of sales leaders list ramping new reps as their top concern. Yet 3 out of 5 reps will not fully ramp for seven months. One in five will take nearly a year to develop all of the skills and behaviors they need to be successful. . That’s troublesome when efficient onboarding programs can improve employee performance by 11.5% and drive a massive impact on revenue. .

article thumbnail

How to Understand and Act On Your A/B Test Results

The Daily Egg

You’ve reached article 4 in our A/B testing series. In case you missed the first three, here’s a recap: A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing with Crazy Egg A/B Testing: How and Where to Start Best Practices and Pro Tips for Using an A/B Testing Tool Now it’s time to move onto the final chapter: […]. The post How to Understand and Act On Your A/B Test Results appeared first on The Daily Egg.

267
267
article thumbnail

5 Ways to Improve Revenue from Integrated Payments

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.

article thumbnail

If You Want to Hit The ’20 Plan … You Gotta Be Making the Hires Now

SaaStr

A few seasons back, we wrote a post on hitting how in SaaS, you have to be putting the resources in place by Q3 to hit the plan for the next year. We update this post a bit annually as we head into next year’s planning procress. I still see most startups way behind on their 2020 planning, and most importantly, hiring, at this point in the year.

article thumbnail

On Humility and Making Better Decisions

Tom Tunguz

Dr. Daniel Kahneman features on the latest Farnam Street podcast and it’s a surprising episode. Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. I admire Kahneman a great deal. Not for his Nobel or for his work, which are both impressive, but for his humility. Some of the key tenets of Kahneman’s work in his famous book were disproved. And he owned up to it , both in print and on the podcast.

article thumbnail

Drop the poker face: Why salespeople need to embrace authenticity

Intercom, Inc.

I’m a crappy poker player and always have been. Part of the reason for this is I’m easy to read. For a long time, I thought my inability to bluff would hamstring me in sales, but now I see it differently. I’ve come to view authenticity as a kind of sales superpower. Being transparent has helped me connect with customers on a deeper level than would have been possible otherwise.

article thumbnail

Swimming upstream: how Proposify went from selling self serve deals to working with enterprise clients with CEO Kyle Racki

Predictable Revenue

Enterprise deals are tough, long, and require a robust product to compete. Find out how Proposify went from selling self serve deals to working with enterprise clients. The post Swimming upstream: how Proposify went from selling self serve deals to working with enterprise clients with CEO Kyle Racki appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

article thumbnail

How to Achieve High-Accuracy Results When Using LLMs

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

article thumbnail

Why is it dangerous to accept too high of a valuation from an investor for a startup company?

SaaStr

Why is it dangerous to accept too high of a valuation from an investor for a startup company? A lot of VC advice is a bit self-serving. There are risks with a too-high valuation — but also benefits: A high valuation has two core advantages for founders: Less dilution. Not only does this mean you own more, but it also means you can sell more later for the same amount of dilution.

Startup 226
article thumbnail

Which Way Do You Run?

Andreessen Horowitz

The plan was to drink until the pain over. But what’s worse, the pain or the hangover? —Kanye West, “Dark Fantasy”. When you found a company, it tends to get wired into your nervous system. I used to become physically … The post Which Way Do You Run? appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

article thumbnail

Intercom on Product: Rethinking outcomes over outputs

Intercom, Inc.

For once, the big debate isn’t about the brand of Post-Its or Sharpies. It’s not personas versus Jobs-to-be-Done. It’s not even about what should be a roadmap and what shouldn’t be. It’s about this idea that there’s a core difference between the output of a product team and the business outcome generated. I’m joined in episode six of Intercom on Product, as always, by SVP of Product Paul Adams, who spoke about this topic at a recent conference.

Scale 119
article thumbnail

The Real Secret to My Social Media Success

Neil Patel

The other day I was recording a podcast episode with my co-host Eric Siu and he wanted to discuss something in particular. He wanted to talk about how I got to 62,000 Instagram followers in a very short period of time and without spending any money on ads or marketing. Eric is a great marketer as well, and when it comes to social media, he spends much more time than me on it and he even has people at his ad agency dedicated to helping him grow his personal brand online.

article thumbnail

SaaS Essentials: Failed Payment Solution Guide

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.

article thumbnail

5 Effective Things We Did to Move Upmarket and Built Pipeline with Mapistry (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

Lots of us fantasize about moving upmarket, but are unsure of how to get started, is it just a matter of hiring a team of SDRs and getting them to hit the phones? At Mapistry, moving upmarket is exactly what CEO, Allie Janoch, set out to do two years ago and in this talk, she and Lauren Alexander, Mapistry’s VP of Marketing and Demand Generation, will share the playbook they have developed for generating warm leads in a market of buyers unused to purchasing software.

article thumbnail

State of Play: Six Trends Revolutionizing Games

Andreessen Horowitz

Games have come a long way since Pong. Consisting of a single white pixel bouncing across the screen—a crude simulation of table tennis—the 1972 arcade classic was the nascent gaming industry’s first hit. Since then, games have grown from … The post State of Play: Six Trends Revolutionizing Games appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

Trends 112
article thumbnail

How is Your Data Stored? 5 Questions to Ask Your Hosting Provider

Nimble - Sales

Choosing your next hosting provider is a big deal because digital marketing is critical to your success. If your business crashes and burns online, you’re in big trouble. Recently, our business got itself into a situation where we had to switch hosting providers, which was actually the inspiration for this article. We quickly realized that […].

Data 88
article thumbnail

‘Tis the Season for Gift Purchases in Your Checkout

FastSpring

Believe it or not, the holidays are just around the corner. This is a special time of year for businesses where they can expect increased brand awareness, higher website traffic, and most importantly, more sales. A significant portion of these increased sales stems from gift purchases—when someone purchases a digital product with the intention of giving it to another individual.

article thumbnail

The GTM Intelligence Era: ZoomInfo 2025 Customer Impact Report

ZoomInfo customers aren’t just selling — they’re winning. Revenue teams using our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform grew pipeline by 32%, increased deal sizes by 40%, and booked 55% more meetings. Download this report to see what 11,000+ customers say about our Go-To-Market Intelligence platform and how it impacts their bottom line. The data speaks for itself!

article thumbnail

Should You Sell Your Company? A Great SaaStr Podcast with Salesforce Essentials

SaaStr

Salesforce Essentials and Mission.org came by SaaStr HQ and did a pretty unique podcast interview with me. We talked a lot about exits. About selling your company, lessons learned, and what the journey of selling a company really all means. There’s a lot in here we have never talked about it, and I think they did an amazing job producing it (i.e., high quality). “Even if there is a payout — which is rare — there are parts of an acquisition no one really talks about.

article thumbnail

Sisu

Andreessen Horowitz

It could all be so simple, but you had to make it hard. —Lauryn Hill, “X-Factor”. Almost every company has more data about their business than ever before, but very few are smarter for it. It turns out that radically … The post Sisu appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

Data 76
article thumbnail

Everything You Need to Know About Sales Opportunity Management

Nimble - Sales

Even if your business is profitable, sooner or later you will face the question of how to boost your sales. To achieve this goal, you need to analyze your company’s sales processes and determine exactly what you can do to boost returns. One of the main things you need to do is identifying sales opportunities. […]. The post Everything You Need to Know About Sales Opportunity Management appeared first on Nimble Blog.

article thumbnail

Founder’s Depression Is B t

Groove HQ

I shared a story recently about one of the darkest moments of my career. We’re through it now and better because of it. But, woah… rough times. Two years ago, we were still in its grip. Our team retreat was just a few weeks away, and I was a wreck. Sitting at my kitchen table […]. The post Founder’s Depression Is B t appeared first on Groove Blog.

75
article thumbnail

An Omnichannel Payment Solution––Without the Complexity

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.

article thumbnail

Founder’s Guide to Scaling Applications: When to Build, When to Buy and What Breaks by Algolia Co-founder (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

When it comes to seamlessly scaling your applications, a top-notch engineering team will be your foundation. Next comes the decisions to build or buy your infrastructure, DNS, monitoring, and analytics tools. Julian Lemoine, Co-Founder, and CTO of Algolia will share his lessons learned on how to stay focused and innovative as you scale while also avoiding the innovation for innovation’s sake pitfalls.

Scale 173
article thumbnail

Whose Company Is It Anyway? Differences between Founders and Hired CEOs.

Kellblog

Over the years I’ve noticed how different CEOs take different degrees of ownership and accountability when it comes to the board of directors. For example, once, after a long debate where the board unanimously approved a budget contingent on reducing proposed R&D spending from $12M to $10M, I overhead the founder/CEO telling the head of R&D to “spend $12M anyway” literally as we walked out of the meeting [1].

article thumbnail

5 Ways a CRM Can Save Your Start-up

Nimble - Sales

Start-ups are glorified as the new way of taking control of your life, foiling your 9 to 5 jobs and throwing them in the garbage. However, according to the Small Business Trends, only 40% of start-ups are profitable and 30% are at break-even point with 30% losing money. You might be having second thoughts on […]. The post 5 Ways a CRM Can Save Your Start-up appeared first on Nimble Blog.

Trends 85